by Anny Scoones
Closer to Oak Bay Village there is a large green space called Windsor Park. It’s simply a spacious soccer field with a clubhouse in the centre, but when you stand there, it does look definitely British and I questioned why, as it is just a field, and then I realized that it is the design, the use and placement of space, that gives the park its English look; the clubhouse, a long two-storey tan structure, stands in the centre of the great space, not at one end. The vastness of the mowed field adds to the vision that a grand school cricket or rugby championship match is about to take place. Low, attractive houses surround the park on all four sides with one corner of white, Tudor-style connected shops serving as a quaint village centre.
Garry Oaks
Although the statuesque Garry oak is unique in that it grows only in this area of the world (from California to Victoria—a few are seen north of Nanaimo), and it is British Columbia’s only native oak, the wonderful feature about the tree is not actually the tree, but its surroundings, its meadow—there is nothing quite like a Garry oak meadow in spring! When the Garry oak’s leaves burst into their lush and glossy greenery, the meadow is a carpet of camas, buttercups, lilies, meadow herbs, and delicate pink shooting stars. Dry, golden, weathered lichen covers granite rock faces that sit like islands in the colourful grass and floral carpet. These unique and special features attract specific birds, insects and little animals such as the alligator lizards who like to bask on the warmed rock.
Garry oak acorns can be eaten after soaking them in mud to remove the bitter tannins (however, my dear old sows on the farm spat the acorns from their slop in disgust). Legend has it that if you carry the acorn around with you, your youthfulness will be preserved!
One corner of Windsor Park is a dear little “scented garden” with lavender, lemon mint, and lilac growing from waist-high stone beds. A plaque in Braille indicates that the garden is for the visually impaired. Sometimes I wonder what our sensitivity to touch or sound would be if we were blind—imagine feeling all the textures of leaves, flowers, and even bark without seeing them!
In the other corner of the park is a rose garden protected by a neatly trimmed hedge and a little metal gate. Inside are neat garden beds of many types of roses; there is the Leonardo Da Vinci Floribunda, the Betty Boop, and the Burgundy Iceberg. At one end is a polished granite bench engraved with a tribute to the “Oak Bay pioneers since 1911” from Robert C. Pattison (1886–1963), the Oak Bay druggist, and “his devoted wife Rose.”
On my visit to the Monterey Centre, a spacious community centre with an endless list of diverse courses for the members to take, a jar of freshly picked flowers sat on a table in front of a poster advertising a course on the Royal Family. The centre has a large number of volunteers and you can buy, for a very reasonable price, a delicious homemade lunch of lamb stew, which comes with a roll. But the feature that most stands out in my mind is the tapestry on a back wall in a hallway, almost swamped by bookcases and shelves, sewn in 1977 by Dorita Grant. It depicts the different heritage structures of Oak Bay (and their dates) in shades of blue and brown wool. There’s the Willows Hotel of 1904, the Oak Bay Boat House of 1906, and “The Old Charming Inn” of 1905, among others; it’s original and delightful and what fun it must have been to sew! To me, that’s a real piece of public art, and it was donated.
Close to Fairfield, out on Harling Point, sits the Chinese Cemetery, a National Historic Site. The austere and treeless wildflower meadow looks out over the sea at the white peaks of the Olympic Peninsula. The cemetery was established in 1903 by the Chinese Benevolent Society and designed according to the Chinese concept of feng shui, a three-thousand-year-old philosophy based on energy, nature, and balance within a space. It’s a good system, I think, because I have been in places where I was truly uncomfortable, where the place just felt not right, and I know of some places that continually have bad occurrences; maybe these places need feng shui.
Feng means “wind” and shui means “water,” and both are associated with good fortune and good health. So the placement of the simple aged stones and marble slabs, and the tall double altar where people can leave candy, oranges, and paper money and burn incense to say a prayer or honour a deceased loved one, stands according to the Earth’s feeling within the space of this windswept, beautiful meadow. The altar looks vulnerable, standing out there all alone, but it also looks strong. Perhaps that is the point: vulnerability and strength, opposite sides of the same coin, the yin and the yang.
An ancient Chinese practice was to exhume the bones of the deceased after seven years, wash them, pack them in a crate, and send them home to China for reburying. While awaiting shipping, the bones were stored in a little hut called a “bone house” (now destroyed). This practice ended in 1933 but is an important part of the cemetery’s history.
Behind the cemetery is a little country lane of weather-beaten cottages with salt-stained glassed-in porches and wind-battered climbing roses, almost begging to be allowed to revert back to wildness, clinging onto their trellises. This little lane seems to be out of another era (like the Willows Beach tea house), a gentle buffer between the quiet, harmonious cemetery meadow and our modern urban civilization just up the slope and a block away.
Perhaps this is the Oak Bay that is so appealing. Its rural charm, which is a mixture of camas meadows, bluebell woods, and breathtaking seaside views, is combined with the urban village, the pruned gardens, and lectures on Prince William—it’s the yin-yang again, the wildness and the tamed, the strong and the vulnerable, the British and our Canadian west coast.
Government Street at Belleville
CHAPTER FOUR
Lower Government Street
and a Little Beyond
Lower Government Street (the area around the Inner Harbour and the Empress Hotel) is a hub of urban, cultural, marine, and residential activity, full of buskers and carvers, artisans, cafés, gardens, and many little historical and traditional features to explore. Lower Government Street borders the east of James Bay, running right from the beaches of Dallas Road all the way to the charming downtown area.
Let’s begin at Emily Carr’s birthplace, her elegant, canary-yellow heritage home, now a museum with a lovely English garden full of primroses and lilies, and a cozy, traditional interior. In Michael Ostroff’s film about Emily Carr, Winds of Heaven, it is noted that her British father thought the Canadian landscape too wild and untamed, so he quickly uprooted the west-coast vegetation of ferns and forest shrubbery and created his fragrant and pretty English country garden to suit his very British taste! Nowadays, the trend is to plant a native plant garden, but I have to admit that a mass of Canterbury bells, sweet Williams, snapdragons, and tea roses is aesthetically more stimulating than a mass of sword ferns and creeping blackberry in a front garden. Perhaps it is innate, this desire we have for colour and garden scents; perhaps we actually need colour in our lives.
Alas, however, Emily loved the woods and wildness—she found colour in the shafts of sunlight in the rainforest, the big night skies and how the forest made her feel; you do not always need to agree with your parents’ tastes. She did try to be English with her little watercolour landscapes of the Beacon Hill meadow, dotted with spring flowers, and pale blue seascapes.
Walking (in spring under a sweet-smelling canopy of pale pink flowers) toward town from Emily’s house, you pass the historic red-brick-and-plaster James Bay Inn, established in 1911. If you like staying in places of yesteryear, this inn is for you; the lobby smells a bit musty in a lovely old way—a combination of aged wood and home cooking from downstairs—and the trimmings are in red velvet, brass, and heavy glass, with antique photographs in thick wooden frames. There is something comforting about an old hotel with uneven floors that creak and a worn carpet, heavy, cast-iron bathtubs with legs, and keys rather than computer cards to lock the doors (the key gives us so much more manual control of our privacy), and curtains, which are so much less sterile than blinds, and windows that open. Heaven preserve us from protecting o
urselves by giving ourselves recycled air and windows that won’t open on the seventh floor in a beige box with a fibreglass bathtub.
This old hotel is one of the last symbols that respects our common sense and judgment, allows us to take the risk of not falling out of an open window and allows us to breathe nature’s air and scents from the outdoors. The soundproofing may not be as solid as in the great beige towers, but I find it a great delight to drift off to sleep with the muffled sounds of joy coming from the street or the dining room three floors below—it’s like going to sleep as a child with the security of hearing your parents’ voices downstairs, chatting in the warm kitchen.
A little farther along, on the corner, is what all the neighbourhoods in Victoria have: the corner store. What a delight this particular one is! It is called The Birdcages Walk Confectionary because it was near here that the first government buildings, nicknamed “The Birdcages,” were built.
The Birdcages corner store has a red awning covering neat rows of pails full of daffodils and tulips in spring, carnations, lilies, iris, freesias, and mums most of the year, huge golden sunflowers and dahlias in the autumn, and holly and green festive bouquets in winter. Inside there is a warm red glow—the little shop is crammed with boxes of candies, racks of postcards, glass vases, newspapers, toiletries, lavender incense, and even a potted orchid! Photographs of local customers and the neighbourhood are pinned above a cluttered shelf of paper bags of nuts and seeds for the birds in nearby Beacon Hill Park.
I think there are several things that give this corner store such charm. One is that it is indeed a part of the neighbourhood community, hence the selling of bird food, and the corner store is always there, like the CBC and The Globe and Mail; even on the worst stormy day, you know that with a short stroll, you can at least get a can of beans or some red licorice, and that if you have no money, the storekeeper might let you run a tab if he or she knows you. (One morning I saw a lady wearing her pyjamas buying a muffin and the newspaper; she didn’t mind if the storekeeper saw her in her pyjamas—it was as if it was her kitchen, her own home.)
The other element that gives corner stores such charm is that they are usually small and rather cozy, and this makes them different from the local convenience store. The corner store is also convenient, but that’s not its main goal; the corner store’s main goal is to be part of the community. Convenience stores focus on fast food, tabloid magazines with anorexic starlets on their covers, and lotto tickets—not very community oriented—and the light is usually a glaring fluorescent and the floor is a dirty beige linoleum, and outside there is a sticky waste can and a chewing gum-laden asphalt entrance. But the corner store is spotless—the owner sweeps the sidewalk, hangs up a flower basket, and proudly displays the good things in life—flowers, soap, local greeting cards, and unique sweets.
Corner stores often cater to the single person who may be elderly and living alone nearby and may need only one potato, not a bag. Some older people make it part of their daily routine to shop for dinner, and a chat with the proprietor a little ways down the street fills their day immensely; for many, their daily shop plus a stroll to the duck pond is their day. Suffice it to say that the corner store is one feature of a neighbourhood that holds a community together.
Continuing along the street toward the harbour, you come upon the very environmentally conscious Union of British Columbia Municipalities building. In the spring, a subtle sweet smell from a magnificent white plum tree wafts up the sidewalk to greet you. The property has a working rain garden, one of the first in Victoria. A rain garden is a way of filtering and conserving runoff water from the rain. Water is directed from the roof garden (which also serves as habitat and food source for birds and insects as well as regulating warmth and coolness indoors) and the gutters into a rock pit and plant garden. The water is then filtered through the rocks and roots and used for irrigation, stored, or drained off into our stormwater system as clean water, which is good, as it eventually ends up in the ocean.
The building is fascinating indoors and out, and you may take an informative, self-guided tour and learn about the numerous environmental elements, which include the furniture and interior design. Here are some highlights: the rebar in the construction was ninety-eight percent recycled metal, and the boardroom chairs are of one hundred percent recycled material; the stairwell is composed of concrete mixed with locally recycled glass, and the beams were milled from pine-beetle-killed wood from the interior of British Columbia. “Beetlecrete” is a concrete containing woodchips from the milled pine-beetle wood, and it was used for the countertops. And rather than linoleum, a flooring called “marmoleum” was used, which is made largely of linseed oil and wood flour. The windows open for fresh air (ironically, just like the heritage hotel up the street).
I have nothing but praise for those who are “going green” and recycling everything, but I think it’s funny that Gran used to open windows because there weren’t air conditioners then, and that she used to boil eggshells for calcium during the war, and that Russian peasants and other downtrodden poor people had to recycle all the wood they could find for warmth during the harsh winters, and that farmers piped the methane from their livestock sheds and barns to heat water, and it all cost nothing. Now, to go green costs twice as much. And think of how people had to reuse and recycle during the Great Depression! Even the doll’s house at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, a real work of intricate craftsmanship, was made of mahogany remnants that came from an old church organ.
Really, all we have done is taken the old logical ideas from the past and made them modern, and put a bureaucratic gold seal on them, a stamp of standard approval from an environmental consultant. I am indeed glad we know not to waste after a few decades of great waste. Gran used to throw grey water from the kitchen sink or her bath outside onto the plants with galvanized pails—now we have rain gardens and pumps and gizmos and filters, and we are warned that the grey water might poison us if we put it on vegetables. It’s an attitude similar to airport security, fearing that we could blow up a plane with a tube of toothpaste! But as I said, I’m glad we are going back to sensibility (even though the builders and politicians think we are moving forward).
Across the street from the UBCM building is the Queen’s Printer, which was originally established in 1859 in one of the Birdcages, the small square buildings with the elegant swooping roofs that handled the government business of the new colony of Vancouver Island. The Birdcages were on the same site as the present-day Parliament Buildings—they were our original capital buildings. In fact, this area is called Birdcage Walk. The Birdcages were so cold in winter that the ink froze in the pots and government business often had to be delayed until the ink melted.
The printing and binding of political and official documents was first done on a little hand press that was shipped over from London. The first man hired as the Queen’s Printer was Captain E. Hammond King. Captain King printed the colony’s government documents and publications for Great Britain, for Queen Victoria. As government grew, so did the business of printing. Today, the Queen’s Printer is alive and well and is composed of many departments, which copy, edit, print, and record all our government goings-on.
In the late 1800s, Francis Rattenbury won the competition to design the new Parliament Buildings, and they are magnificent—the numerous green copper domes actually look to me more like birdcages than the little originals.
Parliament Buildings at Night
You can take a free, self-guided tour (the wooden front doors open at 8:30) or a tour with a guide, and there is also a lovely self-guided tour you can take around the grounds. Inside, it is well worth the visit to see the ceiling murals of our four original industries—agriculture, fishing, logging, and mining; stained-glass windows inlaid with local jade; plaster and gold-leaf reliefs, Italian marble decor, historic photographs, and the wonderful, eight-sided rotunda. Rattenbury designed the rotunda with eight sides to be different from the American rotundas, w
hich were round—a very forward-thinking decision.
You can also learn about the mace, and the difference between our lion, on the British Columbia coat of arms, and the lion on the British coat of arms (and why they are different). You can also learn about our official tartan; the white in our tartan represents the dogwood, our provincial flower, the green is for the forests, the red for the maple leaf, blue for the ocean, and gold for the sun and crown. (It’s almost like the Hudson’s Bay Company blankets—apparently the yellow stripe is for the harvest, the green is for the trees, and the red is for the blood shed when fighting for Canada—a man in the kitchen department of the Bay told me this.)
Outside, the Parliament Buildings are just as spectacular. A little brochure I picked up says that Rattenbury loved to showcase local materials and therefore constructed the buildings from “rough-hewn Haddington Island stone . . . Nelson Island granite . . . and Jervis Inlet slate . . .” Gosh, this Mr. Rattenbury truly was ahead of his time, or was he? Maybe our society just forgot for a while to “buy local.” A local postcard states that the Parliament Building roofs cover an area of over six acres! Francis Rattenbury had a gruesome end to his life—he was murdered with a mallet by his second wife’s boyfriend, and after the murder she committed suicide—a real-life Greek tragedy.
There are numerous free brochures and fact sheets to collect in the lobby (including a description of Rattenbury’s fate); you can read about British Columbia’s first women politicians, or how the provincial budget process works. And there’s even a little gift shop selling trinkets such as “Parli-Mints.” I am almost ashamed of saying that one of the best parts about museums, galleries, and historic sites are the gift shops. It’s as if I need to buy something to cling to the memory of the site and the experience.