NINA SHOROPLOVA
Explorer, Tree Enthusiast, Author

(click on images to enlarge)

Nina Shoroplova is a tree enthusiast, historian, researcher, and author. Born and raised in Wales, she immigrated to Canada in 1969. An avid walker, amateur botanist, and tree enthusiast, she lives three blocks away from Vancouver’s world-famous Stanley Park.

It was her explorations of Stanley Park that inspired her new book, Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver's Stanley Park, an engaging, informative, and visually stunning tour of the numerous native, introduced, and ornamental tree species found in the park, combining a wealth of botanical knowledge with a fascinating social history of our city’s most celebrated landmark.

Legacy of Trees launches June 9 in a by donation online program hosted in Stanley Park Ecology Society's Zoom Meeting Room. Nina will share some historic and current photographs of trees from her book. Register here.

In the meantime, Nina has shared this special feature, A Tale of Three Trees, for our readers.

Legacy Trees is available from June 9 at ….. — *Legacy Trees* is available from June 9 at …..

A TALE OF TALE OF THREE TREES
Special To The West End Journal

Photos & Story by Nina Shoroplova

A one-kilometre walk that links Vancouver Fire Hall No 6 in the West End with Stanley Park goes past three interesting non-native trees. Start on Nelson at Nicola for the first, an unusual maple that is quite young at twenty-seven. Go southwest on Nicola to Comox and walk to 2020 Comox, to view a centenarian wingnut. Then go west to the Vancouver Park Board offices for the third, an evergreen sequoia of unknown age but great height.

The giant sequoia on the grounds of the Vancouver Parks Board offices on Beach Avenue commands a wonderful view of English Bay.

In mid-August 2019, Vancouver launched its open data portal, informing residents about our city’s vibrant culture, affordability and housing, climate change, and more. This portal hosts a fabulous resource of our street trees (opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/street-trees/information), offering a spreadsheet of data, an interactive map, a search bar with an option for finding trees by genus and species, and the opportunity to download the data to your own computer for further sorting and selecting.

This portal makes the identification of boulevard trees so easy.

A quarter of Vancouver’s 146,000-plus street trees are maples of various species—field maples (native throughout southern Europe), Freeman maples (many hybridized cultivars), bigleaf maples (native to Canada’s West Coast), Japanese maples (native to Japan, China, and Korea), and others. By searching under the genus Acer, data for 35,900 individual trees show up. The search bar lists the number of street trees the city has planted of each species. If you click on the map, you can see where they are growing.

The only Père David’s maple in the West End is opposite Fire Hall # 6. Its vertical white stripes are one of its identifying features.

I have been admiring one particular maple tree for some years, because throughout much of the year it boasts clusters of small flowers and these are followed by heavy clusters of close-winged samaras. These intermingle with an abundance of grass green, oval, toothed leaves; two of the teeth are longer, hinting at the tree’s maple heritage. Even after its leaves have turned yellow and fallen in autumn, the tree has a sepia glow from the many chains of tan-coloured samaras. It is a Père David’s maple (Acer davidii). There are fifty-four Père Davids throughout the city, but only one in the West End—it grows on Nelson Street’s sidewalk (985 Nicola).

The David from whom the tree takes its common name was the Frenchman who made it known beyond its native China—Father Armand David, a Catholic missionary, zoologist, and botanist who worked in Central China in the nineteenth century. Père David’s maple is a snakebark maple, as demonstrated by its vertical white stripes on the trunk.

Planted in April 1993, this tree has reached a good size, standing taller than the nearby two-and-a-half story apartment complex. I am so glad I was able to take close-up photographs of the leaves and samaras on one pendulous branch, which has since been lopped off because of the hazard it presented. The tree is now vase-shaped.

Thirty-five heritage trees are listed on the City of Vancouver’s Heritage Register (vancouver.ca/home-property-development/find-a-registered-heritage-building-site-or-tree.aspx). Of these, six are thriving in the West End and one of the most beautiful of them is growing west of Denman Street at 2020 Comox. Over a hundred years old, this Caucasian wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) now spreads its generous, rounded crown from one side of the street to the other. Its Latin name (actually the name is half Greek) translates as “winged nuts and leaves like those on an ash tree.” As with the leaves on trees in the Fraxinus genus, the leaves on this Caucasian wingnut are pinnately compound, bearing between eleven and twenty-seven leaflets per leaf. The count is always odd, because there is always one terminal leaflet.

The tree’s common name derives from its native land of the Caucasus and its prolific hanging chains of winged fruit. As a member of the walnut family (Juglandaceae), the tree’s tiny winged seeds are edible. But they are packed inside a hard shell—hence wingnut—and are only good for growing another Caucasian wingnut tree.

This witness of years gone by has a rugged trunk pockmarked with blemishes, burls, and burrows. Its roots stretch far afield in both directions. Its desire to sucker has been curbed somewhat, until the next time. What stories this tree could tell!

The third tree on this one-kilometre walk is the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) that grows within the grounds of the Vancouver Park Board (VPB) offices in the southwest corner of Stanley Park. The tree’s natural distribution area is the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. VPB’s offices date from 1962. I wonder whether the tree had already been planted there before foundations began. Giant sequoias can live beyond their three thousandth birthday, so one way and another, we know this is a youngster. This non-native tree has settled in well, as it does throughout Vancouver.

Looking up at the horizontal branches of this giant sequoia is a dizzying experience!

This specimen is already tall, dwarfing the low-rise VPB offices. Normally, a giant sequoia’s typical conical shape usually belies its size. Instead, this tree’s gangly and unusual branching somehow reinforces its loftiness. Its branches leave the trunk at right angles, but some then curve back on themselves to reach the ground and fill out the air space not already occupied by two neighbouring beeches (Fagus sylvatica; one is a weeping beech).

The trunk, one of a giant sequoia’s richest features, ranges in colour from burnt orange to caramel brown and is fluted.

One cannot help but be impressed by the combination of elegance and sheer bulk of a giant sequoia. Its abundant, curving branches, looking like thick, green hair blowing in the wind, give the appearance of softness, of feathering. But not so. In fact, the leaves of a Sequoiadendron giganteum are often described as “awl-shaped.” An awl is a carpenter’s tool for making holes in wood, or a sharply pointed instrument for a leatherworker to make a hole in leather. That’s how sharp the leaves of a giant sequoia feel. Be warned! I still can never refuse the invitation to feel a sequoia’s determined leaves.

Nina Shoroplova is the author of numerous books, including Cattle Ranch: The Story of the Douglas Lake Cattle Company; Trust the Mystery; and Spiraling Self-Awareness. Heritage House is publishing her latest book, Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver's Stanley Park on May 12, 2020.

Visit her author page at Amazon.com.