POTS & PLANTS
/Peter Gribble taking notes in the Barclay Heritage Square garden.
THE GARDENS WE LIVE IN / PART II
by Peter W. Gribble / Jame Oakes Photos
To begin this second tour, James Oakes took me down to an urban jewel – a park with houses.
Bounded by Haro, Barclay, Broughton and Nicola Streets, the buildings of the entire block were designated to be demolished to make way for a park. Then in 1976, it was discovered that Roedde House at 1415 Barclay Street was designed and built by the famous architect, Francis Rattenbury.
The National Trust for Canada 1979 feasibility study established that most of the buildings could be redeveloped by tearing down a handful of the buildings and still having a park. In short: a park with houses. Today Barclay Heritage Square consists of 12 heritage buildings and a park planted with paths leading around formal and informal beds with lawns and seating areas.
Three of the large elegant houses, Roedde House, Barclay Manor and Week’s House have public access and are community centrepieces of the West End.
Roedde House was Francis Rattenbury’s first commission. He went on to design such imposing landmarks as the BC Legislature, the Empress Hotel and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gustav Roedde and his wife Matilda had moved to Vancouver in 1886, the year of the Great Vancouver Fire. Roedde became Vancouver’s first bookbinder as he worked for the Vancouver News-Advertiser. In 1890 he opened his own bookbinding and printing business, which was successful enough for him to have a house built. Gustav wanted a house to remind him of his native Germany but Rattenbury, who had inflated his architectural credentials and claimed descent from the Rattenburgs of Hamburg in order to land the commission (he was from Leeds, England), instead built Gustav an “English Queen Anne cottage with a turret on top.”
This was finished in 1893 just in time for the arrival of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1863-1914), on the last leg of his circumnavigation of the globe (1892-93.) He stopped in Vancouver and was fêted by the large German immigrant community then living in the West End. And yes, he’s the same Archduke Ferdinand whose assassination twenty-one years later triggered WWI.
Today Roedde House is a museum, owned by the City of Vancouver and since 1980 painstakingly restored, furnished and maintained as a period house by the Roedde House Preservation Society ”to reflect the atmosphere of late Victorian family life.” There are tours, parlour concerts, historical presentations, workshops and on Sundays, tea is served after the tour.
Currently, the “Wish You Were Here, an Exhibition about Communication, Connection, & the Postcard” runs until September 30, 2021. The postcards are assembled from several collections and span the 1880s to the 1930s.
The house is open from 1 to 4 p.m., Thursday, Friday and Sundays and is available for private functions. There are also Jazz Porch Concerts during the summer. Phone: 604-684-7040
Outside, the pavilion in the front and the Italianate fountain in the back set off the lawns and well-landscaped garden beds edged in places with bent-willow fencing, a feature sometimes seen in English country gardens to create a quick hedge. If you plant one yourself: keep your secateurs handy; willow should not be left on its own for long.
The large Italianate fountain near the back is one of the four water features in the West End that are kept running thanks to the Vancouver Parks Board. The park is spacious, with cool and shady perimeters.
Barclay Manor.
At 1447 Barclay Street is Barclay Manor, today cheerful in yellow with white trim and a generous wraparound veranda. The original house was green and white when Charles and Lucy Tetley, the block’s first residents, lived there in 1890. The property was sold in 1903 and the house was torn down and rebuilt in 1905. Then a large three-story hotel-type addition was built at the back of the house in 1909. The West End Hospital operated here until 1919. Afterwards, it was a boarding house, mostly for naval officers when they were in port. The City of Vancouver acquired it and tore down the 1909 addition and carefully restored the building to its Edwardian elegance.
The building is operated jointly by the West End Community Center Association and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation and the West End Seniors Network operates in the building. The wheelchair access ramp is, of course, not part of the original structure but it has been beautifully incorporated into the overall design of the house.
The gardens are a well-tended profusion of rudbeckia “Goldstrum”, fuchsias, abelia, sedums, brunnera, heuchera, hosta, phormium, phlox, Lysimachia, sarcococca, and hydrangeas. As we walked the paths, a show tune sing-along was in progress on the upstairs balcony and we gave them a round of applause when they came to a break.
Week’s House at 1459 Barclay Street was built in 1895. George Weeks became the manager of Vancouver’s first Hudson’s Bay store on Cordova Street and he lived in the house until he died in 1948. It remained in the Weeks family for another forty years. In 1995, the restored and renovated house was opened by the Friends for Life Society as the Diamond Centre for Living, a comprehensive wellness centre offering services to persons with any life-threatening illness. The place has all the feel of a welcoming home. Kudos to the Parks Board gardeners for rescuing the large rhododendron from a demolition site that now graces the front yard.
Having Barclay Heritage Square as this urban marvel, other houses in the area, originally single-family dwellings have also been renovated, restored and converted into multiple suites and rent control housing.
Moving westwards along Nicola Street towards Davie, old low-rise apartments from the early ‘20s grace the walk. It is reminiscent of the television series Robson Arms (2005-2008) about a “once-grand, low-rise in Vancouver’s densely populated and eclectic West End.”
A swale garden in the making.
At Barclay and Nicola, Daniel’s Market is still undergoing its renovations and everyone hopes it will reopen soon. Marlon the roofer stopped a moment to say hi.
James pointed out an interesting feature I hadn’t completely taken in. It was a smallish elongated triangular shaped garden plot built into the side of the sidewalk at the corner of Bidwell and Comox. “It’s a swale garden,” said James and explained. Swales directs green water or rainwater runoff to filter through a bed of river rock and gravel and water a plot planted above it. Not only does it control and moderate the runoff, but keeps plants above it watered before going into the drains. There are three swales being planned for the Haro Street development. As we face potentially deepening water scarcities, swales and other techniques and devices will be called for.
Peter chats with fellow gardener Keith Wallace.
At Harwood and Bidwell, James and I walked down and met up with Keith Wallace who was tending his sidewalk plots at Harwood and Cardero. He is one of a gang of four gardening stewards who regularly tend their designated plots here. Exuberant plants thriving under their care were calla lily, hydrangea, hardy fuchsia, black mondo grass, Asarum Italica and blooming cyclamen. This was just the introduction for around the corner fronting an apartment building, the exuberance continues with the same plants but made sumptuous with additions of Japanese maples, dwarf bamboo, crocosmia, hostas, and brunnera, everything cheek by jowl. Keith said, “It’s a crazy garden that keeps you sane.”
When the Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out last month, its conclusions were no surprise to many of us, but the sudden near-global attention given to it by the media was an immense relief. It seems the human ethos has shifted at last.
Yet when a part of the world congested by concrete towers can also make way for a park with houses, swales and garden plots built into the very sidewalks it would seem as if the human ethos was already shifting in our small neighbourhood, the gardens in which we live.
One suspects it’s happening elsewhere, too.
