Walk Explores a Treasure Trove of Trees

(Guest article by author and photographer Nina Shoroplova about a May 16 Salmonberry Days walk exploring the trees in Chaldecott Park.)

By Nina Shoroplova

Chaldecott Park boasts a treasure trove of trees. I walked there with about fifteen local tree-enthusiasts on the Queen Victoria long weekend, as part of the celebrations of Dunbar’s Salmonberry Days.

First, we shared our names and our particular reason for being interested in the walk. Everyone was from the Dunbar neighbourhood, except me. I live in Vancouver’s West End.

In the northwesterly corner of the Dunbar neighbourhood, Chaldecott Park is more than a mix of playing fields with a spray park for children. It has a forest of native trees that are as tall as the trees in the Pacific Spirit Regional Park just across the way. It was named for Francis Miller Chaldecott, the wealthy lawyer and landowner who organized the municipality of South Vancouver in 1892, and then gave 12 acres of his own land to the municipality. Part of that gift is now the 8.5 acre (3.45 hectares) park.

The City of Vancouver has an Open Data Portal of City trees. From that online website, it is easy for anyone to find out the common and scientific names of the trees growing in Vancouver. Recently, park trees have been included, even the ones in the forest in Chaldecott Park.

Photo of Chaldecott Park Forest taken by Nina Shoroplova.

The park is bounded by four streets, but we just walked three of them and the forest. First we walked the King Edward Avenue Median from east to west. In 1892, this thoroughfare became 25th Avenue. Then 37 years later, in 1929, the municipality of South Vancouver joined the municipality of Vancouver and the median was renamed for Queen Victoria’s first child, Edward, later to be known as King Edward VII (1841 to 1910).

In the median of this dual carriageway, we admired the red horsechestnut, Aesculus carnea with its large red flowers; the northern catalpa, Catalpa bignonioides, then just growing whorls of leaves; some American elms, Ulmus americana ‘Brandon’; a couple of giant sequoias, Sequoiadendeon giganteum; and a grove of black pine or Austrian pine, Pinus nigra. The pines had dropped so many cones, they were hard to walk beside.

A close-up of an inflorescence on the red horsechestnut, Aesculus carnea. Photo by Nina Shoroplova.

Walking around the corner from the median into Crown Street we found ourselves under five London plane trees, Platanus x hispanica, a natural hybrid between the Oriental plane and the American sycamore. It is highly tolerant of pollution and provides wonderful, airy shade.

Several interesting species of trees grow on Crown Street: plum trees, Prunus cerasifera, a deep burgundy in May; several female katsura trees, Cercidiphyllum japonicum, with their tiny pods of seeds; golden beech, Fagus sylvatica ‘Zlatia’, which was more of a lime green in colour; Persian ironwood, Parrotia persica, one of my favourites in the fall because of the rich colours of its leaves; and one Norway maple, Acer platanoides ‘Globosum’, which prepared us for the trees on West 27^th Avenue.

From under one globose Norway maple, we are looking over to the others on West 27th. Photo by Nina Shoroplova.

All but one of the trees on 27^th Avenue are the globe cultivar of Norway maple, Acer platanoides ‘Globosum’. The odd one out is a cultivar of a northern catalpa, Catalpa speciosa; I don’t known which cultivar. This tree had been pruned heavily to avoid poking out the eye of any pedestrians walking by.

Then we went into the forest. These are mostly native trees, including two very tall Pacific dogwoods, Cornus nuttallii; thirty-five western redcedar, Thuja plicata, very tall, providing so much wonderful shade that we were almost cold; a couple of incense cedars, Calocedrus decurrens, with their shiny fronds and long scales; and many bigleaf maples, Acer macrophyllum, with their huge leaves.There are other trees growing there too, such as the occasional planted (yes, planted, but still native!) Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. We realized we could learn a great deal just from the trunk of a tree.

Looking at the trunk of a western redcedar. Photo taken by Marlene Anderson-Joyce.

We didn’t see any salmonberry flowers or their berries or the rufous hummingbirds that fly all the way from Mexico to feed on salmonberry flowers and thereby pollinate them. And give their name to Salmonberry Days. However, we all learned something about these trees that we hadn’t known before.

Some of us looking at the many western redcedars, Thuja plicata. The rest of the participants were deciding whether a particular tree stump was of a western redcedar or of a Douglas-fir. Photo by Marlene Anderson-Joyce.

Nina Shoroplova’s most recent book is Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. She is the secretary of Nature Vancouver’s botany committee, and a member of the Vancouver Chapter of Master Gardeners, contributing articles of texts and photos on trees and shrubs growing here in the Greater Vancouver Regional District in the PNW. She leads tree-identification walks on behalf of Nature Vancouver, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Stanley Park Ecology Society, and other groups.