It’s pretty hard to talk about Vancouver without mentioning trees ( there are ioo,ooo publicly owned Street trees alone). Some forestry experts believe that this wet, temperate climate has produced the largest evergreens anywhere in the world, and the legacy lives. There are people in this city so tree-obsessed that when anyone appears anywhere near a tree with a chainsaw, they immediately phone a city official or newspaper reporter as if someone is about to commit a murder.
There are homeowners who love to live under a perennial canopy of gloomy conifers that drip endless water onto the roof, gutters, and swampy soil. Then there are others who argue the need for more sunlight and would gladly clear-cut their entire property, given the opportunity — and occasionally do. City council debates and public meetings over tree-cutting policies (and fines) can, therefore, turn de¬cidedly nasty.
Almost all the old growth that covered Vancouver is gone, although a few small stands remain — those trees in Stanley Park deemed too large to cut by those who logged the i,ooo acres in the mid-to-late i8oos. You’ll find “monument” Douglas firs in an original grove on the Tunnel Trail off Pipeline Road, between the Rose Garden and Stanley Park Drive; and towering firs and western red cedars along the Third Beach Trail (in the vicinity of the Hollow Tree).
In recent years, officials have been trying to tell those Vancouverites who will listen that giant, aging trees are unsuitable for a densely populated urban area, and parks officials now plant mostly smaller ornamental trees, many of which blossom in spring. As a result, two of the nicest months in Vancouver are April and May, when the flow-ering varieties produce a pink or white gossamer scene along many streets (Southwest Marine Drive in South Vancouver is among the most spectacular).
In Stanley Park, the entire landscape around the tennis courts at the park’s southern entrance (Beach Avenue) is said to have a priceless collection of ornamentals. Mature tree-like azaleas and rhododendrons, weeping beech, and flowering magnolias nestle under towering ever-greens.
And there are great tree clusters around the city: Cambie Boulevard holds a series of giant sequoia, West ioth Avenue between
Blenheim and Alma streets is a grand treed promenade; on Kitsilano Beach, massive weeping willows perform when it blows; and Queen
Elizabeth Park and the VanDusen Botanical Garden (see “Gardens”) have a raft of exceptional trees and species.
Worth seeking out is the Riverview Arboretum (off the Lougheed Highway in Coquitlam, 604-290-9910), planted in the early 1900S on the grounds of what has long been an institution for the mentally ill, now Riverview Hospital. Modeled on England’s Kew Gardens, this is a rolling hillside of massive, shapely trees in their glorious maturity.
If ornamental trees just won’t do and you still want to see old growth, you’ll have to venture onto the North Shore, where some record-breaking giants are said to exist. Among them are western red cedars more than sixteen feet in diameter, and Douglas firs that soar to almost 300 feet. For details on how to find them, you’ll have to first find a copy of the Guide to the Record Trees of British Columbia, by the late Randy Stoltmann, published by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (arid available at their store in Gastown, see “Environment”).
Lighthouse Park, on a gorgeous peninsula with a rocky foreshore ( south of Marine Drive in West Vancouver), has some of the largest remaining Douglas firs in the region. And there are more statuesque examples in Cypress Provincial Park, above the Upper Levels Highway in West Vancouver, and on Hollyburn Ridge, reachable by trail from the Cypress Bowl parking lot.
But if you want to immerse yourself in the ultimate coastal en-vironment, and take in some giant conifers, make your way to North Vancouver’s Capilano River Regional Park. Drive up Capilano Road, beyond the Capilano Suspension Bridge, and onto Capilano Park Road (it’s well posted).
At the end ofthe road, you’ll find the drop-dead gorgeous Capilano Canyon — a glacier-carved gorge, filled with dark greenish water that tumbles and eddies through a series of coves, pools, and benignly named “drops.” Walk across the wooden suspension bridge and turn right onto a trail that wends a few hundred yards up the hill to a stand of trees with several centuries-old Douglas firs. The largest is said to be eight feet in diameter and more than 200 feet tall. A few yards further and you can see the 295-foot Capilano Dam spillway.
Revel in this mini-exhibit of the coastal rainforest: long-fallen tree trunks or “nurse trees” that support and nurture trees of their own, lovely mosses and lichens covering massive old-growth stumps and rock, and native salal bushes, ferns, and delicate huckleberry (berries in season) — all alongside a vigorous, salmon-spawning river.
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