DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the problems of traveling in July is returning home to find that the neighbors have eaten all the plums.

LA’s skyline-signature palm trees are succumbing to old age and disease, and the city can’t afford to replace them. Here’s the story: Palms in Twilight.

“Vegas has priced just about every municipality out of the market,” says George Gonzalez, chief forester for the city of Los Angeles. Demand from casinos has forced prices for Canary Island date palms to $350 to $500 per foot of trunk, never mind craning, trucking and planting. Across the palm market, including installation, a 15-foot Canary Island date palm might cost $7,500, a date palm $3,500, a queen palm $1,500, a Mexican fan palm $1,000. To start with trees of decent size, city tree buyers have been turning to oaks, jacarandas and ficus saplings, with price tags in the hundreds, not thousands.

The Comox Harbour

Private docks near Tofino

Victoria

One of the main tourist attractions of the Victoria area is Butchart Gardens, a former 50-acre gravel pit transformed into a collection of lush gardens by 100 years of obsessive tending. It is a professionally run enterprise; the staff does a fine job of moving cars and crowds through tight spaces.

The most astounding feature of the entire park is the admission price: $21 per person! To see flowers! Here’s my travel tip for everyone visiting Victoria: skip Butchart Gardens. Buy five postcards of the place instead. You and your spouse have just saved $41. Have dinner on me.

We didn’t know how much it would cost until we’d driven a half-hour to get there, so we proceeded with our plan: a picnic lunch followed by a quick tour of the garden’s highlights.

The picnic was not good. We’d bought “wraps” from a cafe in Victoria. Pictured are the remains of my “no cheese” vegetarian wrap; it not only had cheese (cream cheese, in fact, impossible to remove) but about a cup of ranch dressing. It was nasty. So here’s another handy travel tip for Victoria: don’t eat at “Grabba Jabba.” This was our worst meal in seven days.

Just beyond the picnic area was the biggest hedge in the world. I have not consulted the McWhirter brothers (experts on, among many other things, immense shrubbery), but, believe me, it’s that big — about 25 feet tall, with no external supports.

Gratuitous flower closeup. I have no idea what sort of plant this is.

Pictured is the exotic Aquafina Bush. This is an exceptional shot, included not to suggest that the Gardens are poorly mainained. In fact they’re meticulously, even zealously kept. The dirt patches are raked every day, I’m sure. Beds are plucked of dead blooms. Loose petals are collected throughout the day. This bottle can’t have been there for more than a few minutes.

Nearby (but not pictured here) was the equally elusive Aquafina Bottlecap Vine.

My favorite photo from the entire garden shows a post from the bamboo fence in the Japanese Garden. Neat, no?

The Canadian park service does an amazing job of maintenance on its properties. I have seen a great many regional and national parks in the US and Canada — Zion, Bryce Canyon, Point Reyes, Yosemite, Olompali, Armstrong Woods, Banff, Jasper, Annadel, the place with the microwave tower whose name I can’t remember… but the parks on Vancouver Island are the only two in which most of the public hiking trails are raised wooden boardwalks.

By keeping tourists on a raised path, rangers can be sure the damage to the parkland is limited — fewer crushed plants, less soil compaction, minimal habitat destruction. The trails become slightly more accessible, so a wider range of the population can enjoy the scenery. But the maintenance expense would seem to be a lot bigger. And the liability would seem to increase, too.

We met one of the official park carpenters. He was in the parking lot at the Schooner Cove trailhead, loading a sack with a chainsaw and several planks of wood, preparing to head 1km down the trail to repair a broken support beam. The guys in this crew spend as much time hiking as they do on maintenance. There are 19km of boardwalks in the park, and only three carpenters, one of whom has been repurposed to assist with building a new information shack or something. So the other two guys hike 10km a day just to inspect their territories.

They source the lumber from the forests themselves. Many old-growth cedars were felled in the 1950s but never pulled out, due to the expense. (One would hope that loggers would have had a plan for extraction before knocking down ancient forests, but in fact they did not.) This past eco-crime can now be made right, in a small way, for these wasted trees now provide useful raw materials at the site where they’re needed.

Cedar is naturally resistant to rot, so the the park service doesn’t treat it. Earlier boardwalks (and the ones on Mount Washington) are pressure-treated, but such wood leaches arsenic into the environment. “Live and learn,” as the carpenter said.