Saturday Photo: Just to Remember on a Day When Snow Falls Gently

This was what it was like last summer in Mount Royal Cemetery.  Blue sky and green grass.  It will come again, I have every hope.

Until then, keep warm.

Saturday Photo: The Book on Display...

Had a wonderful launch of Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States last Tuesday.  Great crowd, good conversation and quite a few books sold.

Don't quite know what this means, but the University of Regina website says the book is out of stock, but it's available on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com, plus on-line and in Chapters-Indigo stores.  Your favourite indie store would be glad to order it too, I'm sure!

Saturday Photo: Eviction Notice for Ducks?

Not sure which way the causality ran, but the family (or families, not sure if there were two) of 11 ducks which spent the summer in neighborhood parks have flown off to warmer climes, and the water in the ponds where they hung out has been emptied.

The lower photo shows what the pond looked like on Canadian Thanksgiving Day two weeks ago.  The trees were still pretty green, and the human mother and son duo were sharing something to eat with the ducks.  You'll notice that a few gulls have decided to join the party.

Seasons change, and frequently the other changes that accompany that natural process is hurried along by humans.  Would like to think that the ducks are now paddling around some pond where the first freeze is a month or more away instead of next week. 

Saturday Photo: When You're Forced to Take a Step Forward for the Planet

The cold weather is coming to this neck of the woods, climate change or not.  Everyone knows you can't live here without having heating, and until now we've relied on a hot-water-heating fuel-oil furnace that probably dates from the conversion from coal in the 1950s.  The rads all seem to be working fine, but the first time we turned on the heat two weeks ago, the boiler cracked and the system drained all the water.

What a mess!  How lucky we were that it hasn't been too cold because we have had no heat since then!  Also good that a few years ago when we had to replace the oil tank we looked into switching over to electricity so we had some idea of what to look for.  We didn't make the switch then, it didn't seem to be the moment.

But the moment surely arrived this fall.  It took two weeks but last Thursday a new electric furnace was installed.  You can see the apparatus next to the remnants of the old boiler in the photo.

Now, in some areas electricity may not be the most ecologically sound choice for heating, but in Quebec where all our electricity is produced from hydro dams or wind farms, it seems to be.  The fact that the new furnace may be more efficient is also a plus.  Consequently we are feeling a little smug as well as snug, now that the work is done.  

One, unthought-about advantage: we now have about 20 per cent more space in the basement to store stuff since the footprint of the new furnace isn't a footprint at all, but just a box on the wall.  Must go mop the floor now to get up the last of the soot liberated when the workmen cut the old furnace apart to get it out.  Then to move my garden stuff into the space, while Lee will take over that corner for his ever-growing woodworking projects! 

Keep warm!

Saturday Photo: Glass Houses, and On Line Harrassment

A strange thing happened this week: an anonymous person tried to comment on this blog, writing  "Dear Mary; Find a room in the glass house that you like to live in and go hang yourself." 

I erased it immediately, which I later discovered was the wrong thing to do because I now can't report easily: should have marked as spam and then proceeded to report it.

So, here's a glass house I like, the Haupt Conservatory in the Bronx Botanical Garden.  It's a shame that anonymous persons give places like this a bad name. 

Saturday Photo: No, This Time It's a Video of my Walrus Talk...

"Across the River, The Height of the Land: Physical and Political Boundaries"  That's the title of the Walrus Talk I gave Sept. 23 in Gatineau.  It was great fun to take part in the evening when seven people talked for seven minutes on the general topic "Boundaries."  I was the one who took the assignment most literally, but all participants had interesting things to say.

My reflections grew out of Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States, which will be officially published October 26.  Looking forward to that too...

Saturday Photo: Asters, the Stars of Fall

 Two sort of asters have sprung into bloom in the last couple of weeks.  The first are the ones to the right which I've been encouraging in our little garden.  They are, I think, called New York asters, but I'm sure I read earlier that they were taken back to France by Samuel de Champlain.  The others, below, bloom a little later and are called New York asters.

My flower books mention that the lovely flowers are found in many forms, which indicates an interesting, varied genetic heritage.  Certainly they do seem to adapt to many habitats.  The way they bloom also is interesting: the ones above first, the ones below just about the time the flowers of the first begin to fade.  This means that bees and other pollinators can go from one to the other in the end-of-summer buffet without a day's lapse of good things.

Evolution is a wonderful thing! So is the way that names change.  In looking a little further, I find that North American asters are now classified as Symphyotrichum, based on genetic analysis.  But as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so an aster will still be the star of a the fall garden.

Saturday Photo: Lesson from Spiders

Don't know much about spiders but I think this time of year they are very busy, spinning webs, capturing prey, and setting up a cozy home for the next generation.

Of course, whoever spun this wonderful web may have a bit of problem with the last part of that charge.  Certainly as soon as the car starts, the web will be blown away.  But it's an example of the perseverance that we all need to make it through this life.  And that's something to remember as the kids demonstrate for action on climate change.

Memo to self: check out the stories of Charlotte and Robert the Bruce for more lessons from spiders.

Saturday Photo: Good Summer for Bees

The weather is a little wet and cool right now, but one of the advantages of our hot and dry summer is the abundance of flowers and of bees who have feasted on them.

Nobody on my street uses pesticides that I'm aware of: either people don't care much about their little gardens, or they're eco-types who want to do things organically.  This means that every blossom is bee-friendly, and it's clear that they have been enjoying themselves greatly.

This of course is one of the ironies of modern life.  To some extent cities are friendlier to beneficial insects than the countryside.    In Montreal there also has been an increase in beekeeping, so much so that some voices have been raised to call for a cutback. In part this is because there seems to be too much competition between honey bees and native bees.

Don't know what kind of bee is visiting the hydrangea in the photo, but I find it very encouraging to see so many pollen-loving critters, no matter what kind they are.

Saturday Photo: The Connecticut River and Boundaries, Walrus Talk

The photo is of the Connecticut River which separates New Hampshire and Vermont.  It's just one example of how boundaries--arbitrary and otherwise--divide and influence people.

In this case, the state line is not the middle of the river, but the high water mark on the western side.  This has meant that the good sites for power dams are mostly in New Hampshire, which in turn meant that it was much easier for that state to turn to manufacturing, while Vermont continued as an agricultural state.

I'll be talking about this boundary and others when I take part in one of the CIFAR-The Walrus Talks on Monday Sept. 23 from 7-9 p.m. at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. The topic is Boundaries and my presentation is titled (at the moment at least) Across the River, the Height of the Land: Physical and Political Boundaries.  Tickets at https://thewalrus.ca/events/

And of course boundaries lie at the heart of my new book Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States which the University of Regina Press will be bringing out next month.

NEXT MONTH!  Hard to believe since this project has been in the works for so long. There will be more about the launch later.

Saturday Photo: More Pears Than the Squirrels Can Eat...

Well, actually I must admit that the photo was taken a few years ago, but the truth is that this year we have another bumper crop of pears.

Over the last week we--the grandkids a bit but Lee mostly--harvested a number so large I didn't feel like counting them.  Four have ripened enough to eat, and they taste very good.  The rest are reposing--as Ralph Waldo Emerson reportedly said: There are only 10 minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat."  I'll have to check and see how they're doing in a few days.  Until then we'll eat peaches and nectarines that seem at their most delicious right now.

July was hot and August, dry, which may have contributed to this bounty.  Don't know, but I'm glad to see that all is well, and that bees, who do the pollinating, weren't deterred by a wet and cool spring.

Saturday Photo: Roman Walls at Conímbriga, Roman Concrete Lasts

This week I sent of the revisions to my next book: Rock of Ages: How Concrete Built the World as We Know It. The University of Regina Press will bring it out in 2020.

This is one of the photos I'm suggesting we use.  It's of a Roman wall built in Conímbriga, Portugal, not far from the university town of Coimbra.  Dating from the Third Century CE, it was built on the far western frontier of the Roman Empire, but it still stands.  As such it's a tribute to the many, many Roman constructions that used their rather wonderful concrete, the secret to which was lost for about 1200 years after the Fall of Rome. 

You'll notice that this wall doesn't look like a modern concrete wall wood: the concrete wasn't poured into forms to cure.  Rather, the Roman usually built walls like this with a stone exterior and a hollow interior into which rubble and their concrete were dumped.  In many cases the stones have succumbed to the ravages of time, but the concreted interior survive.

Saturday Photo: Pictures from the Summer of Dust

This is the Summer of Dust on our street.  The work began in early June and probably won't be finished before early September.  Many things are being done: replacing lead water pipes, putting in new sidewalks, adding speedbumps and completely redoing the paving which dates (it would appear) from about 1910. 

Last week the sidewalks were finished, the holes for the pipe replacement were filled, and I looked at the mess and decided I had to do something.  The city will add topsoil and plant grass, we're assured, once the work is done, but that may be several weeks away.  So I went out and bought our own soil, sacks of composted manure, and many new plants.  (The last really weren't an extravagance, I keep telling myself: the garden centre had them all for 20 per cent off.  Think of all the money I saved!) Many of the old plants survived the work, but had to be replanted and/or composted so that they can regrow after being trampled upon. 

The top photo is what it looked like when I finished work last Monday.  Pretty nice, I think.  The other is of the street stripped of its asphalt but before the crews got down to the underlying concrete and rock.  You can't  drive the street this weekend without either being shaken to death, or driving a large 4x4.  Lots of neighbors have cleared out to avoid the noise and trauma, while the streetlights are out because a worker cut the cable up the street when excavating for the pipe replacement.

This means the street is very quiet today,  the upside to the summer of dust. 

Saturday Photo: Day Lilies....

The strong colours of summer are upon us.  This day lily has just finished blooming, and now the golden rod is high, with native asters about to bloom.

A nice time of year to garden, particularly today after a good soaking rain last night broke two weeks of drought.

Saturday Photo: The Road to Nieuport after the Field at North Hatley

Last week I posted a photo on my Facebook Page that
I'd taken of a field at Glen Villa Gardens in North Hatley, QC.  Lovely peaceful scene, I thought.  The  one lone power line crossing the sky seemed a symbol of peaceful countryside that might be almost removed from the crowded highway of 21st century connectedness.

The photo set me thinkning about a painting by Alfred William Finch, a Belgian painter who was influenced greatly by the pointilist Seurat.  It currently is owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, but it was on display at the Art Galley of Ontario earlier this year in a fascinating show Impressionism in the Age of Industry.(1888)

At first I thought the painting was just another pastoral (literally) scene that the Impressionists are famous for.  But then I realized that what Finch was painting was the very latest technology.  Those power poles have to have been among the first in the countryside, carrying telegraph connections across the fields.  (Pretty sure they weren't electricity wires, since at that time transmission of electricity over any distance was very rare for technical reasons.)

If you wanted to, you could read a whole parable in the sheep huddling under the wires, with the dog trying the herd them.  Toward what?  The internet?

Maybe.

Is that a bad thing?

Don't know.  Suffice to say that the creator of Glen Villa Gardens, Patterson Webster, keeps a beautiful blog, and without it chances are I would never have learned about her creation.

Saturday Photo: How Concrete Built the World as We Know It

The photo was taken two years ago when we were travelling in Washington state.  That's the Columbia river near Chief Joseph dam and the green stretches are irrigated fields and orchards.  It's a landscape that would be very different if it weren't for the water from the many dams along the Columbia.

This week the drama of rebuilding our street continued, with all the sidewalks torn up and then replaced by new concrete.  It's only been about 30 years since the last work on the sidewalks, which just goes to show you that you have to take care of concrete.  It's a marvelous material, but in its modern formulation, it isn't the Rock of Ages that people thought 50 or 60 years ago.

Perhaps ironically, this week I also signed a contract for my book about concrete. It'll be called Rock of Ages: How Concrete Built the World as We Know It: when I started working it I intended it to be a straight forward statement, but now I see that it must be taken with a grain of salt. 

Whatever, the book is supposed to come out in Fall 2020 from the University of Regina Press.  This fall they'll also be publishing my Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States.  It's ready for pre-order now, should you be so inclined.

Saturday Photo: Glen Villa Garden: Wonderful Place

Well, sorry, folks you'll have to wait until next year.  You missed Open Garden Day at Glen Villa, a 750 acre estate near North Hatley in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

Patterson Webster has created a wonderful mixture of wildscape--native plant, existing forest and carefully selected plantings--and sculpture. We spent a fascinating afternoon wandering around, admiring views, checking out wildflowers in our wildflower guide, and, yes, seeking shade as it was one of the hottest days so far this summer.

The garden is open only once a year, if that, and we felt lucky to be able to take advantage of the occasion which was a benefit for the Lake Massawippi Conservation Association this year.

Saturday Photo: Time to Plunge Back into Concrete

Once upon a time, I had planned to have a book on concrete appear in 2019.  But things got away from me--the zeitgeist, my editor said--and so the book for this year is Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States.

That's pretty much ready for the printer, so it's time to plunge back into concrete, specifically Rock of Ages: How Concrete Built the World as We Know It.  The plan is to have a revised manuscript ready by mid-September  for publication a year from now.

This is a beautiful example of concrete at its best: the floating staircase in the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec.  I've got a lot more....but more about that later.

Saturday Photo: It's Too Hot to Stay Inside..

Summer has arrived, and it is sticky hot in Montreal.  The canicule, as they say around here, is late, and so far much less intense than what has gripped much of the Northern Hemisphere this season. Alaska is warmer than New York City right now, and glaciers are melting in Greenland, leaving behind tons of sand. 

We walked home from dinner with friends in downtown last night, a 50 minute promenade which left us sweaty and tired.  What was remarkable was the number of people lounging around outside, on the terraces of restaurants and bars, but also just trying to get a little cooler.  We've made the walk many times, but it's been a while since we did it at that hour.  Reminded me of evenings in Singapore where the streets came alive with people of all ages once the sun set. During the day, everything went on in the air conditioned indoors.

Air-conditioning isn't as ubiquitous here yet.  That's why you get scenes like the one above where a couple has taken their breakfast to a park, in an attempt to get a little fresh, cooler air. But we all are going to have to get used to temperatures like this, it appears.  A reminder that climate change will hit us all, and we'd do well to work on strategies to fight it if we can't live with it. 

Saturday Photo: An Octopus's Garden in the Shade

Or rather in the sun.  And maybe it's a pentopus...

This is the temporary water arrangement in front of our house.  Five houses are hooked up to the hose which will be in place until all lead-pipe connections to the street main are changed. 

How long will that take?  Who knows?  Can't extend until winter, of course, because it would all freeze.

It's clear too that there's a lot of infrastructure work going on, some of it less successful than this connection.  Friday morning heavy equipment cut five big Bell cables not far from here, cutting of phone and internet access for literally thousands.  Bell was less than helpful with it's information, but I'm glad to say that things are back to normal chez nous, although our neighbors across the street still don't have telephone.