Trillium North Park, Thornton St at Malkin

Technically, the lookout place is not here, where the mural-painted shipping containers and the garden beds lie near the rows of cherry trees, but slightly up the hill from us along Atlantic; there, in the long ago, the promontory was the perfect spot to camp and be able to survey almost the whole breadth of the estuary at once: all the flocks, all the big creeks where the fish might be running, all the edges and shorelines where the elk, deer, bear, wolves, cougars and more might be coming down to see.

Now we’ve arrived back at a little corner of EartHand. This park, Trillium North, was opened in 2014; we’ve been the artists-in-residence here since then. The park has already undergone some changes: the land under the cherry trees used to be glaring gravel, and much of the rest of the outer areas were pollinator meadows that were a bit too sparse to be comely, so it was all changed to lawn; irrigation was installed in more areas; the shrubbery along the western edge, by the parking lot, was removed because of the difficulty of keeping it free of garbage; and a new raised garden bed for tea and fibre plants was installed along the eastern side of our work bays.

In the raised garden beds you’ll find several kinds of mint and a large and lush rosemary for tea; a thriving colony of fireweed and some dogbane for fibre; coreopsis, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums and marigolds for dye; and a variety of volunteer salad greens.

At the eastern side of the bays and back of the shipping containers we have a lush population of nettles, day lilies, and milkweed for fibre; for dyes, some mahonia, and an alum-accumulating plant called Heuchera (coral bells). The honeysuckle that trails up the chain link attracts hummingbirds that buzz us during our evening studio sessions.

Toward the west from the shipping containers are the rain swales, full of grasses, lupines, some nettles, lots of Nootka rose and hardhack, some spirea, and a cultivar of Salix purpurea called ‘Arctic dwarf willow’, which has lovely whips for weaving if you don’t mind lots of clipping, and is not at all related to Salix arctica.

The new hospital campus is going in next door, but this place will still be a special park — a landscape meant to help us express the fullness of our humanity, in our creativity and our relationships with the more-than-human world. May we look out and see ourselves honouring this meaning through time.

Station Street to National Avenue

Once the land was made solid by the filling in the estuary, Pacific Central Station was built. Amazing to think of the vision and certitude that raised a grand stone building in the midst of what was once a teeming wetland. One of our walk participants said that she heard that the land here still feels the swell and ebb of the tides, and rises and falls accordingly.

Thornton Park in front of the station is an arboretum, with large shade trees from many corners of the world; if you are passing by in the spring time, the large purple spikes of the Empress trees are astonishing and fragrant.

The stories of the land around the station are unknown to us, though probably available with some searching through the archives. Right now they’re mostly seedy pockets like parking lots and run down buildings, but there may have been warehouses and busy industry at one point. The entire landscape is about to transform again, becoming extremely dense and valuable in city once more: the large parking lot north of National will soon be redeveloped into the new campus of St. Paul’s Hospital, slated to open in 2024.

At this moment, though, it’s still fairly quiet and open. By the time you turn onto National there’s only sporadic traffic, and the weeds are, literally, golden: goldenrod, tansy, St.John’s wort, and more yield lovely dyes; scotch broom works away at fixing nitrogen, offering nectar, and occasionally some weaving or broom-making materials.

Western Street to Northern, Station to Terminal

In the long ago, the canoes would have threaded their way through the Separated Points and glided across the relatively warm, shallow and extremely rich waters of the calm estuary here. Flocks of water fowl lingered at the edges, and one could look down through glass waters into eel grass and crabs, schools of fish, the pock marked sand of clam beds, mud sharks lurking under wide fronds of sea weed…

The lines of steel rails are the ‘new paths’ of the continent; from 1912-1917, the estuary was filled in to create a space for rail yards accessible to the port area on Burrard Inlet.

Among the rails and warehouses the land is busy healing, and making the best of the situation, offering a seasonal bounty of food and fibre: grasses, blackberry, bindweed, tansy, goldenrod and more all find a place here; there are still cottonwoods and scotch broom determined to be here, and wild clovers fixing nitrogen in the toughened ground.

Main St.

In the long ago, this place was a thin arm of land that reached out and almost grasped the hand of the arm on the other side of the water; together, they almost formed a land bridge across the waters of the estuary.

These arms of land seemed, to the settlers, to be the obvious spot to put a bridge so that people, livestock and wagons of goods could travel more directly from the relative hinterlands of Mount Pleasant, with its dairy farms, vegetable gardens, orchards and breweries; to the relatively dense populations in the areas we now call Strathcona and the Downtown East Side, near the mills and slaughterhouses.

Swing north around the Midas Brake and Muffler parking lot to Industrial Avenue, and then head north again on Western Street. There are several interesting murals in this area now, thanks to the Main Street Mural Festival

Once people start questioning their assumptions in one part, they’d start questioning in other places… like, this was all mud flats, and this ravine was here but this one wasn’t. Seeing the layers, that’s something they’ll take; that [the city is] a big intertwined system of beings and mass, not just people and buildings and businesses.

Nicola Hodges, Artist

East First Avenue, from Thornton St to Main St

We descend into what was surely the water of the estuary, in the long ago, with the tule and cattail, mud banks and sand bars — perhaps there were also cottonwood trees here then, as there are now.

There are still empty lots here, but not for long: as of May 2019 there are now construction fences up along the north side of First Ave, and the student and rental housing talked about for “Lot P” in the Great Northern Way Campus Revised Structure Plan may be imminent.

At this point in time though, along with the fragrant medicine of the cottonwood we find the generous fibres of blackberry, bindweed, and the aerials of hedge mustard, tuned into their own frequencies; and the rich colours of aromatic tansy. The brewery has decided to put in some variegated yucca, which someday might get trimmed back and offer us some leaves to weave.

When I moved away from the city I started learning more about plants, like living more isolated from humans makes one more interested in other relationships. When I moved back to the city it felt like a loss, like this place where I lived was concrete desertion we what was once rich forest, big cedars. But as I went in the walk and started noticing the plants I felt like I was getting it back again, that the place was alive after all.

Nicola Hodges, Artist and walk leader

The face of this land has been changed many times since the last ice age (when it was under water), and since Europeans and others began to displace the First Nations in the 19th Century. Was this spot lower than it is now, at the shoreline of the estuary? did it get more fill than surrounding areas for some reason? or were these its contours from time immemorial?

According to the Great Northern Way Revised Structure Plan (2014), this meadow will someday be used as part of the staging area for construction of a Broadway subway line (tunnel boring machine! see page 13, fig.7 ); afterward the line is in with a station at the corner of Thornton and Great Northern Way, it will be developed into commercial/campus properties (see page 10, Figure 5). The plot immediately to the south of what is currently the meadow (behind the chain link fence where we wove our circles of weeds) is marked to be the green, open space.

In the meantime, this meadow is a beautiful place to walk, bike and picnic through the seasons, as the flush of wildflower blooms changes week by week (and the art projects pop up like mushrooms). Many of these flowers are here because they are good nectar producers; some of them, such as coreopsis, are also extraordinary dye plants.

I thought it was enjoyable just walking around the city… making installations with plants. It was satisfying to make marks that weren’t permanent… It felt loose and playful… to just create as you go with no pressure… and then just leaving it, a break from product oriented work. And Anna and Nicola together, their knowledge always shifts my perspective: Anna was saying you can tell what ages the block was built by the trees, what trees were trending when that block was built.

Project artist Jaymie Johnson, in an interview with Rebecca Graham

May — Lacy phacelia – people were really fascinated by the caterpillar-like blooms, sweet rocket, blooming trees, St.Johns wort coming out, California poppies, yellow dock, horsetail just small, lupines;
June — pink flowers at ECUAD, Lacy phacelia gone to seed, wild lettuce going to seed, blackberry fibre peeling well, buttercups, St.Johns wort at peak in the middle of the month;
July — goldenrod everywhere, yarrow, fireweed starting, tansy. Also coreopsis “tickweed” at ECUAD and some other little places nooks and crannies. Bindweed everywhere, flowering now;
August— goldenrod stayed strong, fireweed, and second batch of st.johns wart. Coreopsis and marigolds coming on and staying into the fall.

Project artist Nicola Hodges, in an interview with Rebecca Graham