Great Trees of Canada

By David Menary

A personal exploration into some of Canada's greatest trees, from coast to coast to coast. Although some of the oldest, and biggest trees are examined, so too are the stories behind the trees. Canada is a land of trees, both in diversity and in sheer numbers. But the stories behind the trees harken back to the first humans to inhabit North America, and continue through European settlement, until today. The stories are uniquely Canadian and they give texture to this vast land and the people who inhabit it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678019440

Book preview

Preface

This little book about great trees of Canada does not tell the whole story of Canada’s greatest trees, but it does tell the stories of some that have left their imprint on me.

Almost every province of Canada has an Honour Roll or registry of trees, and this is a good starting point for people interested in exploring, or perhaps adding to, their knowledge of those trees that are truly special.

It’s not necessary for a tree to be old or tall to be special, of course. Trees are like pieces of fine art, and their value is in the eyes and minds of the beholder. Trees have inspired the poets among us to write verse, as they have artists to paint masterpieces.

This is a book about Canada’s trees; it’s also about writers and painters, and the trees they have immortalized. It’s a book that took root with me almost four decades ago, and I always look forward to returning to it to provide updates, for there are always new tree stories that emerge across the country. It’s like an old friend that I never tire of seeing.

Many have referenced cathedrals when describing the atmosphere provided by trees and forests. In the same way, someone likened the experience of visiting the old haunts of the Group of Seven on Algoma’s Grace Lake to sitting in a vast cathedral.¹

There are great stories to tell about our trees; some of these go back to the basement of creation and are literally written in the very bedrock of Canada. More recent stories within the last millennia or two are to be found in the telling rings of our trees, from one end of Canada to the other, if not in the oral traditions and stories of our Indigenous people, and the settlers that came.

So let us begin to tell some of them.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

          Christina Rossetti ²

The Great Trees of Canada

Listen to the trees talking in their sleep. What nice dreams they must have! ³

L.M. Montgomery

On the tidewater evening of August 1, 1909, in Cavendish, P.E.I., a disconsolate Lucy Maud Montgomery sought solace and encouragement in a spot lined by white spruce hedgerow she called Lover’s Lane, a small passage leading south from the Green Gables house on her beloved island of red dirt and sea breeze.

Just a year earlier her novel, Anne of Green Gables, was first published and was destined to become a classic in children’s literature.⁴

This evening, she wrote in her journal, I spent in Lover’s Lane, green and alluring and beckoning! I had been tired and discouraged and sick at heart before I went...and it...stole away the heartsickness, giving peace and newness to life.⁵

Those white spruce, their foliage, their beauty, their quietude, are just part of Canada’s arboreal heritage. From the Maritimes to places like Cathedral Grove and its huge stand of Douglas firs along the mist-enshrouded Pacific coast, the trees of Canada have defined our land and its people dating from the earliest times of human settlement, perhaps forty or fifty-thousand years ago. They give us fuel, shade, building materials, a texture to our land, and the air we breathe. The great trees do even more than that—they inspire.

Revered and loathed, trees have been at the heart of  First Nations lore that has been passed from one generation to another for millennia. Moreover, they have been a constant presence in our historical record from the days of the first Europeans. Catherine Parr Traill wrote of this relationship between trees and the pioneering settlers in Backwoods of Canada (1836): They would not spare the ancient oak from feelings of veneration, nor would they look upon it with regard for anything but its use as lumber. They have no time, even if they possessed the taste, to gaze abroad on the beauties of Nature…⁶

Indeed, many early settlers hated trees and regarded them, as Anna Jameson wrote, two years after Traill’s landmark book, as their natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.⁷

The Canada of pioneering days held some of the largest and greatest trees the world has ever seen—it is thought that the largest tree ever known, a massive Douglas fir, was cut down near the beginning of the 20th century not far from the site of present-day Vancouver’s Capilano Suspension Bridge⁸—and though early settlers were in awe of these trees and the wood they provided, trees were also detested by the men who cleared the land, for the sheer magnitude of these impenetrable forests meant backbreaking toil almost without end.

In 2006 a 91.4 metre Douglas fir fell on the bridge during an early winter snowstorm that devastated many of the oldest trees along the Pacific coast.⁹ The cables holding the bridge also held the giant centuries-old tree that fell onto the bridge. There was a renewed confidence in the bridge.

I was here when it happened, said Sue, who, in 2020, was VP of sales and marketing at the facility. We were closed for three and a half months after that.¹⁰

The bridge held up, she said, noting it has anchors embedded deep on either side of the canyon. They performed as they should in that the anchors on the side of the bridge that the tree was on rotated. So while the bridge was unusable and damaged—we had to install new cables—the suspension bridge itself remained intact.¹¹

The tree was massive. Luckily it fell in the middle of the night. It was nearly 50 tons and was clinging on to the rocks on the side of the canyon. It was a tree we had been looking at for a long, long time. Arborists would come in and inspect it and note that it had been there for roughly 500 years and would likely be there for 500 more. But the particular storm we had in 2006 was the storm that did it in.¹²

It was, indeed, a particularly violent storm, breaking off many seemingly healthy old-growth trees that had weathered the storms of half a millennium or more. Due to the size and weight of the tree that fell on the bridge, even though the bridge held, removing such an immense object from a suspension bridge was no easy task.

It had to be cut in sections because if it was lifted off intact, if that were even possible, it would have created a slingshot effect. It took a while, but eventually the tree was carried away in sections. And then the cables had to be replaced and the anchor replaced. It was a long process.¹³

Today they still have a remnant of the tree at the bridge site, and a portion of their boardwalk crosses it. The part that remained after the sections were cut off is still there.

I saw the remnant in 2007 when I last visited the bridge. The first time I saw the bridge was as a 10-year-old in 1969, nearly half-century earlier. Much had changed in that half century.

The forest side today is still very similar to how it appeared a long time ago, even if the other side is full of tourists the year round who are eager to walk the bridge and visit the natural-looking side across the canyon with its towering trees.

As a boy in 1969 I was enthralled with the bridge, and traversed it several times. On that same visit when we crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge for the first time, it was a memorable event, as was the movie we saw at the drive-in theatre across the bridge, called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, starring Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.¹⁴ In my mind, the bridge and the movie are inextricably intertwined.

The Capilano Suspension Bridge is one of Vancouver’s main attractions, and throughout its storied past there have been many notable events in and around the bridge, including several deaths and miraculously, someone who fell but survived, though the fallen Douglas fir was one of the most interesting.¹⁵

It is just one of the stories that have grown up around the bridge  during its long history. Built in 1889 by George Grant Mackay, a Scottish civil engineer and the Vancouver parks commissioner, the bridge gave visitors a good view of the massive trees in the Capilano valley.

The Capilano bridge, wrote Brantford poet E. Pauline Johnson in her 1911 Legends of Vancouver, was named after her friend, chief Joe Capilano.¹⁶ In her book the Mohawk poet retells some Native legends while taking readers back to a time before Vancouver existed, when the land belonged to the Squamish people, of which Capilano was chief.

First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest, and indeed, throughout the Americas, have been part of the North American domain for millennia. Just how many millennia remains a subject of debate. For most of the twentieth century the consensus was that the peopling of North America occurred after the last ice age, in the vicinity of 13,000 years ago. This was called the Clovis theory or doctrine.¹⁷ Until recently, the oldest confirmed archaeological site in the Americas was at Swan Point, Alaska, dating back more than 14,000 years, which was in contradiction of the Clovis theory. But then came an announced find in August 2019, in Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, indicating a human settlement more than 15,000 years old several hundreds of miles inland from the Pacific coast. It was the latest find to stretch the theory of the first American coastal migration back to earlier times. The Idaho settlement was located on the Salmon River, which connects to the Pacific via the Snake and Columbia rivers. It seems clear that the earliest Americans can be traced to at least 15,000 years ago and perhaps even earlier than that, which is something that recent genetic evidence points to. Indeed, genomic analyses of ancient human remains indicate that the forebears of Native Americans became isolated from other Asian groups around 23,000 years ago. More and more theoretical and physical evidence points to the first migration of people into the Americas well before 15,000 years ago, and possibly more than 20,000 years ago.¹⁸

Both Pauline Johnson and Chief Joe Capilano were offspring of an ancient people who had lived for tens of thousands of years in the Americas, yet the two first met not in Canada, but in London, England in 1906 when they were received at Buckingham Palace by their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The two Indigenous leaders—Johnson was three-eighths Indigenous—were a rarity in that they were able to trace in reverse the trip made by the early colonialists, seeing the settler mother country and meeting the colonial leaders on their home turf. But Chief Johnson was not in London to sightsee; he was there to lay Indigenous grievances before King Edward VII. He was upset at the number of settlers coming into B.C., encroaching on indigenous land without permission.¹⁹

At that meeting thousands of miles from home, Johnson was able to greet the Squamish chief in his native Chinook tongue. Johnson, who grew up at Chiefswood on the Grand River, just south of Brantford, Ontario, died in 1913, only a handful of years after retiring to Vancouver in 1909. Her ashes are buried in Stanley Park, while Capilano, who died a year after Johnson arrived in Vancouver, is buried in a mausoleum in West Vancouver.

Johnson loved the park. In her final years, even as she was dying from cancer, she made the daily two-mile walk from her apartment on Howe Street to the sentinel Siwash Rock, at the First Narrows entrance to Burrard Inlet. Far from her childhood along southern Ontario’s Grand River, she made her way to the seaside park no matter the weather. Ancient myths and legends surround this rock, as Capilano told Johnson, but legends also surround Johnson’s memorial at Ferguson Point in Stanley Park. Capilano lived on the Capilano Reserve across Burrard inlet from the city of Vancouver.

There, in a grove of fir and cedar trees, not far from a busy road, water pours down through stones to a basin and a larger pool below. The poet’s profile is carved in the stone and looks toward the forest. This is the spot where her ashes were buried, along with two of her books, Flint and Feather and Legends of Vancouver.

Capilano told Johnson of the way things were, before the white man. Even though the bridge that bears his name is a marvel and enjoyed by thousands of visitors, seeing things from Capilano’s perspective is worth recounting.

We...have lost many things, Capilano told Johnson. We have lost our lands, our forests, our game, our fish; we have lost our ancient religion, our ancient dress; some of the younger people have even lost their fathers’ language and true legends and traditions of their ancestors.

An oldtimer might lament the commercialization at the suspension bridge, just as she would do at the transformation of Niagara’s Falls.

Several years ago I took a visitor from Munich to Niagara and although he was impressed with the natural beauty, he also remarked with surprise at the signs, symbols, and tourist trappings that surround it.²⁰

In the spring of 2004 a new feature, called Treetops Adventure, was added at the bridge named for the former Squamish chief. Visitors delight in traversing seven bridges suspended between old growth Douglas fir on the west side of the canyon, and walking up to 30 metres above the forest floor. Echoes of childhood tree forts and the Swiss Family Robinson's tree house reverberate there. It is far removed from Traill's description of a world when trees were expendable.

Until very recently, Traill’s description stood the test of time. But today, in almost every province, there are publications typically called Trees of Distinction, or Honour Roll of Trees. The very existence of these documents helps ensure the survival of our great trees. 

The late poet Robert Service, who lived in a log