Turning Vancouver into Hawaii
By Steve Whysall, Vancouver SunAugust 14, 2009
The beachfront at English Bay in Vancouver has a lush tropical look, created by the planting of hundreds of hardy palm trees and various exotic companion plants. It didn't always look this way.
In fact, it wasn't until Rudi Pinkowski, of North Vancouver, got the idea back in 1989 to raise the profile of the hardy palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) that the dramatic transformation at English Bay began.
At the time, Pinkowski was president of the Vancouver-based Pacific Northwest Palm and Exotic Plant Society.
"We all had palms in our gardens, but I thought it was important to get a palm into a public place where more people, especially tourists, would see it," he says.
"To me, palms are magical. They go perfectly with sea and sand and they create an ambience like no other tree can.
"Vancouver is also the only major city (I don't consider Victoria a major city) in all of Canada that can pull off this Mediterranean look. Toronto has its tall buildings, but it can't have an exotic promenade of palms."
To get the ball rolling, Pinkowski first had to convince Hermann Christian, parks superintendent for English Bay at the time, that planting Chinese windmill palms was a good idea.
"He gave me five possible locations. I picked the little traffic triangle at Beach Avenue and Pacific," says Pinkowski, who says he knew that the climate at English Bay, being next to the ocean, was milder than other parts of Metro Vancouver and had the perfect growing conditions for hardy palms.
The palm society made an initial donation of 16 windmill palms for the traffic triangle.
One plant was stolen, one suffered a mysterious setback, but the other 14 are still alive and thriving.
With the success of this trial planting, the parks department agreed to allow more palms to be planted at English Bay.
Today, the palm society has donated more than 100 trees for the area. Most are planted along Pacific Avenue, but several have been placed in small groves in prominent beds at the foot of Denman Street.
Pinkowski is thrilled by the way the towering trees, with their large fan-shaped fronds, enhance the beachfront and give it the look of Hawaii or Florida.
"These are the most urban-friendly trees you can find. They give shade, but not too much shade, they don't block the view because the canopy is compact, and they are easy to take care of.
"If you have a palm in your view, it is always an enhancement. When you see a postcard of a beach paradise, it always has three elements -- the ocean, a beach and palms."
Pinkowski thinks it would have been a mistake to plant a native species of deciduous tree.
"If you were to plant alders, you'd be sweeping up leaves all day long. Palms are very clean and require minimal attention. And they always look great, even in winter."
Three species of palms have been planted at English Bay -- Trachycarpus fortunei, which has been planted in gardens all over Metro Vancouver; Trachycarpus wagneriana, which has slightly smaller leaf-fans than T. fortunei; and the European or Mediterranean palm, Chamaerops humilis.
Companion plants have been planted to add to the exotic tropical atmosphere.
They include the castor bean plant (Ricinus communis), bear's breeches (Acanthus spinosus and A. mollis), yucca, phormium, Euphorbia characias, canna lilies, hebes and gunnera.
In defence of the extensive use of a foreign species, Pinkowski points out that while the coastlines of southern California, Spain and the French Riviera are resplendent with a variety of palms, no palm trees are native to those places.
"The land is our canvas and plants are what we paint with," he says.
"I see nothing wrong with using hardy palms to create a tropical ambience. It feels right in reality, as well as in our imagination, even if the plants themselves are not native here."
Twenty years ago when he and friends began growing palms, Pinkowksi says the media "couldn't figure out whether we were on the cutting edge of horticulture or just a bunch of gardening lunatics."
The most common response when he told people he was a member of the palm society was for them to offer him their hands.
"They thought I was a palm-reader. That's an indication of how far we've come."
swhysall@vancouversun.com
WATERFRONT PARADISE WITH A TROPICAL FEEL
At his home in North Vancouver, Rudi Pinkowski, the retired former owner of a chain of hair salons, has planted more than a dozen windmill palms.
He says the root system has an inverted-V shape, which makes it possible to plant companion specimens, such as Acanthus mollis and colourful annuals like petunias and impatiens, right up to the trunk.
However, over the past five years, Pinkowski has been working to turn the garden at his son's home in West Vancouver into a Mediterranean-style paradise.
As well as having one of the biggest gunnera on the coast, the garden contains a substantial stand of timber bamboo, big-leaf magnolias, swamp-rose mallow, elegant Tasmanian tree ferns, pollarded pine, yuccas and a row of scholar trees, richly underplanted with crotons, anthurium, bromeliads and Celosia caracas.
"It reminds me of Hawaii where you sit under a palm and drink a mai tai and forget all your worries. Perfect."
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q: Some time ago you published a list of gardening clubs. I'm wondering if that is still available. I am hoping that someone would be interested in buying my collection of Gardens Illustrated magazines dating from 1994. I have more than five dozen and hate to get rid of them, but space is becoming a problem.
SW: Consider this a free ad. Anyone interested in Marji Phillips' magazines should e-mail her at
mjphillips@telus.net. She's asking $1 apiece for them, $50 for the collection.
It's been years since we ran a guide to garden clubs, so the info is way out of date, but if you're looking for a garden club, check out the B.C. Council of Garden Clubs website at
www.bcgardenclubs.com. Click on the "member clubs" icon. You'll find information about dozens of clubs in B.C. and up-to-date contact numbers.
Q: I have lost all the Japanese maples that I once planted in my garden to some soil-borne disease. I have been advised not to plant them any more. Is this correct?
SW: I'm glad you asked because I recently told someone their Japanese maple was suffering dieback probably because of inadequate watering when in fact it could well be verticillium wilt. That is what seems to be the problem with your soil.
This is a fungal pathogen that lives in the soil and kills plants by invading their vascular system, making it impossible for them to take up moisture, causing them to wilt.
Aaron Roth, plant disease expert at the Kwantlen School of Horticulture, tells me: "Verticillium wilt is a big problem on Japanese maples. Usually the leaves on just one or two branches dry up and the tree gradually dies over several years, but the condition is exacerbated by the extremely hot weather we had this summer.
"To determine if it is verticillium, you can use a pocket knife to slice into the cambium to determine if it's brown (infected) or still greenish (just water stress).
"The same spot should not be replanted with a verticillium-susceptible plant for four years as it too may become infected from spores in the soil."
But Roth says inadequate watering is also a reason for some trees showing signs of wilting.
"Often people water enough to keep the grass green but the bulk of soil around the tree's roots is still too dry. Here the leaves on the southern aspect may show the most severe symptoms. "
Choice of cultivar is also important, he says,
"I have a one, 'Orange Dream', that gets leaf scorch every summer regardless how much I water it and it only gets full sun the first half of the day!"
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