Submitted by Nina Shoroplova

Twenty or so of us Nature Vancouver members gathered on the plaza above Lost Lagoon and the Nature House for this tree-identification walk through one ornamental garden and several forest trails in Stanley Park. 

With people picking out which plant they wanted to see from my list of trees, shrubs, and native herbaceous plants growing along the route, we soon had the morning planned. We stopped at the black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Tortuosa’, and admired its offspring, not the cultivar ‘Tortuosa’ but the species. 

We looked at the big weeping willows along the shore. Licorice ferns were growing in several of their branch crotches and their wounds. We noted the compound leaves of the mountain-ash, each leaf having as many as 15 leaflets, making it Sorbus scopulina, a native, rather than the ornamental Sorbus aria on the list. The leaves are quite different.

We compared the small (10 cm across) palmate leaves of introduced sweetgum trees with the very large palmate leaves of native bigleaf maple (30 cm across). And we admired the vigorous nature of a bigleaf maple that had been cut back to being a tall stump.

We stopped partway along the path that borders the Pitch & Putt on one side and Lost Lagoon on the other. “What are we looking at?” a lot of people asked. 

“What do you see?” I responded. 

We could see the squirrel-scrabbled trunk of a western redcedar, rhododendrons, three magnolias, a ginkgo tree, a cornelian-cherry dogwood, and a pair of dawn redwoods. The redwoods really are a superb pair, their cone-shaped canopies reaching the sky. We admired their cones and fallen leaves.

They are named dawn redwoods, because this species was around at the dawn of time, and considered extinct everywhere, until a few such trees were found growing in China in the mid-1940s. Eventually, several expeditions later, seeds of dawn redwoods, the deciduous conifer known scientifically as Metasequoia glyptostroboides, made their way to Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston, MA (A Reunion of Trees, pp. 230-36). They have since been planted ornamentally and do well in many environments. At one time, before an ice age froze them to death in North America, dawn redwoods were a natural part of our deciduous forests.

Further along the same path, we looked at a variegated tulip tree, Brazilian giant-rhubarb (Gunnera manicata), southern catalpa just starting to leaf out, and a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) that was surviving despite half of it having fallen in a wind.

The China-fir, Cunninghamia lanceolata, was one of the trees of interest along the path.

From then on we walked three trails: Rawlings Trail, Bridle Path, and Tatlow Walk. 

At the intersection of Bridle Path and Tatlow Walk, we admired the one still-standing western redcedar, one of the original, much celebrated Seven Sisters. Completing our loop by coming back to the pedestrian path on the north side of Lost Lagoon, we admired the two larches (Larix is another deciduous conifer) and a native ninebark that was in bloom. Our last stop was at the Camperdown Scotch elm. We snuggled inside its canopy, admiring the smoothness of the rootstock elm and the whirligig spiral that is the Camperdown scion.

Finally, one of the walkers, someone from Iran, wanted to see sumac growing, because its red berries are ground into a popular spice in Middle Eastern cooking. There are many tall shrubs of smooth sumac, Rhus glabra (not perhaps the one used for the spice), growing along the easterly shore of Lost Lagoon. I have some powdered sumac spice at home. I will add some of the tart red powder to my lentil and vegetable stew tonight. Hmm.

Thanks for walking with me and Caroline Penn, our chief photographer.