Community Gardens, Rosedale and Cote St-Luc Road

 This community garden is just two blocks from where I live, on Rosedale Avenue just above Cote St- Luc Road. This isn't a mini-farm, it's gardeners growing vegetables and flowers for their own use. These are quite large gardens, tools and supplies are stored in a locked shed, compost bins near the gardens. Photos taken in May 2015, but not much has changed since then.

Garden work in late October

 

Bee balm, cone flowers, and day lilies;
photo taken in August 2021

Due to illness I didn't do much garden work this passed summer, I didn't even sit in the garden that much. I used to sit outside every evening, I'd be entertained by fire flies. The Covid lock down has been great for gardens, we've seen the return of birds not seen for some time, some urban wild life, and honey bees. I noticed, and I wonder if anyone can corroborate this, that in the morning during Covid , around eight or nine a.m., the air in the garden was so fresh and clean, something I have previously noticed only when living in the country. I've pushed myself and done more garden work this September and October than is usual. I've weeded, transplanted plants, put a row of hostas at the rear of the garden, hoed, dug, and watered. What a great time! Inside the house, I look out of my window and I see sunlight in the tops of trees, where the leaves have turned yellow and the autumnal leaves are brilliant when the sun is behind them. Keeping up my outside work, trying to prepare the garden for next summer, I weeded ground cover that came from a neighbour's yard, it was everywhere. I pulled it up, dug up the roots, and then I realized how large a space I had that was mostly wasted on ground cover. I'd been thinking of expanding the garden but always careful not to expand it too much or possibly I wouldn't be able to keep up with what I'd done, or I wouldn't want to do what had become extra work. But this area, by the side of the house path entrance to the garden, is large, and what a great discovery. I have cone flowers that I planted years ago and that have outgrown the space where they were planted. I moved several of these and it was interesting to see how much they had grown, they are very sturdy plants, and I moved about four of these plants to the new space. Something I just noticed that will be discussed another time is a rose bush I thought had died last winter, unbeknownst to me, it was still alive, and returned to life. Nature is resilient. I have not had a lot of success with roses but now this might be changing. Anyhow, I am very happy with the revitalized and renewed garden space just worked on. I thought this space was good before but now I know that, weeded, tidied up, it will thrive next summer.

Cone flowers were under the window on the left, some of them have been moved to 
the newly turned over flower bed; a few weeks ago I trimmed back ivy that covered
the brick walls on two sides of the house; photos taken on 24 October 2021

All of this space was waiting to be cultivated; there is a row of miniature
irises, bee balm that is now established, and some cone flowers

On the far right are some raspberry canes and behind them is a lilac bush that
wasn't expected to survive after being cut down to ground level about ten years
ago; it is now coming back to life and thriving

A bare piece of land doesn't look like much but the soil here
is pretty good and I expect everything will thrive

 

Community Gardens, The City Farm Garden

 

All photos taken in October 2021

I used to post photographs of the City Farm Garden, the area where herbs and flowers were grown, located behind the Hingston residence on the Loyola Campus of Concordia University; this area has been either built on, ploughed under, or left to go wild. Left to go wild is my preference. The larger part of the City Farm Garden seen above, just a few hundred feet from the other area, is thriving and abundant. They grow food that goes to Montreal-area food banks including homeless shelters. . 

No More Progress!

An old 78 RPM recording from my father's record collection

Progress is a mug's game, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's comment on writing poetry. Some people think that society is improving, that it is evolving to some greater state of generosity, kindness, and wealth. It is more likely that it is devolving into all of us being captives to isolation, loneliness, and being defined as consumers. Change is not progress, it is just change, and in our consumer society change is often the replacement of one consumer item for another more expensive item. Change is buying more stuff we mostly don't need. There are other, probably better, examples but for now let's take a simple example of this, about listening to music. 

Long, long ago people listened to music on wax cylinders, then we moved on to single sided 78 RPM records, then two sided 78 RPM records, then to 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums, then to 45 RPM records and then cassette tapes and then CDs, and each time we had to replace our record collections with recordings that worked with the new technology; and then our old records, tapes, and CDs were discarded when we (the editorial we) began buying digitized music--we were really just renting it--and this music (our virtual record collection) was streamed to what we now call our device, farewell record players, tape decks, and CD players; farewell to my grandmother's large wooden console record player with a little box of steel needles and old magazines stored on the shelves below the turn-table. Farewell to scratchy recordings, vinyl recordings, and hello to digitized music so evolved that no one can hear the attraction of listening to digitized sound. Farewell to the human dimension of things. 

Did technology really improve so much that we should care to buy into the next latest technology? I don't think so. We could have stayed at vinyl records, and there seem to be enough people who agree with this as 33 1/3 RPM vinyl recordings are making a come-back. We discarded our old record collections when they became obsolete, meaning that the machine required to play this music was no longer being manufactured and new vinyl recordings were also not being made. I always liked to collect certain things, for instance books and old postage stamps, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums and compact discs; I listened to my father's 78 RPM records, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glen Miller; I bought CDs of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison and others. This music was a part of my life.

The last music I wanted to buy were the complete Glen Gould recordings of J.S. Bach, but the technology changed before I could begin; so, farewell to me as a consumer of music. I stopped buying any music when CDs became obsolete; at the most, now, I listen to some music on YouTube. I put all of my CDs onto my computer thinking I would listen to them as I sat writing, I've never listened to any of these copies of my CDs. Human nature hasn't been factored into the mania for "progress". Some of us like to collect things, to have an album cover to look at and liner notes to read, to have something an album or a book that we paid for and then to put it on a shelf; it seems this desire to collect things has been forgotten.  

It is possible (or is it wishful thinking) that a failed technology is the digitized book, while they are still being sold the demand for digitized books seems to have plateaued (except for text books). The paper book, two covers containing pages with printed writing on each page, is among the the greatest technological inventions, it is also inexpensive,  and it will not be replaced; the world of learning, spirituality, and entertainment is available in books, whether a poem, a detective novel, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, or the King James translation of the bible. The replacement of paper book technology didn't work because digital technology could not compete with the older paper format, a book is tactile and people like to hold a book, write notes in the margins, fold a corner (God forbid!) as a book mark, write their name and date when purchased or read on the cover page, give books as gifts, own a copy of the book, and buy books used or second hand; of course, Amazon and others tried to replace books with Kindle, etc. But books are still among the greatest technological inventions in history. For a while book stores were closing, replaced by Amazon, who wanted to sell digitized books that you could read on your Kindle that they also sold. They wanted to sell the device and then sell the customer a digitized book; it was a means to divert profit from the publishers to, in this case, Amazon. 

Digitized books peaked and paper copies of books are now selling more copies than ever. It used to be a sign of learning and intelligence to have, in your home, bookshelves filled with books and some of us enjoyed browsing at the titles of a friend's home library. Your books reflected who you were, what kind of interests you had, even your education. Not the best example but a fun example, remember the old Dell detective novels, they were purposely designed to be small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans; some people used to walk around with a book in their back pocket, reading was that important to people. Remember the map on the back cover of these books? Remember buying second hand copies of these Dell books just for the cover art? They are still worth collecting and the Dell novels are still worth reading. We have fond memories of these and other books, we don't have fond memories of Kindle books, browsing Amazon's website, storing music in the Cloud, or what have you. It hasn't quite worked out as they had planned. People still enjoy visiting book stores, not just shopping online. But the damage is done regarding music, I doubt I will ever visit a record store again, I don't even think there are any left in Montreal. 

Fall planting of hostas

We've had a mild October this year, it was +20 C yesterday and most of the previous two weeks; however, it is raining today (on Saturday) and the coming days will be in the +10 C range. This means it's been great weather to get out and work in the garden, in my case moving or transplanting hostas. One of the advantages of perennial plants is that they are perennial, you buy them once and not only do you have them year after year, but they multiply, and then you can divide them and have more of the same plants; plus, you buy them only once so you aren't paying for them a second or third summer. Perennials are the gift that keeps on giving... Frugality is something the government of Canada needs to learn as we are now half way to a trillion dollar debt. Meanwhile, annuals look great for one summer and then, in October, they end up in the compost or the garbage; I've seen piles of geraniums thrown out, still in bloom, they could easily have been overwintered indoors and planted the following spring. 

    About five years ago I planted four hostas in the front of the house, as a border to the walk, as well as other hostas planted in the backyard; I decided to move two of these plants to the back yard garden and that's what I did last week. In fact, I also moved a few other hostas into this same long row at the very rear of the garden, it has the effect of pulling the whole garden together. This backyard, my Canadian cottage garden, is not very large and it doesn't get a lot of sunlight except where the house abuts the backyard and even what sunlight I get isn't guaranteed, it depends on the time of day; in other words, nowhere does this garden get twelve straight hours of summer sunlight on a single day as do the gardens of some of my neighbours. I don't have a great love for hostas; I like hostas, but... so, planting these hostas was a matter of convenience and even necessity, it is all that will grow where I planted them; also, they are perennials and there are many varieties of hostas, they will grow and flourish in the shade and I like them well enough. 

You can see where two hostas have been removed, they were the same size as the hostas on either side of the remaining hostas; by the way, hostas are easy to dig up, even four or five years after first planting them the root ball was more or less intact. It is also easy to divide the root ball prior to transplanting them.

Here we see the row of hostas only half planted; this is very poor soil and it's beside some cedars and below an apple tree, so not the greatest place to grow anything.

Here is the completed row of hostas, they'll look better next year or the year after next. It was only after planting them that I realized how they completed the garden; the hostas gave a sense of enclosure to the garden as a whole, a sense of completion. 

I planted these hydrangeas and the hostas in the foreground last summer when I also dug this small island in the backyard. It isn't a lot of work to dig up small sections of grass and, one thing I've noted, is that an island also creates green space surrounding it, it creates paths. I enlarged this area this summer and, recently, I moved the hostas further away from the hydrangeas. By the way, the hydrangeas were moved from the front lawn area where they were too plentiful. I don't throw out any plants or bushes. 

The Village Shopping Plaza in early October

It is inevitable that the Village Shopping Plaza will be demolished and become the site of spanking new paper thin wall condos! My new motto is "No More Progress, Please". Look at what has already been lost, stores, a restaurant, a place where people could meet and talk; it was, after all, the village shopping plaza, not the city shopping plaza but a community. Did people stop shopping here? Most likely, but whatever happened it was also the fault of whoever owned this complex, they didn't keep up with the times and then land became more valuable than the building and so, voilà, where we are today. Progress is not just exchanging the old for what is new and more profitable (excuse my naivete!), that is how we define progress in our society and it is a false definition. In the meantime, nature or urban wildlife is returning to this area, the other day I saw a hawk sitting on a railing behind the building.  

“The Stare's Nest by My Window”, by W.B. Yeats

 

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies;

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Note: the more times I read this poem by Yeats the more impressed I am by it, especially the last stanza. Re. "the stare", it reads on the Internet: "The first urban roost ever recorded was in Dublin's downtown plane trees in the 1840s, when the starling was the "stare" (an Old English word for the bird) and bought for food in city markets."