by Anny Scoones
Hops
The hop plant is a tough climbing vine. Its delicate, light green, cone-like flowers are the female part of the plant and are cultivated to flavour beer—they give the beer a tangy taste. Farmers harvested the hops and dried them in oast houses. Oast is an old word meaning “kiln.”
There are many global varieties of hops, including a British one called Fuggles (doesn’t that just sound so English?). Hops also have medicinal properties. They relieve anxiety, for example, and if you put hops in your pillow, it helps cure insomnia.
William Towner, one of the first pioneers on the peninsula, grew hops; his original plant is still growing in a wet, gravelly drainage ditch and climbs a Hydro pole every spring—the locals and heritage preservationists guard and protect this hop and its location!
An oast house is a unique structure; the hops were laid out over several storeys to dry in the warmth from a wood fire below. The distinctive ventilated roofs were cone-shaped. When the hops cooled they were bagged and sent to the local brewery.
There’s a great difference between the “rural” and “agricultural” properties on the peninsula, but together they create a beautiful countryside within minutes of Victoria. Rural living (which might mean residing on what some urbanites refer to as “martini ranches”) means a lifestyle; perhaps the residents have a garden and a lovely marine view, perhaps even some chickens or a horse. Agricultural means business!
On the peninsula, there are many agricultural businesses, which include the breeding and selling of special insects intended to eat other insects that attack crops, thereby reducing the need for harmful pesticides. There’s a man who grows and sells olive, lemon, and pomegranate trees! There are farms that raise heritage breeds of livestock and poultry such as the Naked Neck hen and the Old Spot pig. And flower growers who make huge, colourful bouquets of dahlias named Yellow Baby, Exotic Dwarf, or Lemon Drop and sell them from great glass jars on the roadside. There are U-pick meadows full of strawberries in June, blueberries in August, and pumpkins and corn in autumn.
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church
The peninsula is also home to various wineries, and horse stables, and the oldest church in British Columbia, St. Stephen’s. It’s a dear little painted structure that sits in a bluebell wood in the heart of the Mount Newton Valley. The lichen-covered, weathered stones in the cemetery wobble like loose teeth under old pear trees and a canopy of huge maples. The odour inside the church is of fresh, damp, cool wood.
Wineries, of course, sell wine, but the vineyard business has also turned into a sort of social and recreational afternoon event. You can taste and sip the local wines while leaning over a smooth, varnished counter (made from a local tree that was cut down for the vineyard and then reused), and pop little cheese crackers shaped like fish into your mouth while learning how to swirl your glass and how to hold the stem, as well as how to do a sort of gurgle into the wine. This apparently inserts a blast of oxygen, which in turn brings out a multitude of flavours such as “dark cherry,” “crisp grapefruit,” or “deep vanilla.” To me, after a few samples they all taste the same, no matter how I breathe or hold the glass!
Visits to one or two peninsula wineries make for a very pleasant afternoon and you can take a lovely country drive from one to the other (but drive carefully after a tasting!). Many wineries encourage you to stroll through their beautiful landscaped properties, and there’s often a lovely old dog to greet you. Winemakers are really outgoing, gregarious people. I think the hosting takes up most of their energy—I don’t know how they smile all day and pour wine and describe what the heat of your hand does to a merlot or what wine pairs best with a really smelly French cheese. I just couldn’t do it!
One winery even started producing gin. The amazing thing about a distillery is the beautiful equipment. Huge, gleaming copper vats with brass fixtures, tubes, and vents, on polished stone floors—distilleries look like the mad scientists’ laboratories gone sane.
And then there are the residential areas of the peninsula, usually on slopes for the marine views, with manicured lawns, white front doors, pruned hedges, and mossy baskets of scarlet begonias hanging over freshly painted porches. I heard that in one of these neighbourhoods, a group of residents got together and took a petition to the local council to have their street name changed from Protection Avenue (they thought it sounded too sexual).
By far the biggest and most exciting annual country celebration on the peninsula is the Saanich Fair. It is the oldest continuing fair in western Canada; the first one was held in 1867. At the fair you can see a pig obedience class (it’s quite funny!), the tallest sunflower of the year (the record is apparently twenty-five feet), a parade of Arabian horses in native dress, and a three-hundred-pounds-plus pumpkin. You can eat everything from homemade caramel apples to fresh blackberry pie, crispy onion rings from the Lions’ caravan to Turkish kabobs. Pioneer farmers demonstrate their antique red and green tractors and steam-powered threshers; prizewinning turkeys strut slowly on their fresh straw, showing off their blue rosettes.
Roadside Stands
The roadside stand just may be the last type of free-market enterprise characterized by two features that symbolize total trust between the seller and the buyer: products on the roadside stand are rarely limited by government regulation, and the money exchange is based on the honour system. The roadside stand typically displays the farmer’s wonderful wares—great piles of autumn squash of all shapes, sizes, and colours, free-range eggs from chickens who peck the soil and have dust baths, bouquets of purple kale and burgundy beets, walnuts neatly packaged in cellophane bags, and golden jars of honey from local wildflowers. The buyer is usually instructed, on a colourful painted sign, to deposit the money into a slot.
The income to the farmer often adds up to a nice little sum and as well, any extra produce does not go to waste. The buyers have the satisfaction of knowing where their food came from, as well as the pleasure of shopping really locally, and usually just for pocket change. And there’s a flood of a good type of feeling at participating in such a trustful relationship; it’s like a relief of some sort that trust still exists. That grassroots moment when you drop your coins into the little wooden slot and turn away with your armload of corn is the purest form of honest capitalism.
The Saanich Fair is held on Labour Day weekend and marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The dews are heavier, the draft horses’ coats are becoming thick, and a fall mist hovers across the fairgrounds at dawn as the 4-H members, horse grooms, and chicken caregivers clean and feed their livestock before a long day of facing spectators and judges. For three days and nights, the front meadow of the fairgrounds is an array of row upon row of dome tents, tarps, trailers, and mobile homes, and each has a barbecue and a circle of plastic lawn chairs. This is the Saanich Fair neighbourhood!
The sleepy children who must show their sheep and hold their prize rooster up for the judges’ inspection later in the day stagger up to the public washrooms in their pyjamas as the dawn creeps over the makeshift village through the mist that has settled overnight. Their mothers make coffee and oatmeal and eggs on the camp stoves in the damp grass as the exhibitors go from the washroom to the stables, still groggy, emptying the fresh hay and grain into the cages and livestock pens of their charges. This is the part of the fair that the public never sees—they arrive later, bustling through the gates and dashing toward the midway and candy kiosks.
Around noon it can be blazing hot and the judges walk around in their grey smocks pinning great gold and purple rosettes on the winning animals’ pens. The exhibitors do not have the fun of heading off to the spinning and tumbling midway; they must remain with their animals to care for them throughout the day and explain to the fairgoers the business and science required to keep livestock.
I once saw a lovely, gentle farm boy holding his doe-eyed Jersey cow on the end of a rope, stroking her face as she quietly chewed on her hay. He was telling a young family that her name
was Dora, and that Jerseys give us the richest milk of any cow breed, and that Dora spends six hours a day eating, and eight hours a day chewing her cud. Dear docile Dora let the children feed her a handful of grain and brush her smooth, fawn-coloured coat. The scene was so refreshing: the nice boy and the little children being so gentle with the cow—it gave me great hope for the world.
One of the more peaceful and rural areas of the peninsula is Ardmore in North Saanich. It has shady, tree-lined lanes connected by pretty trails, and little beaches that look across Saanich Inlet to the layered, deep purple hills of the distant Cowichan Valley. Ardmore is an old Scottish word meaning “hard moor.”
My friends Lorna and Patrick live in a lovely, airy white house surrounded by a manicured Japanese garden of clipped shrubs, smooth granite boulders, bamboo gates, and a beautiful shallow pond where they used to keep two turtles, named Blanche and Sparky. Blanche and Sparky often sunned themselves on the lily pads or the granite patio alongside us as we drank our gin and tonics during the warm summer, but one day Blanche disappeared. Lorna was so upset that she posted a LOST sign, offering a reward, on the corner Hydro pole, and the only person who answered her was an animal psychic; she said that Blanche was “still on the earth and was at peace in the universe,” and that for one hundred dollars she might be able to locate her. I think (from reading about turtle behaviour) that Blanche lumbered off to the creek across the road to mate and lay her eggs along the clay banks under the great drooping cedars. That’s what turtles do. Poor Lorna grieved for days. Blanche never showed up again.
Hedgerows
Among the first peoples to plant hedgerows were the Vikings. When they invaded England, they built strong fences out of dead logs, branches, and sticks to define their boundaries and pen their livestock. It was an arduous process, and one day they realized that if they actually planted a live hedgerow, the results would be far more permanent, and far less repair work would be needed every year.
Hedgerows are nature’s fences and serve many purposes, especially if they include native plantings. They make good wind and noise buffers and act as pollution absorbers; they prevent erosion and are an excellent source of food, shelter, and habitat for bees, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife. Natural hedgerows can be seen throughout the Saanich Peninsula. North Saanich even has a hedgerow policy, which encourages residents to plant, maintain, and enhance hedgerows, to hand prune, and to resist pruning in the spring when birds nest in the hedgerows. Local nurseries are encouraging residents to landscape with hedgerows and to buy native plants.
Some lovely-sounding native plants that are in our local hedgerows include the Nootka rose, trumpet honeysuckle, snowberry, ocean spray, Indian plum, salmonberry, red flowering currant, beaked hazelnut, and Oregon grape. Doesn’t this sound like a delicious hedgerow?!
The Nootka Rose
The word Nootka comes from a First Nations word that means “go around.” When Captain Cook explored our waters in the 1700s, he named places according to the Native languages. The story is that the local people in Nootka Sound called out, “Noot’ka,” meaning that he should go around a point, and Cook assumed it was the name of the sound.
The lovely Nootka rose has a delicate, fragrant pink blossom which bees and butterflies love. In the winter, the prickly thickets of the bush are ablaze with crimson and orange rosehips against our low, grey, drizzly skies.
The First Nations used the rose for many ailments and day-to-day needs; the leaves could add flavour to cooked food, tea from the branches soothed the eyes, the chewed leaves eased the stings of bees, and the ripe hips were cooked and mashed and fed to babies with indigestion.
Winemaking and Other Old Trades
My friends Pat and Lamont have a small winery in the heart of the peninsula. There were all sorts of things I wanted to know about our local grape industry, so we had a chat in a lovely loft above the room where the oak barrels are stacked—the barrels are made in British Columbia, by a cooper. Making oak barrels is a very old trade and you could pay a thousand dollars for one from France made from a very specific oak! The type of oak influences the flavour of the wine. The barrels are skilfully constructed and “toasted” on the inside. Originally, coopers made the barrels not only for wine, but also to ship and store gunpowder and tobacco. The staves are split from the centre of an oak where it is the strongest, shaped with sharp hand tools, then heated and bent into shape to fit snugly; tight iron rings keep the barrel together. Old-fashioned names for these barrels were puncheons, hogsheads, and firkins. French oak barrels are usually used to age the wine because they have a particular flavour; for example, the Limousin oak has a rich vanilla essence that it gives to aging wine.
The big four grapes that can grow on our peninsula are Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Marechal Foch, and Ortega. If the soil is too organically rich, the grape will put too much vigour into its leaves and not enough into its grapes. Grapes like the soil to be a little acidic, with good drainage, and they like LOTS of sun and warmth. Growing grapes is a science—the temperature is very closely monitored and recorded, every half-hour in the growing season. Some wineries make fruit wines. The first commercial winery in British Columbia was set up in 1921 and used loganberries. Today, blackberries, picked wild from the sun-drenched summer hedgerows, are a superb winemaking fruit.
Most wine producers do not crush their grapes barefoot anymore (what with our new health regulations and such!). The difference between red and white wine is what happens with the skin; in a white wine, the grapes are pressed first and then the juice ferments; in a red wine, the grapes ferment first, with the seeds and skin still intact, and then they are pressed.
The government has strict health and administrative regulations on winemaking; there is quite a complicated process if a winemaker wishes to sell his or her wines in a liquor outlet, so many peninsula winemakers sell instead from their vineyards. It is far less bureaucratic and much more social and intimate (like a good wine!).
The peninsula attracts many artisans and craftspeople who practise old-fashioned trades; the ironic thing is that these trades today are associated with pleasure and perhaps wealth, while in the past, they were considered quite laborious.
Take the horse farrier. Horse owners prefer to have shoes on their horses to prevent the hooves from wearing too thin and being bruised from riding on hard ground. To shoe a horse properly, the old trade of blacksmithing, or working with iron, must be employed. Farriers on the peninsula drive to the stables in their trucks, which carry portable forges and very heavy anvils. The farrier has to make the shoe from strips of iron by heating up the metal until it glows red and then pounding it to the shape of the horse’s hoof, and every hoof, like our feet, is different. The shoe is nailed onto the hoof red-hot! Neither the nail nor the burning iron hurts the horse because the hoof is like a toenail and has to be cut anyway, and filed down. The art of making and fitting horseshoes is an ancient skill and takes years of practice. They say that once horses in ancient times were shod, it changed the course of history—horses in war could run faster and for longer periods without damaging their hooves. (War on horseback changed dramatically again when the Chinese invented the stirrup, which improved the rider’s balance enormously.)
The ancient art of boatbuilding is alive and well in the charming village of Brentwood Bay. Brentwood is a sleepy little town overlooking Saanich Inlet. A few years ago it underwent a makeover; flower beds were added down the centre of the street and a roundabout was constructed at the top of the hill, which slowed down the traffic. The south end of Brentwood is dotted with small farms where huge crops of corn and squash are available in the autumn from their market stands. To the west, the neighbourhood of modest houses slopes gently toward the inlet, where one discovers a quaint historical shoreline area of cozy cafés, kayak rentals, a marina, and a labyrinth of tiny lanes leading to a wood-and-metal building perched on the shore on solid stilts, home to the boatbuilders and restorers Abernethy and Gaudin. Boat repair makes th
ese men their money, but their passion, and what they also practise for love, is actual old-fashioned boatbuilding.
Hanging from the high-beamed, dust-covered ceiling were a few of their works of art: a pea pod-shaped rowboat, a replica of a little wooden boat that was used to fish salmon in the inlet in the 1940s; a Newfoundland dory; and a beautiful, elegant boat that was used on the St. Lawrence River. “The white man’s canoe,” said an apprentice in worn canvas overalls as he looked up from sanding, by hand, a pair of wooden oars.
A freshly varnished mast with polished brass hooks and rings lay ready to be stepped in a little sailboat bobbing at the wharf, just a few yards away outside in the sunlight. I realized that you could actually tell the history of Canada by its variety of little wooden boats. The red cedar and oak in the canoe was hand steamed (just as at the cooperage) and then copper riveted.
Saanich Inlet has a long history of industry, and evidence still can be seen—the old limestone quarry at The Butchart Gardens, the remnants of the brick factory all through the woods and trails at nearby Tod Inlet, and the crumbling old grey cement plant across the inlet, now overgrown with natural bushes, blackberries, and climbing vines.
The boatbuilders offered to introduce me to a man who knows much of the inlet’s fishing history—“an old salty guy,” they said—but he was nowhere to be found on the day I visited. There’s something romantic about being an old salty guy, of having a life on the sea; that’s part of the appeal of old crafts and skills such as boatbuilding. Being in the present, but working with the past, working with the memories that have brought us where we are, keeps that connection to what formed us.
But I do wonder whether in another eighty years, when boatbuilders are restoring the great white fibreglass yachts of today, it will feel as romantic, working with chrome and resin rather than with wood and brass. I wonder if it is simply the past that is romantic, or if it is truly the traditions, the materials, the morals, and the feelings of society rather than just the passing of time.