The hidden trail in February

It's been a very cold winter and it looks like it will continue being very cold until the end of March. Here are photographs from a walk on February 17, on the hidden trail; this winter, beginning in early November, has not been a time for any really pleasant walks. But we're Canadians, we endure. And we wait for spring.

Christmas Eve, 2025

Arriving home Christmas Eve. It was dark and cold and snowing. Even in winter the garden is a place of life, seeing a rabbit digging in the snow and eating some grass. The garden is an invitation to birds, insects, and urban wildlife.

Soren Kierkegaard on walking

Kierkegaard

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

         --Søren Kierkegaard

 

The Hidden Trail, fall 2026

Visit to Mount Royal Cemetery and Cote des Neiges Cemetery in 2008

Visit to Mount Royal Cemetery and Cote des Neiges Cemetery on 16 December 2008.

Mount Royal Cemetery

The Molson mausoleum 

Cote des Neiges Cemetery, this cemetery is adjacent to Mount Royal Cemetery 

 

The Hidden Trail, 11 September 2025

 A sunny day, blue sky, and around 22 C. 

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"

                   

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course

A very long walk on 9/11; the last days of summer.

 

  

Canadian Cottage Garden, early evening

 Photographs taken on 05 September 2025, around 6:30 p.m., as the days are getting shorter.