by Anny Scoones
On a sunny day, with the white boats bobbing in the harbour across the road, it’s truly a treat to stroll the grounds and see the landmarks on the Parliament Buildings, which are as interesting and as elegant as the interior. At the back of the library wing, for example, are two features worth noting: the Centennial Fountain, which depicts four bronze animals symbolizing our geography and First Nations cultures, and a large plaque in a cairn with bronze reliefs of famous explorers and politicians, placed to correspond with their sandstone statues high on the building’s corners and balconies. It includes Sir Francis Drake, Sir James Douglas, Simon Fraser, and Alexander Mackenzie. There are female statues as well, representing the arts of painting, music, sculpture, and architecture, but they are not on the plaque—maybe they should have their own plaque!
The sunken rose garden on the west side is where one of the historic Birdcages once stood (that’s why it is sunken). In the front, on the expansive lawn, are commemorative trees, fountains, statues, and a thick, stolid totem pole. The pole is called the Knowledge Pole, and it is topped by a loon—the teacher, which symbolizes Aboriginal traditions; under the loon is the fisherman, and under him is the bone player, playing a game with all people who do not share the same spoken language; and finally the grand frog that comes from an ancient mountain story.
The frog is very symbolic for First Nations people, and in a totem, it may be hidden in a figure’s ear or belly button. Some clans believe that the frog is a symbol of wealth (which takes its form in copper), and other clans believe that Frog can call them back from the dead. Totem pole symbols are fascinating. A face that is upside down might indicate a punishment or insult toward a clan member; some symbols are simply whimsical, but most have deep meanings. One of the tallest totem poles in the world is in Beacon Hill Park near Dallas Road. It was erected in 1956 and is 127 feet 7 inches high.
On the very top of the Parliament Buildings, gleaming like a Greek god, straight and regal, stands a proud, golden Captain Vancouver. From my aquafit class in the Grand Pacific Hotel, I can see him glinting in the sun through a slit in the skylight above the pool—me half-heartedly doing leg kicks in waist-high ozonated water, possibly but not likely increasing my heart rate by a beat or two, while glancing at Captain Vancouver, who crossed the stormy seas and charted our waters, overcoming disease, loneliness, exhaustion, and stresses too hard to even imagine.
The Royal BC Museum is spectacular, and there a few things worth noting outside it. If you walk around the outer courtyard you will see a beautiful piece of public art—it’s a bronze sculpture of a family, smooth and polished, by the famous Canadian printmaker and sculptor Jack Harman. Jack hailed from Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast, where he established his foundry in 1962, the first sculpture foundry in BC. His beautiful works in polished bronze can be seen all across Canada and include a sculpture of Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Jack died in 2001 at age seventy-four. I love the sculpture of the family beside our museum and get a little thrill every time I see it—it’s a great piece of public art that I think may go largely unnoticed because of its streetside location, tucked behind a damp garden of native ferns under a pine tree.
The British Columbia Archives is in the lower section of the museum, and if you take the steps down from the street, you will come upon a beautiful pond and native-plant garden, and a bench on which to sit and reflect in the cool shade of the flowering red currants. A distinctive sculpture by another famous Canadian artist, Elza Mayhew (1916–2004), sits quietly in the pond, stretching upward toward the sunlight. Mayhew’s distinguished bronze and aluminum sculptures are formed from symmetrical geometric shapes, some tall, some squat, and remind me of little Mayan shrines or temples for worshipping something greater than ourselves. As in a totem pole, you can see the spirituality, even though the symbols are simply lovely shapes that fit together like a piece of architecture. Mayhew has described her sculptures as representing the dignity of the human state, ritualistic and meditative. Her work is in various locations around town—you can’t miss it.
Another highlight of this little hive of activity on the corner of Belleville and Government Streets is the Netherlands Centennial Carillon, also known as “the Singing Tower,” which sits next to a hot dog and ice cream vendor and a set of dinosaur footprints. Across the street is a statue of Emily Carr, who seems to have enormous feet and a large round head! The carillon is an actual musical instrument, housed in an eighty-nine-foot cement tower in front of the museum. It was a gift from the Dutch community in British Columbia in honour of Canada’s centennial year in 1967. Canadians played an important role in liberating Holland in the Second World War, and the Dutch, appreciating this, have remained great friends of ours.
The carillon consists of sixty-two brass bells (cast in the Netherlands), which are struck—they do not swing. The carillonneur, weather permitting (more often in the summer), climbs the seventy-five steps and then a ladder to play songs that waft and echo across the harbour. One bleak and freezing winter day, I was walking along the causeway, the sleet beating across my face, the sailboats bashing against the docks, their bleached ropes stretched and groaning in the wind—everything grey, wet, and windswept—when suddenly, from the dismal freezing mists, there came a muffled ringing of “Hello Dolly.” There were perhaps one or two off-key notes, maybe due to the numb fingers of the musician, but it was a humorous addition to a walk on a winter’s day along the deserted Inner Harbour. And our Victoria carillonneur is a woman!
Along the street eastward, just a short walk from the carillon, is one of Victoria’s lawn-bowling clubs. On a nice day you will see the players in their bright whites carefully strategizing where to roll their balls on the green, impeccably kept lawn surrounded by clean and freshly painted benches.
Records in Britain suggest that lawn bowling was first practised in the thirteenth century, but early monarchs outlawed the increasingly popular sport for fear it would distract people from excelling in archery, a skill needed in the many wars between England and France and other countries. The oldest record of a bowling green is the Southampton Old Bowling Green, used in 1299. Many bowling clubs offer help to the visually impaired by stringing lines along the greens to guide the players’ aim.
Just past the lawn-bowling club is a charming little corner park with pathways and shade trees amongst fern gardens and lawns. In the centre are some informative signs dedicated to the clergyman Edward Cridge and his wife, Mary. Next door stands the beautiful heritage wooden board-and-batten Church of Our Lord, designed in the style of Carpenter Gothic by the English architect John Teague and built in 1875. Teague was a well-known local architect in early Victoria who also designed City Hall and a few buildings in the naval dockyard; he was also the mayor of Victoria in 1894.
The Cridges were strong anti-racists and promoted education of Victoria’s children; they had nine children of their own but devoted much of their time to helping local orphans and the poor. Edward Cridge suddenly went blind in his old age and died at ninety-five. The Church of Our Lord, where Reverend Cridge preached, is a National Historic Site and regularly has clever and humorous religious messages displayed; a recent one was “Life is Fragile, Handle With Prayer.” They also note that the church initials spell COOL.
When Victoria was settled, this whole area was a mud flat at the head of James Bay. The Inner Harbour (the bay) came up this far and was fed by a stream beyond; the stream is still flowing underground. This area is known as the Humboldt Valley. It is a little area of downtown that isn’t a valley per se, but rather a lovely sloping street with richly historical landscaped heritage structures and woodland gardens at the top and fresh, spacious, and clean modern urban design at the lower end.
Alexander von Humboldt was a brilliant and original thinker, explorer, and naturalist who studied everything from the Earth’s magnetic fields to orchids in the seventeenth century. Humboldt was Prussian but spent his life travelling extensively through Latin America
and later in Russia. He was very good-looking, and his portraits show him dressed in a white scarf similar to the type that Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) wore in the BBC series Pride and Prejudice. So respected was Humboldt that many species of plants and animals are named after him—there’s the Humboldt squid, Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk, and the Salix humboldtiana, a South African willow.
At the top end of the Humboldt Valley is St. Ann’s Academy, a highlight of Victoria’s heritage sites. The great stone building with the red turret at its peak was the first four-storey building in Victoria. St. Ann’s, built between 1871 and 1910, used to be a convent school. The architecture is French, as the four original Sisters were from Quebec. There is something very charming and Canadian about Victoria having such a contribution from French history. I find it another reason to embrace Quebec as being part of Canada—I am proud of Quebec, and I love the fact that it plays such a historic role.
Beyond the tall iron gates at the entrance to St. Ann’s is a vast landscape of orchards, woodlands, gardens, and hedgerows. Up the stone steps, the beautifully exhibited history of the Sisters and their lives includes parlours, the Sisters’ artwork, schoolrooms, and even the priest’s breakfast room. Not to be missed is the charming little novitiate garden, a private manicured side garden where the younger novice Sisters could go to contemplate nature, pick herbs, or pursue gentle recreational activities. But the most splendid sight of all is the chapel, built in 1858 as Victoria’s first Roman Catholic church and later added to the school. The decorations and ambience of the chapel reflect rural French-Canadian churches—ornate altars, tapestries, marble trimmings and carvings, gold-leaf, stained glass, religious paintings, plaster reliefs and busts, and a 1913 pipe organ. The academy and grounds have been exquisitely restored, the chapel in historic ornate Quebec Baroque style in gold, white, and pale blue.
Beehives at Fairmont Empress Hotel
You can take a self-guided tour of the academy and its grounds; the little booklet is a delight and has some lovely, sensitive quotes from the Sisters and students who once lived and worked there. Information sheets, little prayers, and trinkets are also given out, all in a gentle and modest manner, and there is even a gift shop with T-shirts. The grand academy is now used as government offices, but the building is worth the visit and the grounds make for a pleasant stroll with interpretive signage throughout.
From the high stone steps of the academy amongst the apple trees, you can see another architectural heritage treasure, St. Joseph’s Hospital, across the road, also associated with St. Ann’s Academy (some Sisters were nurses). As with St. Ann’s, the massive, solid building has a red turret reaching for heaven on its rooftop. St. Joseph’s also has mature shrubs and trees and its own chapel. It was a hospital but is now in private hands and is used as housing, with many of its heritage features preserved. It was at St. Joseph’s that Emily Carr’s sister, Elizabeth, was nursed during her final days, suffering from breast cancer, and so, in appreciation for the Sisters’ compassionate care, Emily gave them a lovely painting titled Wild Lilies. Wild Lilies is beautiful; I like it as much as the shafts of light that fall between the swirling giant cedars in her later work, the subject that made Emily famous.
The Sisters have, in turn, kindly donated the valuable work to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, as well as other art they have collected over the years. In 2012, the Sisters donated a vast collection to the Royal BC Museum. Many of their artifacts date back to 1857 and include hand-carved rosary beads and an 1858 Bible. The Sisters’ original little schoolhouse also sits in the peaceful garden beside the museum, amongst the flowering plum trees and an impressive collection of totem poles.
Mount St. Mary Hospital
Around the corner from St. Joseph’s is Mount St. Mary Hospital, also at one time associated with the Sisters of St. Ann. Mount St. Mary in the past was a hospital for extended care but is now a modern facility for “complex care.” I met someone who said that Mount St. Mary is the most compassionate hospital her old father has ever known; he wanted rice pudding with raisins like his mum used to make, so the nurse made it for him using her mother’s recipe. Now that’s a great nurse!
Down the hill from the historic and shaded landscapes of the Sisters is a modern array of gleaming, turquoise glass towers surrounded by fountains and white patios. The lower part of the Humboldt Valley is made up of plastic-surgery and liposuction clinics, spas, and little cafés serving chilled glasses of crisp French white wine with appallingly smelly cheeses (which are delicious!), along with the two very chic Winchester art galleries.
The galleries are set back behind a clean concrete patio, which serves as a place to sip espressos amongst some colourful and interesting outdoor sculpture: another Elza Mayhew (made of solid aluminum) and two large steel structures, one bright red and the other bright blue, titled Music One and Music Two. There are other modern pieces strategically placed—one looks like a combination of a rain barrel and beer keg that has rolled in from the street. It’s an extremely important piece of art by our well-known Victoria artist Mowry Baden, and it is titled Toy Amenity Satellite.
My own taste in art is very traditional—I am never sure what I am supposed to think when I see modern or minimalist art. There was a painting at the Victoria art gallery that was simply a canvas painted bright pink. There it hung on a white wall, just this pink square. The ironic thing was that it said nothing, but it consumed me. The reaction was philosophical—I seemed to have been doing more thinking than the artist and I remember feeling that this just was not fair—How Dare He! And then I became mad at myself for being taken in by a pink square. In retrospect, I think that my reaction wasn’t minimalist, even though the visual piece of art was. But I may have had the final word because if it was really minimalist, why did the artist even need colour? Sometimes just loving a painting of wild lilies for its beauty is what it’s all about—it’s much less stressful and as I age, I just don’t have the energy to mentally argue with a painting of a pink square.
The patio in front of these galleries is worth noting. Sunken slightly from the sidewalk, the smooth white concrete becomes a curving stream not only amongst the modern art, but between small fountains and pools, and blocks of shrubbery. Sculptured fish embedded in the “creek” follow your movement. The design of this fake waterway is beautiful and calming; it is perhaps even lovelier than some real creeks and ponds and scraggly shrubbery. Isn’t it interesting that something that substitutes for nature can actually be as lovely or lovelier? To a nature lover like me, this was an epiphany!
The grand, palace-like, ivy-covered Fairmont Empress Hotel, also designed by Francis Rattenbury (the architect of the Parliament Buildings), stands at the base of Humboldt Street. The Empress was originally a Canadian Pacific Railway hotel (there’s one in every province) and is known for its extravagant afternoon English teas, posh interior, and delicious dinners at the (East) Indian buffet in the Bengal Room, but perhaps many people do not know that the Empress also is home to eight hundred thousand Carniolan and Italian honey bees, which produce the delicious honey that is featured in the Empress’s restaurant menus and teas. The bees, cared for by a professional beekeeper, live in ten hives in the Centennial Garden and pollinate the fragrant flowered landscapes and rose beds of the hotel. Over one thousand pounds of honey can be produced in a year. Victoria is known as “the city of gardens,” which makes it a delight for the bees.
Some residents in our neighbourhood actually have their own hives in their back gardens. The life cycle and lifestyle of the bee is one of the most amazing on earth. I have always wondered how the queen bee is chosen by the others to be the queen; a friend of mine thinks it is because she’s “at the right place at the right time” but I think it is more that she exhibits the sort of leadership charisma that the other bees just resign themselves to following. I went to high school with girls like that. Whatever the reason it takes to become the queen, we love and need our bees, and May 29 is the official Day of the Honey
Bee.
The Empress is also known as the place a poor frightened cougar hid out a few years ago, lost and disoriented in the lower car park. I cannot recall how the story ended; I am sure that if it was possible to catch the cougar and take him back to the nearby woods, the City would have done that. Cougars are also called mountain lions and they are plentiful in the region, along with black bears. Cougars kill and eat deer—one deer will last one about a week. Their jaws are for slicing, not chewing, so they have great difficulty eating (chewing) frozen carcasses. Good thing for the cougar that it rarely freezes here.
On the front lawn of the Empress stands a healthy, multi-stemmed arbutus tree. Arbutus is from the Latin meaning “strawberry tree” and it is the only broad-leafed evergreen tree native to Canada. The Pacific coast here is its northernmost habitat but it is found quite far south and was first recognized in 1749 by a Spanish missionary in California. The arbutus is a striking tree with its peeling deep-red outer bark and hard, cool, green inner trunk. The tree, because of the structure of its white flowers (followed by red berries) belongs to the heather family.
It is said that the First Nations used the arbutus wood to make board games, and boiled the leaves, bark, and roots to make a potion for curing colds and flu. It sounds as if that might be a bitter mixture but maybe it’s better than what some of the drug companies put out these days. They warn you on television in a rapid verbal spew of a dozen frightening side effects such as passing out, vomiting, blindness, impotence, dizziness, constipation, and suicidal tendencies—they advise that you see your doctor immediately if you have these side effects. I think I’d rather have the flu.
Across the road from the Empress is the causeway overlooking the Inner Harbour. On a sunny day, the upper and lower causeways are bustling with tourists, red double-decker buses, buskers, and street vendors. The harbour is always a hive of activity, full of seaplanes, expensive yachts and sailboats, whale-watching boats, fishboats, kayaks and little harbour ferries. Sometimes there are near collisions, with all the congestion. One year I was the drummer on a dragon boat in a race, and during the warm-up I sort of steered us into ramming Merv Griffin’s great white luxury cruiser, and then when we backed up, we hit the Undersea Gardens!