Tag Archives: Medicine Wheel

The High Plains Environmental Center

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Long ago, in the mid-1990s, I attended a presentation here in Toronto on “new urbanism”. It was focused on a development and planning approach that sees communities built according to principles of diversity of use and population; pedestrian and transit opportunities rather than being centred on automobiles; accessible public spaces and institutions; and a “celebration of local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.” (Source: Congress for The New Urbanism). One of the speakers was a local developer who was keen to build a community featuring many of the tenets of new urbanism. I was fascinated by his dream but secretly felt he would have a tough time competing economically with the treeless subdivisions of cookie-cutter, chock-a-block houses springing up north, east, and west of Toronto’s urban core. My city’s developers had been paving farm fields for years to build residential shrines to sprawl and the automobile. Yes, they were ‘affordable’ suburban homes for the middle-class in a growing metropolis of more than 6-million people, but any vestiges of natural or cultural heritage were erased in a bid to streamline lot servicing and maximize profits.

I was reminded of this a few days ago while reading in the paper about one of Toronto’s most successful subdivision builders. He demolished a $48-million house he’d purchased in seaside Florida a few years back in order to spend perhaps an equal sum to build an “ecomansion” for his family, utilizing net-zero energy but with enough garages for his many cars. And, of course, he flies there via private jet.  I do not begrudge anyone their profits; he took a lot of financial gambles and lost money here and there along the way, especially during the 2009 recession.  He is also a generous philanthropist. But it seems strange and counterintuitive to me that environmental principles are not part of an intelligent development business plan for every economic level of new home ownership.

So I was delighted last June during my annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling to visit the High Plains Environmental Center (HPEC) in Loveland, Colorado in the northeast part of the state. Here, an hour’s drive north of Denver in a 3000-acre mixed use development called Centerra, environmental principles are a major selling feature. Begun in 2001 by McWhinney Enterprises on land homesteaded and farmed by their family from 1866, Centerra includes retail businesses, office buildings, restaurants and residential neighbourhoods. The homes were built by McStain Neighborhoods, co-founded by green building pioneers and architects Tom and Caroline Hoyt. Both the McWhinneys and the Hoyts understood that there is a great cachet to building not just houses, but sustainable environments, in which people can feel connected to the land around them. Part of that initiative was the creation of the High Plains Environmental Center, occupying 100 acres of land surrounding two lakes comprising 175 acres of open water which are reserved for waterfowl. HPEC also manages 135 acres of common space belonging to the landowners in Centerra. Its educational visitor center was opened in 2017, a small building fronted by a lush meadow of native plants…..

…. including delicate blue flax (Linum perenne var. lewisii)……

…. and my favourite of all the penstemons, beautiful pink Palmer’s beardtongue (Penstemon palmeri).

Though we’d been told to make our way through the building, I had to stop for a few moments and enjoy the plantings in the parking lot, especially this border of labelled native perennials and shrubs…..

…. including gorgeous blue Rocky Mountain beardtongue (Penstemon strictus) and golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha var. rydbergii).

And as a photographer of bees, including bumble bees, I was delighted to spend a few moments tracking a new species for me, the Nevada bumble bee (Bombus nevadensis), which was busy foraging on the penstemon.

On returning from Colorado last June, the first blog I wrote was called Penstemon Envy. There are simply so many beautiful penstemon (aka beardtongue) species to see in early summer. This is pine-leaf penstemon (P. pinifolius).

Large-flowered beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus) with its semi-succulent leaves is one I grow at my cottage north of Toronto. For me, it behaves as a biennial, making its rosette the first year and flowering the second.  Imagine how inspiring these native plants are for the homeowners in the neighbourhood!

Growing amidst rugged Colorado sandstone boulders was beautiful sulphurflower buckwheat  (Eriogonum umbellatum), along with orange California poppies (Eschscholzia californica).

Prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata) is a spectacular native plant that we would see in other Denver gardens on our fling. As well as being a larval host to two species of butterfly, it was also a traditional medicinal plant for many Native American peoples.

I passed the sign that marks Centerra’s certification as a Wildlife Habitat. And I wonder how many North American suburban planned communities could be brave and generous enough to view homebuilding as an ecological mission. 

We were here to see the center but also to hear from its Executive Director, Jim Tolstrup. Originally from the Boston area, he’s been with HPEC for more than a decade, and we gathered around him in the Medicine Wheel Garden. This part of the center aligns very closely to Jim’s professional background, since he was “a founder and former president of Cankatola Tiospaye, a non-profit that provides material assistance to Native American Elders”. Though his role there, he developed life-long friendships with Native Americans and a perspective that informs much of the emphasis here at the center.

Jim told us about Centerra’s beginnings and its mission and said that the center and the community’s environmental ethos have actually become prime selling features for the development, where there are strict building and landscaping design guidelines. It’s promoted as “Certified Wild”, he said. This video is an excellent introduction to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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This is the HPEC Master Plan from 2016 which gives a good overview of the site.

Courtesy of High Plains Environmental Center

The Medicine Wheel Garden in which we stood was erected on consecutive Earth Days in 2018 and 2019.

It will be used for the local Thompson School District’s annual 3rd grade powwow and to host participants in the 400-mile Lakota ride along Colorado’s front range each summer.

It was freshly planted with species used by various Plains tribes as food, medicine or in ceremonies. The plants are labelled with their traditional Lakota names.  Beyond the new Medicine Wheel Garden is The Wild Zone. Still being developed, it will serve as an outdoor classroom to foster a love of nature through play and self-directed learning. This section is called “The Nest Tree”.

Here is one of the plant labels in the Medicine Wheel Garden….

…. and the plant with its unripe fruit. Chokecherry fruit was traditionally mixed with pounded bison meat and tallow in the making of pemmican patties or wasna.

Here is the label for yellow monkeyflower (whose Latin genus name Mimulus has been changed to Erythranthe). Check out that clay….

And here are the beautiful blossoms. The leaves of this species were cooked by the Lakota for food.

Fishing is allowed from the shore of Houts Reservoir and adjacent Equalizer Lake, with a licence from Colorado Fish & Wildlife. The lakes also support native waterfowl.

We toured the Community Garden…..

….. where members grow tomatoes, herbs and all manner of vegetables in neatly spaced raised planter boxes. In a normal year here, there are workshops on composting, pest management, propagation and other garden practices, as well as produce-swapping potlucks.   

I wish we’d had more time to explore the Heirloom Fruit Orchard.  I was surprised to learn that this part of Colorado has a buoyant fruit industry, and that the first cherry trees were planted here in 1864. Though the trees are young, this will be a wonderful spot. Among the old varieties of apples are Haas, Goodhue, Flower of Kent, Johnny Appleseed, Utter’s Red, Patricia, Gravenstein, Maiden Blush, Pitmaston Pineapple and Duchess of Oldenburg.

The greenhouses are used to raise native plants for plant sales and landscaping. Because of Covid, this year’s sales were held online with curbside pickup. Available plants included native hyssops, sages, columbines, milkweeds, buckwheat, gaillardia, sunflowers, beebalm, tansy aster, evening primrose, penstemons, ratibidas, goldenrods, vervains and Stanley’s plume.

We walked down The Promenade, a beautiful pathway through mixed plantings of Colorado natives. Imagine how inspiring this is for Centerra residents looking for plant design ideas for their landscapes.

Honey bees were all over the apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).  Not only is this drought-tolerant native shrub beautiful in flower, its fluffy, red seedheads are very decorative as well.

There were plants I’d never encountered before, like desert 4 o’clocks (Mirabilis multiflora).

I loved this beautiful western ninebark (Physocarpus monogyna), with Rocky Mountain penstemon at its base.  It was the perfect pairing, and the perfect way to end an all-too-short visit to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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If you’re interested in First Nations culture, you might wish to read my blog on two days at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the city where I was born.

Spring at VanDusen Botanical Garden – Part 2

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Now that we’ve left the Sino-Himalayan Collection I toured you through in Part 1, along with the Rhododendron Walk, let’s wander through the rest of this spectacular Vancouver garden. The map is below, and if you click to enlarge it you can see the details a little better (a large map is on VanDusen Botanical Garden’s website). As I mentioned in my first blog, my photos are from four spring visits in the past decade, dates ranging from May 2nd to June 1st.

We’ll start in the Fern Dell. This is one of the many Taxonomic Collections at VanDusen Botanical Garden, filled with little Pteridophyte treasures from around the world…..

….. like Himalayan maidenhair fern (Adiantum venustum)  …..

….. and arching Japanese holly fern (Cyrtomium fortunei var.clivicolum) …..

….. and the beautiful native British Columbia deer fern (Blechnum spicant).

Walking southwest from the Fern Dell, we come to the Medicine Wheel. As the seasons change in March, June and September, visitors are invited here to participate in a Medicine Wheel Ceremony, celebrating the cycles of nature as marked by people from different backgrounds and spiritual traditions. Medicine wheels, of course, were created by many indigenous people in North America, most featuring a central stone cairn and one or more stone circles and stone lines radiating from the central point. In Saskatchewan, I visited and blogged about Wanuskewin Heritage Park which features a 1,500-year-old medicine wheel.

Nearby are VanDusen’s beehives. Since I’ve spent years photographing honey bees wherever I travel, I always spend a few minutes watching the activity around the hives.

Provided the spring temperatures are warm enough for the honey bees to fly, sharp-eyed visitors will always find them gathering nectar or pollen on the garden’s plants, like pulmonarias or lungworts, which are a particular honey bee favourite. This is Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’.

At the very southwest corner of the garden adjacent to the wonderful Alma VanDusen Garden I blogged about in April are the Meadow Ponds.  If you come in early May when not much is blooming, you’ll likely see the pink flowers of moisture-loving umbrella plant or Indian rhubarb, Darmera peltata.

But visit several weeks later and the scene has changed to include orange Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ and yellow flag irises (Iris pseudacorus).

I love this scene adjacent to the Alma VanDusen meadow nearby, featuring red-flowered horse chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and bluebells.

If you’re a kid or an adventurous adult, the Maze is always fun. Me? I prefer to focus on the monkey puzzle tree outside (Araucaria araucana), since they were part of my childhood in Victoria, B.C.

Now we’ll do a slow curve and start to walk northeast behind the Sino Himalayan Dell. In spring, VanDusen’s impressive Mountain Ash (rowan) Collection puts on a fine show. This is Sorbus caloneura, native to mountain forests of China….

….. and this is Sorbus commixta, the Japanese rowan.

The Maple Collection is excellent. I love the way moss clings to the limbs of the trees; it reminds me of my own suburban Vancouver childhood home and the lime my father was always sprinkling to try to get rid of the moss in the lawn. This is the the purple-leaf sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus ‘Atropurpureum’).

And this is the chartreuse foliage of the golden Cappadocian maple (Acer cappodicum ‘Aureum’.)

There are lovely spring plantings under the maples, featuring bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis), blue-flowered Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and late daffodils.

Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) have a place in the Maple Collection as well.

During my four (mostly May) spring visits in the past decade, I seem to have managed only this one pretty photo of a few of VanDusen’s famous Ceperley hybrid primroses, on the edge of Heron Lake.

So I dug into my vast slide collection and scanned an image from June 2003, to show the impressive colours of the Ceperley hybrid candelabra primroses a little later in the season. According to Douglas Justice of UBC Botanical Garden, these beautiful, moisture-loving primroses (like some of VanDusen’s Asian species rhododendrons) originated in Stanley Park gardener’s Alleyne Cook’s collection in the Ceperley Picnic area of the park. They are a mixture of hybrids (he called it a “hybrid swarm”) involving at least four Chinese candelabra primrose species: gold-flowered P. bulleyana, deep-pink P. pulverulenta, yellow  P. helodoxa  and magenta P. beesiana (some sources call this a subspecies of P. bulleyana).  When these species hybridize, they produce a spectacular mixture of orange, yellow, salmon, pink and mauve-flowered primroses.

Butterbur (Petasites hybridus) is an unusual Chinese perennial found near the Maple Collection.

There’s a good collection of lindens or limes. This is Korean linden (Tilia insularis).

Vancouver is famous for its Japanese cherries and on May 2, 2017, I enjoy standing under a white cloud of Prunus ‘Shirotae’, or the Mount Fuji cherry.

VanDusen displays Canadian-bred cultivars of plants, celebrating the heritage of botanists like Frank Skinner (Hyacithiflora lilacs, roses, honeysuckles), Isabella Preston (Preston lilacs), Felicitas Svejda (Explorer roses, weigela, forsythia), Percy Wright (crabapples, roses) and the UBC Botanical Garden Plant Introduction Program (‘Mandarin’ honeysuckle).

One special introduction is ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwood, a hybrid of Eastern flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) and the western native Nuttall’s dogwood (Cornus nuttallii).  This is a branch from the oldest living specimen of the cultivar, bred by British Columbia nurseryman Henry Matheson Eddie (1881-1953) in 1945. Eddie made crosses in the 30s and 40s, his aim to develop a shrub combining the large flowers of the western dogwood with the rich fall colour of the eastern species. But when the Fraser River flooded its banks in 1947, the wholesale division of his family business, the Eddie Nursery Company, lost all its stock of the hybrids except for one shrub that had been moved to their farm in Richmond, from which all the ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwoods in the world have been propagated. Henry Eddie’s family donated the specimen below to VanDusen in the 1990s.

This is Weigela florida ‘Minuet’, one of Felicitas Svejda’s Dance Series introductions from 1981.

If you read Part 1 of my blog, you’ll know that R. Roy Forster was a beloved first Director of VanDusen, so we’ll take a walk past the Cypress Pond named for him. Check out the knobby knees of the cypress trees (Taxodium distichum). And look, there are little ducklings swimming in the water.

Nearby is the Eastern North America Section…..

….. with its native trees (including a beautiful and rare butternut) and understorey plants, such as these young red buckeyes (Aesculus pavia)…..
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…. and familiar to me, a Torontonian, are showy trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum) and Solomon’s seals (Polygonatum biflorum).

We’ll head southwest again via the Woodland Garden. I believe it’s in this area where there are some wonderful magnolias, including New Zealand-bred ‘Star Wars’, below.

I love seeing all these western mayflowers (Maianthemum dilatatum) or “false lily-of-the-valley” carpeting the ground under conifers.

From this area, we can reach the Southern Hemisphere Garden which contains an amazing collection of plants native to South America, Australia and New Zealand, below.

Lolog’s barberry (Berberis x lologensis) is a lovely hybrid between two Chilean species, Berberis darwinii and Berberis linearifolia.

Gunnera manicata is called Brazilian giant rhubarb and gradually becomes an immense plant here on the edge of Heron Pond.

We’ll leave the Southern Hemisphere Garden via the zigzag bridge……

….. and make our way down the path through the Ornamental Grass collection. VanDusen does a beautiful job of integrating the grasses into the garden with other plants, such as the crown imperial fritillaries under the goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), below. At this time of spring, you can barely see the Bowles’ golden grass (Milium effusum ‘Aureum’) popping up….

… but a few weeks later, it makes a stunning contrast to the dusky cranebill (Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’) here.

Another chartreuse leaved plant, Bowles’ golden sedge, Carex elata ‘Aurea’, shown below with Lychnis viscaria ‘Feuer’, causes understandable confusion, given the common name. Both were introduced by British horticulturist and garden writer Edward Augustus Bowles (1865-1954), who was also an important collector of crocuses, colchicums, snowdrops and snowflakes.

Not all the grasses in the garden are arranged in little vignettes, but it is fun to see the details of some, like tufted sedge (Carex elata).

Now we’ll circle back on the path through VanDusen’s renowned Black Garden. Though it’s at its best later in the season, it is still stunning in springtime, with its wine-red tulips, barberries and heucheras, black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’) and chartreuse highlights.

On my visit in May 2014, one of VanDusen’s volunteers named Hughie greets me and she is so perfectly colour-coordinated, I ask her to stroll through for my camera.

I adore this combination of ‘Gold Heart’ bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) with dark ‘Queen of Night’ tulips.

Let’s make our way west to take a quick peek at the Perennial Border. It isn’t quite as grand in May as later in the season, but there are still lovely plants……

….. like these ‘Sky Wing’ Siberian iris….

….. and attractive vignettes such as Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ and white Trollius x cultorum ‘Cheddar’ in front of the dark foliage of Ligularia ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’.

Visitors can find lots of spring design inspiration in the garden, like this Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’ with Epimedium x perellchicum ‘Frohnleiten’.

There are old-fashioned perennial favourites, too, such as pink gas plant (Dictamnus albus var. roseus).

The formal rose garden takes summer temperatures to begin to bloom, but in May, the perennial border flanking it starts out with a few narcissus….

…. before exploding in mid-late June with a purple profusion of bellflowers (Campanula latifolia var. macrantha), cranesbills (Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’) and catmint (Nepeta sp.)

Near the Loderi rhododendrons which launched our tour in my previous blog, hundreds of colourful tulips carpet the ground in front of British sculptor Sophie Ryder’s ‘Minotaur and Hare’, created for the Vancouver Biennale in 2009-11.  Sadly, the little blue hare that the minotaur once cradled was stolen, not once, but twice.

Tulips, of course, are a big part of spring at VanDusen, but my favourite way to use them is in combination with spring perennials, as here with pink Bergenia ‘Eroica’. If I had to guess at the tulip, which was not labelled, I’d say the single late ‘Dordogne’.

Now we come to the finale of our tour, a beautiful spectacle you’re most likely to encounter between mid-May and early June: the gorgeous Laburnum Walk.  Planted in 1975 under Director R. Roy Forster, the walk was modelled on the famous Laburnum Arch at Bodnant Garden in Wales. The long, yellow, pea-flowered trusses of golden chain tree (Laburnum x watereri ‘Vossii’) cascade over the walk, flanked by Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’, pink bistort (Persicaria bistorta ‘Superba’), forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) and bluebells (Hyacinthoides x massartiana).

Isn’t this perfect?

So our tour is over, but I’d like to pay tribute to my late mother Mary Healy, who accompanied me to VanDusen Botanical Garden over the years on many occasions. The photo below is from 1988. My mom taught me about gardening, was proud of me for choosing to make it my career, and loved nothing better than to walk with me for a while; then, as she got older, to settle on a bench with her newspaper as I happily roamed the garden with my cameras. I dedicate this blog to her.

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If you’d like to read about another exceptional Vancouver garden, visit the blog I wrote on UBC’s David Lam Asian Garden.

Other public garden blogs I’ve blogged about include Toronto Botanical Garden; Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton ON; Montreal Botanical Garden; New York Botanical Garden; Wave Hill, Bronx NY; New York’s Conservatory Garden in Central Park; New York’s High Line in May and in June; fabulous Chanticleer in Wayne, PA; the Ripley Garden in Washington DC; Chicago Botanic Garden; The Lurie Garden, Chicago; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin TX; Denver Botanic Gardens; the Japanese Garden in Portland OR; the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Bellevue, WA; the Los Angeles County Arboretum; RBG Kew in London; Kirstenbosch, Cape Town; the Harold Porter National Botanical Gardens, South Africa; Durban Botanic Gardens; Otari-Wilton’s Bush, Wellington NZ; Dunedin Botanic Garden, NZ; Christchurch Botanic Gardens, NZ.