West Haven Community Garden

The West Haven Community Garden is located behind Reno Plus, a big box hardware located on rue St-Jacques near Av. Patricia. 

Photographs taken 05 September 2025

Henry David Thoreau on gardens and nature

 

The Hidden Trail, 2022

Photographs of the Hidden Trail

And then for my afternoon walks I have a garden, larger than any artificial garden that I have read of and far more attractive to me, -- mile after mile of embowered walks, such as no nobleman's grounds can boast, with animals running free and wild therein as from the first, -- varied with land and water prospect, and, above all, so retired that it is extremely rare that I meet a single wanderer in its mazes. No gardener is seen therein, no gates...You may wander away to solitary bowers and brooks and hills.

                                   —Henry David Thoreau, "Journal", 20 June 1850.

          

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. 

                        —Henry David Thoreau, "Journal", 22 June 1853       

         

A man is not to be measured by the virtue of his described actions or the wisdom of his expressed thoughts merely, but by that free character he is, and is felt to be, under all circumstances.
                       — Henry David Thoreau, "Sir Walter Raleigh"

                   

Mid-May and staying at home

No one is doing much of anything these days, we're sitting at home watching CBC's News Channel. There's Justin at 11 a.m., there are the other politicians at 1 p.m., 2 p.m., and on it goes. Legault looked good until Quebec had double the number of Covid-19 cases as Ontario and only half of their population, until the old people began dying in larger numbers than anywhere else in Canada; even Ford looked good compared to Legault. Some of us are still going for daily walks, the streets are quiet at 9 a.m.; does anyone still live in those houses and apartment buildings I pass, there must be someone living there but who are they and how can they be so quiet?

    

Living with Animals

Last spring when I began working in the garden I wondered why birds and squirrels were afraid of me but not afraid of each other. Then I thought of Walt Whitman's poem (section 32 of "Song of Myself") about living with animals. Do we need to be like St. Francis of Assisi to be on friendly terms with animals? I soon realized the simple answer, just be outside a lot and the birds and squirrels will soon get used to you and not run from your presence. In fact, they'll ignore your presence. Today I began feeding the birds again for the winter. Soon I had a beautiful red cardinal and then chickadees arrived and then some squirrels who didn't seem to like each other. Here is Whitman's poem:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are
so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with
the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince
them plainly in their possession
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?