LIST GREW LIKE WILDFLOWERS
Friends identify 200 species in Gatineau Park
In all the wonder of Gatineau Park, it always struck Gwynneth Evans and Tom Delsey as odd that there was so little information for visitors about what flowers grow beside the trails.
The two friends from Ottawa, both retired from Library and Archives Canada, have spent many years walking and cross-country skiing in the park.
Now, they are nearing the end of a personal project that echoes the private work of many Canadians in past generations: They have made an extensive database of what grows where, with photos, so that visitors will know what flora they are gazing at as they hike, ski or just meander through the park.
Evans and Delsey have trudged along the same paths over and over to find the flowers of the changing seasons, recording everything from rare orchids to common daisies.
“We usually go once a week from mid-April through to the very end of November, and we usually spend 2 1/2 to three hours each time,” Delsey said. “Because we’re not charging through there, we do maybe 12, 15 kilometres each time. We really love the park.”
Because there are so many plants, they have restricting themselves to wildflowers — no trees, shrubs, grass or mosses.
“We adore the Gatineau, and we hike in the Gatineau a great deal,” Evans said.
“There is much more diversity right at the local level than we ever really acknowledge . ... When I look at the diversity within a metre of the ground in the Gatineau — the different kinds of plants that are growing together and surviving — crowding one another out, it’s just an amazing lens on the complexity and refinement of life. It is so varied and so beautifully made and worked out.
“It’s almost a mystery that every plant is unique and there is so much life in just a very small patch. The Gatineau itself has so many different microclimates and trees and shrubs and rock formations and so on.”
But she also says there’s more to it than a love of growing things.
“Canada in the ’30s began a number of very strong national institutions even though it was the Depression,” she said. There was the National Film Board; the National Research Council got its home at 100 Sussex Dr., and the government bought the land for what later became Gatineau Park.
“We saw that nation-building involved public good, and without public good we would not be a society that would be able to thrive in a positive sense.”
“So the fact that people had vision and were not just caught up in the pain and suffering of the day and the week has always impressed me. And we do it in our Canadian way. We don’t do it with a lot of flourishes.
“That, for me, is a thread that goes through the history of Canada, and we don’t talk about it so much now ...”
“We can continue the work in different stages of our lives and in different ways.”
Neither of the two observers is a trained botanist, though they do have backup help — a former Yale University botany professor who is a personal friend.
“It is the combination of the love of being outside in that wonderful park and the desire to learn and to appreciate and then share the bounty we have right at our doorsteps in Ottawa,” Evans said.
Delsey and Evans are following in the tradition of generations of early European settlers in Canada who got to work sketching and describing all the unfamiliar plants of their new country. Most, such as Catherine Parr Traill of Peterborough County or Abbé Ferland of La Tabatière, Que., were self-taught; yet their close examination of their surroundings had valuable detail that was widely shared by scholars.
The list reminds us that for centuries, people have known all these plants and given them common names that relate to their appearance, smell and even taste. The odd names lead us on a tour through the popular culture of a society that was once closer to nature: Nodding beggar-ticks, common eyebright, boneset, virgin’s bower, white turtlehead, squirrel corn, spotted jewelweed, cardinal flower, marsh skullcap, Indian cucumber root, kidney-leafed violet, perfoliate bellwort.
“It’s very hard to find anything (published work) that the professionals have been doing that focuses on this area,” Delsey said.
“As amateurs, we’ve been hiking in the park for years and we would always just observe the wild flowers. Gwynneth has a precious little wildflower book that dates back to the early 1900s with hand-drawn things. “And then we got more serious about it.”
They took photos and could identify many of them, but not all.
“I would come home and check databases and try to determine exactly what we were dealing with,” because closely related flowers can be easy to confuse. “We got up to just over 200 species. We were aiming for 150 for Canada 150, but in the spring we were well beyond that.”
It all went into an Excel table showing which plant lives on which trail. “We thought this might be useful for other people like ourselves, amateurs who are interested in what they are looking at.”
The pair consciously has not gone off the trails; these are all plants you can see as you walk.
“I spend a lot of time on my knees and sometimes my belly, trying to get an angle of it.”
They contacted Friends of Gatineau Park and are in discussions to hand over the photos and the database. Nothing is ever simple: Public sector rules have to be followed, even for a list of where to see flowers.
Delsey is hoping that eventually someone connected with Gatineau Park will set it all up on a website for public viewing.
The park is split into three main sections: There’s the cliff edge of the Eardley Escarpment, overlooking the valley. The area near the cliff top and along Ridge Road is another ecosystem, the Eardley Plateau. Then there’s the larger section with the lakes — Meech, Philippe and LaPêche, interspersed with hills and marshes.
“It’s amazing, some of the stuff you see,” he said, including tiny specialized plants the cling to crevices in the rock face.
Delsey’s old school friend taught botany at Yale “and often, when I am puzzled by something, I just send him the photo. He has said he is amazed by the variety, the diversity, given that we put those constraints on ourselves of staying within the boundaries of the park.”
“The deeper you get into it, the more you get amazed by the structure of these things.”