According to Asian astrology, the Lunar New Year which started yesterday is the Year of the Dragon. Let’s hope that’s an auspicious sign for one trying to festoon Snapdragons across a city.
Chinese New Year
January 25th, 2012Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2012New Year’s Day is often a chance, however arbitrary, to look forward with hope for the future. Not sure if that’s too likely given that Richmond voters in the last civic election returned many pro-density councillors to office without getting answers to such questions as how to provide services to all of the expected new residents with a shrinking land base from which to do it or giving them adequate park space when the size of the average back yard in Richmond makes a postage stamp look positively roomy. But I am optimistic about one thing. I’m optimistic there will be many, many more snapdragons blooming around town in places they weren’t before.
Civic election time
November 7th, 2011Civic elections tend to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, but given the city’s primary planning tool – the zoning bylaw – and the impact it can have on where you live day in and day out, there are several questions one should ask of their local candidates.
- Will the candidate protect the character of existing neighbourhoods or allow them to be taken over by higher-density housing?
- Will the larger tax base that higher densities of populations bring cause a decrease in the overall tax rate?
- If not, what will the excess be spent on?
- Does the candidate have a plan for increasing availability and size of city services, such as recreation centres, parks and libraries, to accommodate an increasingly packed in population.
- How will this affect the city’s transportation policies? Will all modes of transportation still be tolerated?
In short, is it a good thing to be packed in like sardines into the area allotted to your city, or would you rather have a real community with services enough for all and the ability to find a space to call your own?
Francis Road
March 31st, 2011
North Richmond Alliance Church
March 7th, 2011
I’m not a religious person, but if I were I’d think that this house of God shows very little evidence of His creation. I don’t know why most of the Churches in Richmond are so bland. I could perhaps see it if there were some valuable use of the land, say if it were occupied by a library, a cultural centre, a farm, but if it must be occupied (and subsidized by taxpayers) for one of the less-productive industries on Earth, they could at least make it look nice.
Let there be Snapdragons.
Groundhog Day.
February 2nd, 2011
With groundhogs in both Canada and the United States unanimously predicting an early spring (and, in the case of Punxsutawney Phil, a Super Bowl win for the Steelers), I took to the abandoned patches of dirt of Richmond once again. This year, I plan on using a combination tactic of both direct seeding and small, newly grown plants, to maximize chances of blooms come this summer. I’m starting with the seeds now, while the weather edges towards wet and rainy more of the time and can satisfy the young plants as they mature.
Richmond Centre is the main shopping mall in the city. Its multi-storey parking lot, I noticed, has several of these boxes of dirt intended as planters on the sides. While the ones facing the mall itself are tended and filled with plants, the ones on the South side are neglected and full of grass and weeds. How convenient! Plenty of virtually unobstructed sunlight and some mulch ready and waiting. I didn’t do much about removal of weeds, simply raked it over to expose bare dirt and spread seeds in a line down the middle. That should be enough until several Snapdragons are established.
Because there are so many of these planters, I’ll be coming back over and over in the coming days to get them all. But I will definitely get them all.
Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2011Winter really only started eleven days ago, but there’s something about the new year, that notion of a fresh start, that gets me thinking about the year ahead and how best to start planting. Fortunately, being in a rainforest, our winters are nice and mild and wet, perfect for seeds just starting out. Spring may not be here yet, but it will be sooner than you know.
Happy New Year!
Autumn falls upon us all
September 23rd, 2010
It’s the first full day of autumn. Another summer is over, and unfortunately, I can’t report a successful planting this year, either. My first site of the year at the bulldozed lot on Number 4 Road was buried under a mountain of sand meant to pack the ground prior to construction. The horribly dense, rocky ground around the giant head of Lenin wouldn’t let the roots in deep enough for them to survive. My final site, this recently emptied lot at the corner of Blundell and Gilbert, was the most promising. While the original house was gone, some garden soil near what was once the front steps was perfect for my young plants, but then just days before the first Snapdragons were about to open, I returned to find the plants had been pulled up and removed. I guess someone felt they needed a little brightening in their yard more than this bare patch of dirt did.
I am, of course, not finished. My own garden has been very abundant again this year, and I have many, many, many thousands of seeds stored up. I will be working extra hard starting early next year, in many new places, until the city is positively alive with Snapdragons, and a touch more livable and lively among the ever upwardly rising urban sprawl.
Lenin
August 6th, 2010
The statue entitled Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head certainly caused no shortage of controversy when it was unveiled just prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was installed as part of the Vancouver Biennalle public art project and even though it was not in a prominent part of Richmond, nestled behind two tall towers away from major thoroughfares, it got the bulk of the attention. Lenin was fond of saying “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”, which probably explained the dearth of art or beauty in Soviet Russia, so I can only wonder what he must have thought of gardening or landscaping as a profession. Regardless, since I am only doing so for the sake of beauty that Lenin’s legacy largely forgot, the Snapdragons I planted behind his right ear, in Earth so hard that calling it soil would have been a kindness, will do wonders for this small lot where the statue is located, which seems about as dreary as any other you might have found a statue of Lenin in during communism’s heyday.
Got paid? Sue anyway!
July 13th, 2010It was pretty much accepted that the $59.2 million dollars paid to the Musqueam band for the Garden City Lands would be used to continue legal proceedings against various other people the band thought they could squeeze money out of. That they were also going to sue the City of Richmond over it, after being paid, came as a bit of a surprise.
Just nine days after closing the sale of the Garden City Lands, the Musqueam band launched a lawsuit against the City of Richmond claiming that the city did not live up to its obligations under the Memorandum of Understanding and demanding the terms of the agreement remain in force. The agreement was contingent on getting the lands removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve, which the city attempted twice unsuccessfully.
The Musqueam claim in their court filing that, since the lands were unlikely to be allowed to be developed, they accepted the purchase offer from the city under duress. Just how one can be under duress to accept nearly sixty million dollars is not explained, but it can probably be safely said that this money was not shared with the band’s approximate 1100 members, or at least, none have come forward to spend their near $55,000 windfall from the sale.
The City’s position is that the MOU ended when the purchase was agreed to and that the Musqueam have no further claim. It is now up to a B.C. Supreme Court Judge to determine if the case is as absurd as it sounds.
