Post by Nina Shoroplova

It was fortunate that Caroline Penn and I moved the date of Nature Vancouver’s “Fall Colours in Stanley Park” tree-identification walk away from Saturday, October 19, the heaviest rainfall day of the latest atmospheric river. But perhaps not so good that we moved it to the morning of Tuesday, October 22, because it rained cats and dogs once again.

Originally there were twenty of us registered for the Saturday, but weather and work intervened and just ten of us intrepid and curious souls gathered on the Tuesday in the horsechestnut triangle in Stanley Park, opposite the Vancouver Park Board offices. The list of trees was long but there were several favourites: harlequin glorybower, Persian ironwood, and the redwoods jumped off the page.

The yellow-leafed tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) was a highlight. Here are three photos of it: one showing the unusual four-lobed leaves, one showing the strength of branching and the umbrella canopy of the tree, and finally a distance shot of the whole tree (I took this photo last year).

Burning bush (Euonymus elata) was a favourite once everyone saw it. Two separate plants grow near the Pitch & Putt. Appealing were the brilliance of its magenta leaves and the squareness of its branches, bolstered into thickness to discourage any large herbivores who might be coming by: goats, for example.

Beside one of the burning bushes (in an area once known as the Putting Green) are the four enormous conifers from California that are close to a hundred years of age: two giant sequoias (Sequoidendron giganteum), a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), and an incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens). The oval female cones—the ones with seeds—of the three redwoods diminish in size from the largest to smallest through giant sequoia, coast redwood, to dawn redwood. The seed scales resemble a pair of lips. When the cone is mature, the seed scales open and the seeds fall. There can be as many as 250 seeds in each giant sequoia cone.

Among the fallen coast redwood female cones and branchlets were some white fungi, their caps upturned. 

Growing beside Lagoon Drive—we had to watch for cars—are two Persian ironwoods (Parrotia persica). While the colours of the leaves on the trees were not as thrilling as they sometimes can be, some of the leaves gathered in the gutter were astounding stripes of reds and yellows or reds and oranges.

We walked along the southern shore of Lost Lagoon, under the weeping willows and beside the black locusts. We admired the grove of American sweetgum (the gum that oozes from injuries to the trunk can be chewed for its sweetness) with this year’s and last year’s cones and their many, many leaf colours. 

Leaves on the sumac shrubs were also in glorious shades of yellow, orange, and burnt cinnamon.

With the rain showing no signs of letting up, half the group returned home, wet but content. The rest of us retraced our steps toward our starting place. Along the way, we saw a deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara) with its myriads of pollen cones getting larger and falling. 

Look at what was written on the yellow leaves of an eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) we passed! Just what we had been doing all the wet morning. 

Finally, we visited a bank of harlequin glorybower (Clerodendrum trichotomum) different from the one we were going to visit in the Information Booth Parking Lot. This plant’s name means “treelike shrub of flowers in threes”. Had the species epithet been trichromium, meaning flowers in three colours, its meaning would be closer to the way I see these flowers: (1) first are the fragrant star-shaped petals, (2) then come the magenta sepals that hide the fruit, (3) then the sepals open into magenta stars to reveal the grey-white fruit that change colour to bright blue! Most uncommon.

A wet but satisfying walk.