The Home was — and continues to be (for it still exists, though no longer as an orphanage but as the Cridge Centre for the Family, an ironic twist) — a big red brick Edwardian pile, standing on a hill with rocky bluffs on the Hillside exposure. The oaks are magnificent; tall and proud, survivors of ancient fires. I always wanted to walk up among them, but a chain-link fence surrounded the complex, adding to its forbidding aspect. In the archival material, provided at a Web site devoted to the history of the Orphans’ Home, there are strict rules about visiting times to the Home, and perhaps our Guide leaders were given a small window for our projected visit.
Ten years later, in winter, I’d sometimes pass those bluffs with their oaks on my way across the city and see the pattern of gnarled branches reaching up for the grey sky. I thought of quiet elk, antlered and alert, hoping to pass safely through the darkest months. I thought of the slow incremental growth of bark and the strands of lichen. I wondered if Flora ever wandered among them on her own, in her tidy dress and apron, or if small boys played hide-and-seek with true abandon on those grounds.
As a young adult, I had an apartment on Fort Street. Shadows of oaks patterned the walls of my small sitting room. It was comforting, as though that herd of elk had settled nearby to wait out winter, listening for danger, their bodies warm and familiar. I was waiting out winter myself, hoping to return to a life I’d begun with a lobster fisherman in the west of Ireland. That changed when I met a poet in Victoria and fell in love with him. Thinking and weeping through this in my apartment, I’d stand by the window and look out at the twilit street, the oaks with their heavy limbs beginning to unfurl chartreuse leaves, their clusters and catkins of flowers, female and male, almost invisible.
I’d walk out in the darkness to sort out my feelings. Up through Rockland and down into Fairfield, where the sea tossed fretfully beyond Dallas Road. These were the city streets I was familiar with, lined with chestnuts and flowering plum and cherry, with clusters of oaks on rocky outcrops. The oaks were the wild trees,13 even in their placement on the wide residential avenues where they’d been built around or accommodated for. In some cases they’d been left on purpose, as in the meadow behind Government House where very old ones, with massive crowns, stood in timeless repose with their distant view of Juan de Fuca Strait.
When I was a teenager, in the years when I rode through Broadmead, my parents lived at Royal Oak. There were many oaks in that neighbourhood, from the contorted beauties gathered around the Maltwood Art Museum, to those on Beaver Lake Road and other back roads off West Saanich Road. My terrain was wide in those days. On Saturday mornings, I’d tack up my horse and ride out onto Saanich Peninsula, taking the quieter roads and trails as far as Island View Beach where I’d let my horse gallop along the sand. In early summer, I’d remove his saddle and ride him into the water where he liked to plunge and snort. Depending on the tide, sometimes he’d even swim with me clinging to his back. I’d walk him on the beach to dry him off before saddling him again to ride back along Mount Newton Cross Road and through a network of trails, past Bear Hill and Elk Lake, and finally back to the rented field and barn overlooking Pat Bay Highway.
I have a map, prepared by HR GiSolutions Inc. in 1997: Historical Garry Oak Ecosystems of Greater Victoria and Saanich Peninsula. Green areas indicate 1900 ecosystems that cover nearly half the map’s area. Red dots indicate 1997 ecosystems — a tiny smattering, decorative on the map, but shocking when one reads this as contrast, as loss. I wondered how the earlier range was determined, and asked Ted Lea, the field ecologist who helped prepare the map. He generously responded by email:
Much of the map is derived from original lands surveys that, at least for most of the CRD area, show what was coniferous, what was broad-leaved or prairie (with oak regenerating after aboriginal burning stopped) and what was wetland.
Otherwise, I used old photographs, paintings, soils maps and drove every street in the area to see where oaks presently exist and might have existed in the 1850s and 1860s. There are other sources such as First Nations people and land survey journals that would have helped, but would have been too time consuming; however, this would have been fascinating to research.14
I was curious, too, about palynology, the sedimentary record of plant pollens and macrofossils, and what it might tell me about the vegetation history of the area where I grew up and learned to love the oaks.
A fascinating essay, “An Ecological History of Old Prairie Areas in Southwest Washington” by Estella B. Leopold and Robert Boyd, from Indians, Fire and the Land, offers a deep portrait of post-glacial vegetation in a particular landscape, taking into account historical and anecdotal material regarding land use. Camas and various umbelliferae pollens peak in association with local fires. Douglas fir pollens drop to reflect logging and deforestation due to European settlement. Narratives of shifting relationships can be read by reconstructing plant communities, estimating climatic and environmental conditions. Charcoal shows up to tell of fires. People shape their landscapes to accommodate what they require — and not just the First Nations people who tended their camas crops and their nodding onions, and who knew that ash improved the growth of wild tobacco.
People arriving later from elsewhere often brought mementoes or improvements, uncertain that the place itself would be adequate. Think of the English sparrow, the European starling, Himalayan blackberry, gorse and Scotch broom (all the widespread and invasive offspring of three seeds that germinated in Sooke in 1850),15 the beautiful, soft-eyed fallow deer seen on the Gulf Islands and the Saanich Peninsula, to which they swam from James Island at low tide. I saw fallow deer on Island View Beach, making their delicate way through the flotsam and jetsam at the tide line.
The world contains such archives — plants, birds, foreign and native, their bones and stems and pollens anchored in the sedimentary layer. The one I read in memory is almost lost; houses crouched over the vanished grasses where the oaks once listened for fire, the promise of renewal in its dense heat.
Those grey trees on the long walk home from school, down Haliburton Road and along Elk Lake Drive to Royal Oak. How they mirrored the angst of a girl at odds with the social world — those radiant groups so tightly guarded that no one new stood a chance of belonging; the other group that would have me and took me on Friday night hunts for beer and hash, followed by pizzas in the small hours, and then headaches the next morning as I cleaned my horse’s stall and wondered about dying.
The trees, presenting gnarled fists to the sky! The darkness of their bark, their sombre postures! I wanted too badly to know the world beyond the present, and I don’t think I meant heaven. I wanted to know the great lively spirit that caused the tides to turn in their season, the passing of geese in the high flyways, muttering amongst themselves as they flew to warmer sloughs and lakes, the brief luminescence of fawn lilies by the trail down to Quicks Bottom, their petals turning up like Turks caps after pollination. It made me cry, this beauty, and I had no way yet to express what I felt in the face of it. I’d go out at night to visit my horse in his wide field, his black body mysterious in the dark and his white stockings glowing if there was moonlight, and I’d cry against his warm flank.
The young never know that vast and splendid lifetimes await them. Travel, lovers, children, sorrow, loss, the beauty of mornings seen from hotel windows while a cup is cradled, the scent of jasmine filling the room from an open window. Or a young woman walking the dark streets, having met a poet with whom she was almost certain she’d spend the rest of her life, trying to see stars through the tangled branches of the great oaks, their roots deep in sediments of pollen and ash. A new moon waited.
Quercus virginiana
Degrees of Separation
To sum up the outward madness of nations, this is the land to which we drive out our neighbours and dig up and steal their turf to add to our own, so that he who has marked his acres most widely and driven off his neighbours may rejoice in possessing an infinitesimal part of the earth.
— Pliny the Elder, Natural History
I realized, as soon as we drove down Dallas Road, in the winter of 2009, that this couldn’t be the house. The numbers weren’t right. I thought — I hoped — that the house I remembered from a Brownie field trip in 1962 might have belonged to the Newcombe family. A very old man met the Brownies at the door and led us through a dark wood-panelled hall into a large room where he showed us cases of spiders and butterflies. I remember Native masks on the walls, and a small totem pole in one corner of the room. There were rattles, bearing fierce faces of ravens and loons, which we were allowed to shake. The old man had been a missionary. We were also told he’d known Emily Carr, a name that stayed with me, although at the time I had no idea who she was. In those years, her work hadn’t achieved the ikonic status it properly enjoys now.
I have a clumsy theory about degrees of separation working vertically as well as horizontally. That we can trace our relationships down the rich road to the past, like an archaeologist examining the layers of Troy, the same way we can connect ourselves to others through the present. I’m not sure that six degrees will always take us somewhere significant, but in many cases it can.
Charles Newcombe was a naturalist and ethnologist (though his primary training was in medicine; he was also British Columbia’s first psychiatrist). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he acquired artefacts from Northwest Coast cultures for many museums in North America as well as England and Germany. His son William was also a collector as well as a friend of the painter Emily Carr. Charles had died in 1926, but I thought William had lived into the 1960s. I imagined it would be somehow significant to know I had been shown the collections of two men who had been so instrumental in gathering the various histories of British Columbia: its botanical record, the material culture of its First Nations, and the artistic legacy of Emily Carr. So, on a trip to Victoria, my husband and I drove over to Dallas Road, at the point where Eberts Street joined it. I had a copy of Exploring Victoria’s Architecture, published in 1996, that featured a photograph of the Newcombe house and provided its address. We peered at house numbers. I was trying to wrestle my vague memories into something resembling fact.
But it became clear that the Newcombe house was farther west, near Ogden Point, judging by the number given in the book: 1381. As far as I could remember, the house we’d walked to with our Owls from the church basement at Five Corners, where my Brownie pack met weekly, was between Moss and Linden Streets, near Clover Point. We wouldn’t have walked to Ogden Point, a group of six-year-olds on an after-school outing.
In 1962, Victoria was a city of retired military men and ladies in white gloves. W&J Wilson Fine Clothiers sold them tweed jackets and Shetland sweaters, and Murchie’s carried the tea they liked, measured from great tins with a metal scoop. The Bengal Room at the Empress Hotel knew how to mix their drinks — Singapore slings, Pimm’s cup, and Tanqueray G&Ts. On windy days, couples dressed as though for church walked the seafront along Dallas Road with dogs straining at leashes. My father called it their “constitutional,” a word that puzzled me in this context because I thought it had to do with good government.
In those years, a child could ramble freely around Fairfield neighbourhood and the waterfront along the Juan de Fuca Strait. I had a small, blue two-wheeler, given me for Christmas in 1960, and I remember riding as far as Beacon Hill Park. A trail known as Lover’s Lane was dense with snowberries, and once I accidently knocked down a wasp nest, crying out as its angry residents stung my legs again and again. My pedal pushers had to be cut off and for days my calves were too swollen to move them much. Rather than fear, I remember extreme impatience that I had to pass the days inside when the whole world went on without me.
Near our home on Eberts Street was Clover Point, a peninsula jutting out into the Juan de Fuca Strait. A road perambulates around its circumference and in a grassy area in the middle we once stood with hundreds of others, hundreds more on the ocean side of the road, watching the Queen being driven by slowly, her gloved hand waving, first to one side, then the other. In my family, it was insisted that she waved specifically at my younger brother, but there is no way of proving this. In those years, he was skinny and all nose, and I don’t imagine he stood out of the crowd to inspire special notice. Certainly we didn’t present flowers. I remember standing in that grassy place with my family, feeling strange in my Sunday dress and coat.
We often walked down to Clover Point on a Saturday morning to collect bark in grocery bags for the wood-burning kitchen stove in our house. Our mother organized these outings, in any weather, insisting that we wear our oldest clothing — patched dungarees and faded kangaroo jackets. We’d walk the beaches, choosing pieces that would fit in our stove, and we’d trudge home with the heavy bags of damp bark. It was piled on the back porch to dry, within easy reach of the kitchen.
Charles Newcombe, doctor, natural historian and anthropologist, was commissioned by Kew to collect Aboriginal artefacts from British Colombia. The objects, including fish nets and hooks, ropes, garments, baskets, woodworking tools and gambling sticks, reflect the daily life and industries of the Aboriginal peoples and hint at their extensive knowledge of the natural environment and its resources.
— From the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Web site
I’d seen the photograph of the Newcombe house in Exploring Victoria’s Architecture, and I wanted to try to recover that moment in my childhood when I might have been a degree closer to the history I have always gravitated towards. John and I drove west on Dallas Road, past Cook Street, past Beacon Hill Park and Finlayson Point, past Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway (where Douglas Street meets Dallas Road). And then I recognized the house from its photograph.
We parked our car and stood on the other side of the road. I was gesticulating with my hands in my usual excitable fashion and my husband said, “Someone is waving to you.” And sure enough, two men in the glassed-in verandah were smiling and waving. An elderly woman waiting at the bus stop beside where we stood said, “It’s a halfway house, you know.”
I didn’t know. I asked her if she knew it had been built for Dr. Charles F. Newcombe, a man indirectly responsible for the Royal British Columbia Museum. “No,” she said, “how interesting. The neighbourhood has changed, of course.”
As had the house. That verandah hadn’t always been glassed-in, though the balusters, generous eaves, and angled bay windows hadn’t been altered. I was reminded of eighteenth-century houses, Italianate in design, that I’d seen in leafy boroughs of London. A huge tree, with a crown of at least fifteen metres, spread over the front yard of the Newcombe house. It was February the first time we parked opposite the house, and though a few snowdrops and crocuses were in bloom in some of the protected gardens, it was still winter and not even local forsythias were in bud. So I was surprised to see that this tree was fully in leaf. But it wasn’t a conifer or any broadleaf evergreen that I recognized. It had vaguely elliptical leaves, glossy on top and slightly downy on the undersides. It was very lovely. Was it some kind of eucalyptus? It had no odour. I pinched off a small branch so I could try to identify it at a later point, placing it in my copy of Exploring Victoria’s Architecture, a book that had alerted me to the possibility that this might be the house of my Brownie memory by providing the wrong address: 1381 instead of 138. (Small typo + big hope = inevitable disappointment.)
I kept the house in mind and the sprig of leaves tucked into Exploring Victoria’s Architecture. Periodically I’d look through my tree books and try to figure out what kind of tree shaded the south-facing verandah with its Georgian Revival-influenced windows and the balustraded roofline of the house built in 1907 for Dr. Charles Newcombe and his family. A tree reaching deep to anchor itself to the earth, reaching for water and nutrients, just as I tried to anchor myself in the rich loam of history and narrative. I wondered what it might mean that the tree was not a native species but something chosen for its exotic qualities, its reminders of fo
reign travel, its ability to conjure a landscape with resonances perhaps now mute to our century.
It never occurred to me in childhood to wonder how Clover Point got its name. The grass in the area between the ring of paved road was short and wiry, shorn by flocks of geese that patrolled the waterfront. Their droppings were everywhere. Masses of broom on the cliffs above the water hummed with bees in spring. But clover was not much in evidence. There’s a story here, I mused, and went in search of it. One of its voices was that of James Douglas, who arrived at this Clover Point in 1842:
Both Kinds [of soil], however, produce Abundance of Grass, and several varieties of Red Clover grow on the rich moist Bottoms. . . .
In Two Places particularly, we saw several Acres of Clover growing with a Luxuriance and Compactness more resembling the close Sward of a well-managed Lea than the Produce of an uncultivated Waste.1
Botanist Dr. T. Christopher Brayshaw, Curator Emeritus of the Royal British Columbia Museum, suggested that the most likely clover species was Trifolium wormskjoldii, or springbank clover.2 This plant’s long, fleshy rhizomes served as an important food source for many Northwest Coast peoples, including the Lekwungen, who managed extensive areas of rich growth along what is now Dallas Road. Notions of gardens and husbandry vary from culture to culture, and it seems that colonists arriving on Vancouver Island didn’t recognize these systems of maintenance and use (and of course it didn’t occur to them that ownership of these lands might in fact be an issue). Once Fort Victoria was established in 1843, there was industrious clearing and planting of crops the new arrivals couldn’t imagine a civilization doing without: carrots, turnips, potatoes, oats. What had been admired about the area — the park-like Garry oak meadows, the tall grasses, ferns, blue camas, “the several Acres of Clover” — was replaced with farms, a rifle range, hotels, and the Ross Bay Cemetery, on the site of Isabella Ross’s farm.
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