Light shed on Haunted Lane
Most of trees cut down along lane to Guisachan Heritage Park
Kelowna’s Haunted Lane is but a shadow of its former self. Most of the 300-plus cedars that once flanked a lane where a 19th-century carriage is said by some to appear on moonless nights have either been cut down or are destined to fall.
So instead of being a dim and foreboding passageway to Guisachan Heritage Park, the lane is now open to the light of day. And not at all spooky. “It will be again someday,” Peter Brenneman, representative of an adjacent 100-home development called Cameron Mews, said Thursday.
The company once owned the lane, but it transferred title to the City of Kelowna when the housing project was approved.
The terms of the deal required the developer to cut down all of the trees that were diseased, dying or represented a fall hazard, since the lane will eventually become a full public access to the heritage park and the city didn’t want to inherit any liability issues.
Original estimates were that about 160 of the trees would come down.
But a closer look by arborists revealed the cedars were in rougher shape than believed. Virtually all of the trees on the east side of the lane will be taken out, and many on the west side as well.
“The quality of the trees is not very good,” Blair Stewart of the city’s parks department said in 2016. “They haven’t been properly cared for for a long time. The main problem has been that the cedars require a lot of water, and there’s no irrigation there.”
Eastern white cedars were originally planted on the site by Lord and Lady Aberdeen, who owned the property in the late 1800s.
A plaque at the heritage park identifies the lane as the Avenue of Cedars. It’s said to be an occasionally haunted lane where a ghostly horse-drawn carriage appears and clop-clops to the Guisachan Heritage House, built in 1892.
Once the existing trees are removed, new rows of western red cedars will be planted this spring. They are indigenous to B.C. and expected to fare much better.
“I’m not an arborist, so I don’t know how long it’ll take for the new trees to reach the size where they can create that nice, arched effect over the lane that was there before,” Brenneman said. “But the sooner we can plant them, the sooner they’ll start to grow.”