Revisiting the hidden trail

 

Burying the St. Pierre River Has Begun

 

Yesterday morning I walked to Meadowbrook Golf Course; it was a beautiful sunny day, not a single cloud in the sky. Court ordered work to bury the last section of the St. Pierre River has begun. On the far right of the above satellite image you can the St. Pierre River, it's just below Toe Blake Park; the river runs in a fairly straight line until it meanders and then, finally, empties into a culvert at the train tracks. I learned a few things in high school Geography and one of them is that a meandering river is very old, that it was once a more powerful river but is not as powerful as it once was, when meeting obstacles it meanders around them rather than over them. However, this river may have never been anything but a creek; it begins as a stream on Mount Royal and then runs across the city to empty out at the St. Lawrence River. Of course, even Mount Royal was once a much larger mountain but has been worn down by erosion and time.

It must seem a big issue is being made of something fairly insignificant. What the river represents is the last vestige of a historical river, it represents the presence of nature in the built city environment that can be relentlessly soulless. All people need the presence of nature as a place to enjoy the outdoors and we know that the outdoors--a forest, a river, a field--gives meaning to life, it restores one spiritually, it recharges one's batteries. This is what the river and the golf course represent, even though most people will never walk here or see the river. That it exists and its possible future use as a nature reserve, a park, or still a golf course is what is important. It is important not to lose this land to more condo construction.

Here are some photographs of the burying of the river. I see that the plan is to dig a straight trench between where the river enters the golf course below Toe Blake Park and where it leaves at the culvert. This water will be diverted into culvert pipes.

This part of the river, that meanders, is cut off 

Roses, The Regenerative Power of Nature

These three photographs were taken in July 2021.

When we moved into this house in June 1997, a neighbour remembered the previous owner for her garden. I am not sure that she was accurate, there was very little sign that any gardening had gone on here. But there were two rose bushes behind the house; I am told that the way to get roses to bloom is to feed them, make sure they are in the sun, and in the fall to cut them back to about two feet from the ground and wrap them for the winter or cover them with mulch. I did none of these. Time passed, years passed, and these two rose bushes survived my neglect; they didn't thrive but they didn't die. I found a plastic label for one of the roses in the earth, they are Tea Roses; I know so little about roses that, to me, their flowers don't even look like roses.

Then, a few years ago, I began to work on the backyard garden and I called it a Canadian cottage garden as distinct from the much loved English country garden. I noticed that the two rose bushes, planted by the previous owner, were still alive; I bought and planted a third rose bush even though I've never had much luck with roses. I am not, I guess, a rose person... Early last spring, 2021, one of the two original rose buses looked as though it had died; I tried to dig it up but I was lazy and gave up on it; that rose bush was more tenacious than I realized. For a few weeks the two surviving rose bushes thrived, I've never had so many roses! Then, one day, I noticed a neighbour's roses, they were incredibly abundant and remained so all summer and, even yesterday, they had flowers although now covered with the first frost of the season. My roses lasted a few weeks, died, and that was the end of them; my neighbour's roses bloomed all summer and fall. Looking at the photographs of my roses leaves me wondering what kind of roses they are. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the rose bush I thought had died was still alive, it had survived the previous winter, it had survived my neglect. Well, what do you know? All three rose bushes are now alive; I will wrap them with burlap for the winter and look after them better in the future.

Here is part of a longer quotation from Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel, Autumn, in which he mentions the regenerative power of nature: "Life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening." Written after he hacked away at an apple tree, then was concerned that he might have killed the tree, and a few months later had more apples than ever before. Despite everything, nature affirms life. And this is one of the things that gives me hope, no matter what terrible things people do to the world, to Earth, nature will soon return and reclaim what we have leveled, built on, destroyed, polluted, and desecrated.

These three photographs were take in July 2020, also an excellent garden summer.