Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Return to Stanley Park


From the groomed to the wild: some superbly-tended hellebores in the botanical garden section of the park. This is good gardening! - complete with the pong of freshly-applied compost, which Vince wanted to blame on the Canadian geese grazing like grey sheep on the bright green grass.


It was a grey day, so small things looked important: snowdrops under the bare lacework of a weeping Japanese maple.


Ha! What was this thing??? A skunk cabbage. My first. Very exciting.

Clearly belonging to the vaccinium family (blueberries, cranberries, etc), the bell-like flower very small, very subtle, hanging on this red-legged shrub growing with its feet in the water.

The Stanley Park Explorer is an excellent, thoughtful site that explains the ecology of the park, gives you tours through the seasons, as well as listing all the plants...so I think this blueberry may actually be Vaccinium ovalifolium.

2 comments:

  1. "grazing like grey sheep on the bright green grass." That's such a good description of the geese, and pretty. Personally, I think of them as soldiers on their own mine field...

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...and when they expode you can eat them!

    ReplyDelete

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