Trees and Bees

Above you will see two things I saw at the UBC Botanical Garden, which is a great place to visit, even if you aren't a botanist!  In this heat, there are lots of cool shady places to walk and in the Greenway, you can climb up into the forest canopy on this suspension apparatus (like a bridge -- I'm making it sound scarier than it seems, even though, with my fear of heights, I would not want to use it).  At points on the walkway, you are seven stories high and you can get up close and personal, just like loggers or people who want to prevent loggers from taking the big trees.  There is a meadow with endangered Garry Oaks and in the meadow is a beautiful sweet smelling tree (I believe it is a catalpa) and I walked over and stood under it and it was just abuzz with bees and so I did my best to photograph one busily doing her work.  There are so many blooms that the bees finish climbing into one and then just walk over to another; they don't have to fly.

There is an alpine garden with a giant maple tree shading things -- it has a beautiful white trunk, almost arbutus-like.  I believe it is called a paperback maple.  And there is a little greenhouse with cacti and succulents and a lovely physic garden with medicinal plants (also very popular with the bees) and a lovely flowered herbaceous border and just loveliness for all the senses (I even had an ice cream, so thankfully I didn't have to taste any of the hellebore,  which is poisonous!)

As I said, one of the reasons I went to the botanical gardens was to see the golden spruce descendant (or perhaps it's more of a clone, because it is growing from a cutting of the tree).  I went into the BC trees area, where the spruce was supposed to be growing.  It is lovely with a pond and all sorts of different grasses and trees.  I couldn't find the golden spruce, but I was enjoying the pond and the hemlocks and Douglas firs and Western red cedars when I overheard a couple who were looking for something and it seemed as if it was the golden spruce.  I didn't interrupt them, but I listened to a bit of their discussion, which helped me find the tree, too.  It doesn't stick out from the other trees.  It is very slow growing and so it doesn't make much of an impression.  It doesn't even seem that "golden".  Maybe the "goldenness" comes when it gets older.  (Like I'm approaching my "golden" years!). Anyway, it was nice to see the little tree bravely growing there and think about its amazing story.

Visiting the garden made me think a bit about Do Androids Dream of Mechanical Sheep?  Philip K. Dick postulated this world which we had destroyed with nuclear fallout, in which nothing grew and nothing natural lived.  As I said, the time period is basically ours and there I was in this beautiful garden with big trees and lots of birds and insects.  (In the novel, J. R. Isadore finds a spider and he's thrilled because there are almost no wild animals left.). Human beings can be so destructive -- we have destroyed the habitats of many animals and even insect populations are plummeting.  We could end up in a world like the one Dyck described if we aren't careful.  But then, other human beings, like the environmentalists who camp out way up in big trees to prevent them from being logged, or people like David Suzuki or John Muir or the members of Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund or the Nature Conservancy speak up for the natural world and wildlife and we are all better for it.