POTS & PLANTS
/THE GARDENS WE LIVE IN / PART III
by Peter W. Gribble
(James Oakes Photos)
Viewed from a helijet, seaplane or drone, Comox Street stands out as one of the green arteries leading to the heart of Stanley Park.
Bicycle sculpture at Comox and Bute by Nicco Soria and Calu Jienez.
(click images to enlarge)
Comox was once a popular alternative route to avoid the traffic congestion squeezing off of Robson, Burrard, Granville, and Georgia Streets. In the ‘70s with civic involvement, the greening of the West End began. One of the components has been to ease the dependence on cars by facilitating the use of bicycles. The Comox-Helmcken Greenway is a designated bike route running the length of Comox, past St. Paul’s and onto Helmcken.
At the corner of Comox and Bute Streets stands a whimsical celebration of the greenway and one of the most original garden trellises in the West End: the bicycle wheel sculpture. Built by Nicco Soria and Calu Jimenez, bike wheels, minus their tires, are joined at the rims to make a striking, wraparound urban hermit’s wing chair and trellis. The area is planted with rosemary and a Hydrangea macrophyllum, while a merry group of nasturtiums grows up into the spokes. The nasturtiums are a good artistic choice as they add to the color of the street-narrowing traffic sign.
Peter admires the garden at Gordon Neighbourhood House.
Just half a block north of Comox at 1019 Broughton, at Gordon Neighbourhood House, is a magnificent, mature Hinoki False Cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa) at the front and is underplanted with Hakonechloa grass, zinnias, dusty miller, rudbeckia, petunias, and cannas. To the west of the building are poppies, alyssum, lavender, boxwood, geranium, and a day lily offering its last bloom for the season.
Gordon Neighbourhood House is a community center, run by volunteers, offering a wide range of services for all ages. A currently active one, under the heading of “Urban Farming Initiatives,” is their ten Community Herb Boxes scattered throughout the West End with sage, mint, thyme, parsley, and oregano. The nearest one, at 1051 Broughton, is called The Laurel and is on the Comox side of the building. The Attic Thrift Shop is currently closed.
On the northwest sidewalk bulge of Comox and Broughton is a chair for one set in the middle of a small well-kept lawn surrounded by plantings of boxwood, crocosmia, Goldstrum rudbekia, coreopsis and others along with a hummingbird feeder. The chair’s position, while inviting, is evocative of the famous English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll’s lovely quote, “sometimes a bench on the landscape is merely for the eye to rest upon.”
The West End is a friendly neighborhood and people love to talk about their gardens. Conversations start up easily with passers-by who slow to enjoy the yard or examine a plant. It happens all the time. Among them today was Tuan, living near Comox and Nicola, who chatted with us from his balcony overlooking a lush garden just below his railing. Seven-foot-high sunflowers list to the sidewalk, hydrangea, petunias, zinnias, marigolds, and fall crocus peeking out, and snapdragons, geraniums, rhodos, laurel, hardy fuchsias, hydrangeas, and digitalis––make for a beautiful view to look upon every day.
Norm and Peter at Norm’s micro-garden.
Another avid gardener is Norm, the manager at 1721 Comox, out trimming the edges of the sidewalk median and happy to take a quick break. He has created an exuberant garden at the front with hollyhocks, mallow, dusty miller, petunias, scarlet runners with tree stumps from blowdowns serving as risers for the potted plants around and within the raised bed. The white Dahlias are full and stately, while the single lone pale orange dahlia leans out to the sidewalk as if seeking attention. Norm started the garden six to seven years ago and has it lit at night. He can change the light color from his phone.
Our Peter chats with Iva, one of the caretakers of Peter Rabbit’s Garden, one of several “sponsored” neighbourhood patches in the West End.
At Comox and Gilford is the Peter Rabbit’s Garden, a swale garden where a terracotta clay mother rabbit watches over her two bunnies. Tended by Iva, Madeline, Jane, and Dani, it is a very cute garden with heucheras, ferns, hostas, hydrangea, California lilac (Ceanonthus) - which bees love - skimmia, lavender, oxalis and decorated with pieces of driftwood and hand-selected stones.
In the roundabouts, bulge sidewalks, and curb-side swales you might see a sign peeking out of lush plantings. They are invitations to try one’s hand at gardening and stewardship. This sign is north of Peter Rabbit near Chilco Street and reads:
“This street garden is now SPONSORED. A local resident cares for the garden as part of the Green Streets Program. For more information visit vancouver.ca/greenstreets or call 3-1-1.”
If you are a beginner or starting out, best start small, gaining experience and confidence with each season. With every year, experience and knowledge gained develop into expertise. Eventually, expertise blooms into mastery.
At the western end of Comox’s green artery stands Hirshfield House. Well-known by locals, the house and garden, situated on a small rise, is described as “a Swiss chalet-style Craftsman bungalow of 1910.” The house possesses stoic conviction, but the garden is spectacular.
The front is stepped, tiered, and terraced, which is mostly hidden by the profusion of color and texture. This causes the garden to accentuate the rise and elevate the house. The order, due to the garden being fully packed with plants, is punctuated by the planted-up Italianate urns that asymmetrically suggest the levels. The design is superbly executed and meticulously tended.
The locally famed gardens at Hirshfield House.
The plant list is extensive yet there’s nothing you can’t see along Comox and elsewhere in the West End: nothing is particularly exotic or out of the ordinary. Yet the juxtaposition is exceptional. There is pieris, New Zealand flax (Phormium), impatiens, boxwood, Choisya x dewitteana “Aztec Pearl”, tall orange cannas, fireweed, dusty miller, potted hydrangea, rudbeckia “Goldstrum”, nicotiana, rhodos, geraniums, hyssop, daylilies, roses (showing their mutabilis ancestry), chrysanthemums, euphorbia, Salvia guaranitica “Black and Blue”, the perennial Salvia nemorosa both blue and white varieties (the blue especially loved by bees), peonies, lady’s mantle, zinnias, petunias and several varieties of phlox and begonias.
With so much in one spot, this garden demands you stop and absorb the mastery, both of the gardener and of nature. But that’s a column for another time.
As for Nature, its heartbeat, Stanley Park, looms close by.
James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis posits that Earth is a living, synergistic, self-regulating, complex system existing to sustain and perpetuate life. As part of the evolving system, humanity has begun to wake to the need to self-regulate and mitigate our climate crisis.
This self-regulation is part of the gardens we create, the gardens we live in, and must include our humble appreciation of the greater garden, Earth itself.
