Early days

BACK STORY

(Note to readers: You might want to skip the back story. It turned out a lot longer than I'd intended.)

When we bought our house on Gabriola Island in 1996, one of the things we loved about it the most was the fact that it was completely surrounded by trees. This part of the island (attractively known as Phase 4) had been parcelled into ¾ acre plots some years previously. Almost every other owner had, as his or her first act, cut down almost all the trees on their property, but the people who’d originally owned our plot had simply cleared a space in the middle and built a small house on a hill. So, even though there are neighbours nearby, when you look out the windows of this house, all you see are trees. It feels as if you’re in the middle of a forest and we loved it.


Don’t let the photo fool you (as the image we first saw of the listing did). This was taken recently, following a major renovation in 2006. The house was like a reverse Tardis – smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside.

The original house had been a small cabin: the entrance was at the back into the kitchen, with a small bedroom on the other side of a partition wall, a bathroom and livingroom with wood stove. At some point someone had built an extension out front of the original – a large livingroom on top of a semi-finished basement. So, really, despite looking like a two storey house, it was only one – the basement/ground floor not even weatherproofed for safe storage. When I first looked around the house, I saw the tiny bedroom and thought, Oh, no, this will never do. You could barely squeeze a double bed into it. Then I paused, in what was now the diningroom (the old livingroom), turned around full circle and declared the house was backwards. Clearly the large front room was where the bedroom should be, so that when you woke up in the morning you could look out the picture window and see trees, trees, trees. The room with the wood stove should be the livingroom, so you could curl up and admire the fire, and the partition wall should be taken down to provide and open kitchen/diningroom. Oh, yes, and the semi finished basement should be finished as a spare room and writing space for me. (Photos now added here.)

As soon as I realised that, I was in love with the house. Of course, the path of true love never runs smoothly, nor did our purchase of the house. It was listed with a cowboy realtor who offered clients a saving by only charging a 3.5% fee – which they accomplished by trying to cheat the buyer’s agent out of their half of the traditional 7%. Patrick, our friend and estate agent, went basically to war with them. Our first offer was turned down. We dejectedly began to look at other properties on the island, but nothing ever came close. After our second day of looking, I asked Patrick to drive past “our” house. He did and I said, “We want that house.” And Patrick said, “Okay, it’s not going to be pretty, but I’ll get you that house.” And he did. Some of his methods would lose him his licence (if he was still in the business), so I won’t elaborate, simply say, no, it wasn’t pretty.

In February 1996 we rented a van and brought it, loaded with excess bits of furniture from our rented house in Vancouver, to our new getaway on Gabriola.

Things we’d somehow failed to notice, but discovered that first weekend:

• Nowhere in the large front room or the semi-finished basement was there a single plug.
• The only window in the livingroom was a small skylight.
• If you looked up at the ceiling surrounding the woodstove chimney, you could see the sky, an infraction which meant we would not be covered on our insurance if we actually used the stove.
• The large, multi-paned windows in the basement were set into, but not attached to their frames. (We discovered this when we touched one and, almost in slow motion, it fell out of its frame onto the rocky ground outside – miraculously not one of its 24 panes so much as cracked.)
• Just as we were getting ready to leave, the pump stopped working and no water was coming out of the taps.

Mike, my then partner (and still good friend), groaned and referred to the house as The Money Pit.

Somehow while we were there and from Vancouver the following week, we tracked down the appropriate tradesmen to deal with all these problems.

So where, you ask, is the garden in all this? Patience. There was much to do inside the house during the limited time we had on the island weekends and during the summers. Our most excellent handyman Tom put a picture window in the livingroom. I painted. I ripped up the hideous carpet in the kitchen and bathroom, put down tiles, replaced the hideous carpet in the back “bedroom”. (There was nothing we could do about the hideous carpet which covered the floor space in the middle and front rooms. It was too big a project for me and too expensive.) Where, you ask, was Mike while I was doing all this home improvement? Working on his computer or watching baseball games on television. DIY is most definitely not his thing.

It was only a year or so later, when the inside of the house was transformed as far as I could take it without a major renovation that I started to think further about the outside of the house than hanging a basket of flowers.

Gabriel garden project – phase one

On our pie wedge-shaped lot there was one corner, near the road, which had been cleared of trees and actually got some sunlight. It was a mess and it wasn’t easy to access from the house, what with all the overgrown undergrowth and the rotten tree which had fallen across what might be a path to the sunshine.

It was time and phase one of the Gabriola garden project began.

I recruited Pat, our nearest neighbour, a widower and retired logger (whom I never, at that time, told that I worked for Greenpeace, the forest campaign being somewhat contentious).

Step one: Pat fired up his chainsaw and demolished the fallen, rotten tree. We had what would turn out to be the first of many bonfires, which dealt with the bits of log, fallen branches, overgrown undergrowth.

Step two: I bought some metal poles and wire fencing. Pat helped me hammer the poles into the ground. We wrapped the metal fencing around these and used some of the excess to block the entrance.

Step three: Tom, our handyman, who had just replaced his fence, donated his old gate, which we jury rigged between two trees.

Steps two and three were crucial to combat one of Gabriola’s greatest gardening challenges: deer. I love the deer on the island, get excited when I see one, but, with the exception of daffodils and a few other flowers, there’s pretty much nothing deer won’t eat in a garden. So, a fence and a gate had to be in place before anything else could be considered.

I couldn’t be too ambitious with my gardening plans. At that time we were only on the island weekends and for varying periods in the summer. Mike, a poli-sci prof at UBC, had the luxury of spending more time there in the summer. Unfortunately, his thumb was any shade but green, so there wasn’t much help to be had from that quarter other than watering. There was no question of growing fruit and veg, but I did want somewhere sunny with some flowers, somewhere to while away a pleasant hour or two in the summer, relaxing with a book.

The area which I was transforming was rock-filled and uneven. I dug over part of it, pulling out roots, trying to make a raised patch, surrounded by some of the rocks I’d jammed my shovel and back into. I planted some rose bushes. Because I’ve always loved lilacs, I planted a lilac tree, surrounding it with wire to protect it from the deer which might (could) jump over the fence. I bought a weed wacker to keep the combination of grass, clover and weeds down to a reasonable height.

Mike and I bought a bench. Constructing it from the flat pack was a reminder of two things: Mike’s complete absence of a DIY gene and our total inability to communicate and work together on any sort of construction project. Somehow (I honestly don’t know how) the bench ended up in one piece. I bought some forest green marine paint and coated it. We had a garden of sorts and something to sit on.

The following summer, I somehow wangled three months of working from home and so had a decent amount of time on the island. Now it was time to have more than the bench to sit on. Despite my workaday role as a toxics campaigner, I threw all principles to the wind and bought a white PVC table and chairs. Now we could have lunch in the garden. Hurrah! My plans were still not very ambitious: a few pots with flowers in them, bulbs planted for the spring. It was enough. I had a garden (of sorts).

In 2001 I had an opportunity to take on a one-year contract role with Greenpeace UK. I could (but won’t) go into all the reasons that Mike and I were not functioning well on any level as a couple by then. And I was missing my family in England, tired of the semi-annual fortnight of running around from London to Liverpool to Bristol, double booking my days with lunch and evening meetings to make sure I saw everyone. It was time to go home.

The one year turned into nine, not all with Greenpeace: WaterAid, Homeless Link, the National Union of Students, a surprising stint at the League Against Cruel Sports and a grand finale as acting director of Free Tibet Campaign, all factored into the mix. During that time I’m pleased to say Mike and I remained friends.

My semi-annual trans-Atlantic trips went in the opposite direction, usually at Christmas, which was a wonderful time to be on Gabriola. There’s nothing quite as pleasant as sitting in front of a roaring woodstove on a cold winter’s day. Still, not the right time of year to work on, let alone enjoy one’s garden. The only use for the garden during those trips was for yet another bonfire with Pat to get rid of the bits of wood and other crap (don’t worry, nothing toxic) from various renovation projects. The only flora addition during that period was the planting of a rhododendron to mark the grave of a much loved cat.

Return to Gabriola

In early 2008 disaster struck for Mike. On the lengthy waiting list for knee replacement surgery, he’d had a fall, badly hurting his other leg. He hobbled around for a couple of weeks before finally going to his doctor in Vancouver. The x-ray revealed that his entire femur was shattered and the reason it had broken so easily was that it was riddled with cancer. By the time he was admitted to hospital the cancer seemed to be spreading all over his body. Femur replacement surgery ensued, followed by chemotherapy, followed by radiation. I’d managed a quick visit in April between the enormous pro-Tibet rally at the Olympic torch relay in London and the Dalai Lama’s visit the following month. I went back for three weeks in September, planning to get him back for at least a visit to Gabriola, which he missed terribly and hadn’t seen for months. Unfortunately, just before I arrived, he’d been hospitalised again, this time with pneumonia. Hoping that a visit to Gabriola might still be possible before I left, I came over for a weekend with my friend Catherine to make sure the house would be ready.

It wasn’t and we realised the evening we arrived that we were going to be spending a lot of our time cleaning. Bless Catherine, who is simply the best, she got tucked right in.

Catherine hadn’t been to the house on Gabriola since shortly after we bought it. Despite the three inches of dust on everything (the house sitters having somehow failed to grasp the concept of a dust cloth or furniture polish), she was impressed with the transformation. By then the house had been through its major renovation and was as it should be: an open plan kitchen/diningroom in the back, the “basement” now a finished bedroom with en suite bathroom and, almost most importantly, the hideous carpet in the two front rooms replaced with lovely new carpet. (I’ll let go of my shock and dismay – though it was hard to do at the time – that somehow in the reno process Mike had been persuaded to not only paint all the woodwork and wooden window frames, but that he’d chosen to have them painted brown, a colour I detest for anything except actual wood.)

In the morning light I was keen to show her the garden I’d created. Imagine my heartbreak at discovering my garden was no longer there. Oh, the fencing was still just about standing, but the gate, which had at some point been left open, had warped and rotted, fallen off its hinges. Paint peeled off the rotting slats of the bench. The white PVC table and chairs would never be white again. And of course everything I’d planted was dead, dead, dead. Okay, Mike had been hobbling around with a bum knee for over a year and had been in no position to do any gardening and, okay, the various house sitters who’d been taking care of the cats in his absence hadn’t seen gardening as part of their remit, but, oh, my, it was heartbreaking.


I had to take her to Drumbeg to cheer myself up.

Back in Vancouver, I took Mike, now out of hospital, to an appointment with his oncologist. The news was not good: the radiation which had been tried when the chemo didn’t work, had also failed. There was nothing else they could do. He had maybe a year, possibly less, possibly six months, possibly three. I understand why these guys say something as fatuous as “Try to enjoy the time you have as much as you can”, but it really does seem a slap in the face at the time.

There was no way to get Mike to Gabriola before I was due to leave. He was gutted. Inclined towards neediness for as long as I’d known him (one of the reasons being half a couple with him had proven impossible for me), he put neediness to one side and told me simply and honestly that the prospect of facing his last ever birthday, his last ever Christmas, his last ever New Year would all be a bit more bearable if I could be there. Well, what do you say to something like that? Of course I agreed to come back. Free Tibet had by then appointed a full time director, so I wouldn’t be leaving the campaign in the lurch. I went back to London, found someone to cover my half of the house share in Walthamstow for a few months, gave my notice at Free Tibet and flew back to Vancouver in time for Mike’s 65th birthday in November. We celebrated his birthday with his daughter, son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters. Then we headed over to Gabriola.

It was the worst winter on record. It snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. There were power failures, during one of which the pump first froze, then fried. It was a week before the plumber could actually get to the house to replace the pump, a week of mornings begun by clambering across the road through the snow drifts to fetch pails of water from Pat’s house. Shovelling the drive, shovelling a path from the house to the woodshed, only to have four tons of melting snow fall with a crash off the roof and the trees and onto the freshly shovelled path. Despite all this, I was for the first time in eight years reminded just how much I did love this place on Gabriola. It was also a reminder of what good friends I had here.

In January I took Mike to Vancouver for his next appointment with his oncologist. The news was astonishing: his cancer, three months earlier still rampant and unstoppable, had gone into remission. I claim no role in this (although sanctification would be gratifying).

This was, as they for some reason say (whoever ‘they’ are), a different kettle of fish. Mike, most happily, was not going to peg it in a matter of months. Unfortunately, he still had major mobility issues. Although he could use a walker (and before I left a cane) over reasonably short and even distances, he was still recovering from femur replacement surgery and still in a wheelchair much of the time. If he wanted to continue living on Gabriola – and he did – he was going to need help after I left. A period of sorting this ensued, before I was able to leave him in the care of lovely Kelly (who became a good friend) and delightfully (for the most part) wacky Claudia.

I flew back to London. Sadly for me (and a lot of other people, I do concede) during my absence the economy had collapsed. Jobs were in short supply and I agreed without hesitation to take on some temporary work writing new business tenders for my friend Irmani’s housing charity. Still, as grateful as I was for the income, the contrast between fronting the hottest campaign on the planet in April 2008 and writing tenders in April 2009 was a bit dispiriting, truth be told. A year of temporary contracts, of filling out applications which didn’t even lead to interviews, of interviews which didn’t lead to jobs ensued. I was out of work and on the ludicrous dole (£65 a week job seeker’s allowance and a weekly housing benefit that was £35 a week less than my actual rent), when a letter arrived from the estate agent reminding us that our tenancy agreement was up for renewal in May.

How, I asked myself, can I renew the tenancy for another year when I don’t even know if I’ll have a job in May? It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. I had a house on Gabriola. And a garden that needed me. Sod it, I thought. Time to go.

Before leaving London behind, I sign up my cousin Peter to assist me in my summer project of rehabilitating my poor garden. Peter, a lifelong gardener and for many years before his retirement a syndicated gardening columnist, has considerable experience in rehabilitating the sad gardens of his family.


Peter getting dug into his daughter Philippa’s garden in Ireland.

Normally, as above, his involvement is hands on, but distance dictates he will, in this instance, have to direct operations electronically from afar. I am instructed to send him photos and some compass references, which I promise to do.

GABRIOLA GARDEN PROJECT

Day 1 - 24 May 2010

It is late in the evening when I arrive back on Gabriola in May. I decide to put off looking at the garden until the morning, thus able to remain blissfully unaware of quite what a challenge I’ve set myself when I blithely stated in London that I was going to spend the summer transforming the garden.



In the morning I go down to the garden and gulp. The gate is, of course, still broken. The fence is still in need of some attention. The bench is still dilapidated. But now, unlike my previous winter visits, there is also two and half feet of grass and weeds covering the entire area.

Oh, well, I think, first job will have to be getting out the weed whacker. Until that job is done I can’t even begin to assess what needs to be done.

I go to the shed, where I know the weed whacker was hanging in December 2008. Uh, oh. No weed whacker. Or hose (also last seen in the shed in December 2008). Or shovel. Or hoe. Or rake. Or … Zip. Nada. Rien. Absolutely no garden tools of any description anywhere. Buggeration.

I sigh, go into the house, send an email to Gary, who’s done or organised a lot of work on the house and property for Mike in my absence, asking him if he has any idea what happened to the weed whacker and hose, last seen in the shed. He replies that he has no idea, but can lend me both. I tell him I’m a long way away from needing the hose, but the weed whacker would be most appreciated.

Day 2

I go out in the morning, take some more pictures of the garden to send to Peter, make a note to myself that I need to get a compass. Sigh.

Late in the afternoon Gary drops off his weed whacker (and the hose I’d said I didn’t need).

Day 3

It rains.

Day 4

Pat is supposed to be coming over to have a look at the garden and offer suggestions about how the fence might be strengthened – at 88 and with a bum shoulder now, he won’t be pounding posts in again, but I’d appreciate his thoughts.

Of course, it’s raining, so we give up on the idea of garden work and instead go to the pub for a pint and a few games of pool. He beats me 8-2 and the only reason it’s not 9-1 is that he misses the eight ball and pots the cue ball instead in his final shot of the final game. On the plus side, in the one game I did win, I managed to pot four balls in one go – a personal best in a game which I’ve never really mastered.

Day 5

The rain has finally stopped. I pull out the long extension cord (one of the few things still left by the gremlins in the shed), plug in the weed whacker, start whacking weeds. I hear someone calling my name, look around. It’s my neighbour Jamie, welcoming me back to Gabriola. We briefly discuss the sorry state of the garden in general and the bench in particular. I tell him optimistically that it will not be long before he will see an amazing transformation. I’ve already lined up, thanks to Mike, access to a small rototiller, which I shall be able to put to use once I’ve dealt with the knee deep weeds. Jamie carries on up his drive and I get back to work.

I’m about halfway through the job, just beginning to feel some sense of accomplishment when Gary’s weed whacker makes a popping noise, stops working. Smoke emits from the motor. Uh, oh. Borrowed weed whacker now dead. Shit.

Day 6

On my way to the shop, I run into (not literally) Sally, Jamie’s other half and our other neighbour. I tell her the sad story of my missing weed whacker and the demise of the borrowed one. She tells me they have one I can borrow, although it’s somewhat jury rigged, so she will need to consult with Jamie to see if he thinks it’s safe to lend out.

Day 7

It is raining.

I ring Sally and Jamie for the verdict on the jury rigged weed whacker. It seems the starter switch (which probably cost five cents to manufacture) had stopped working. After much checking with shops and manufacturers, he was informed that it could not be replaced and that he would simply have to buy a new one. Jamie was having none of that. He took the handle apart and bypassed the starter switch. The weed whacker now works directly off the mains. As soon as you plug it in (which must be done carefully to make sure it doesn’t start leaping about), it’s going. As long as I follow these instructions, it’s safe to use and I’m welcome to borrow it.

I say I will come by to pick it up if it ever stops raining.

Day 8

It rains. Apparently, unlike the UK, where the first half of May was crap, it had been glorious in British Columbia until the day I arrived. Ha. (Emails from friends in the UK inform me that as soon as I left, beating the ash cloud by four hours, the weather turned beautiful. Grrr.)

Day 9
It’s still raining, but Sally and Jamie are going away for the weekend, so I decide to collect the weed whacker anyway, in the hope that it will stop raining while they’re gone. We have a chat about the best sources of various plants on the island. There is apparently a Thai woman who has a stall at the Saturday market and who sells the best tomato plants and herbs. No point in visiting her at the market this week as I still don’t have a gate on the fence.

Have I mentioned the deer? I do believe I have, but to recap: there is nothing other than daffodils which deer won’t eat. Partly for this reason, people on the island have planted a profusion of daffodil bulbs – not just on their property, but along the side of the road, everywhere they can find some soil. It’s a beautiful sight in the spring.

Day 10

It’s market day, but, as noted, no point in buying any plants for the garden until the rotted gate is somehow replaced. I figure just seeing plants at the market will depress me, so I don’t go.

It’s still raining and I’m getting very impatient and wound up.

Day 11

Still raining.



Bloody hell, I’ve just seen my first BC mutant (technically called banana) slug in years. I’d forgotten how big these buggers are. I remember the first time I saw one after moving to BC in 1990. I pointed in horror, demanding to know what the hell it was and refused initially to believe the person who told me dismissively that it was a slug. Slug? Get out of here. I’ve seen slugs and they should not be the size of a 12” ruler. (Trust me, I kid you not.)

I update my status on my soon to be deactivated Facebook account to mention the slug sighting – with an added message to my friend Rowan, who moved to Vancouver the same time as me, but has been back in England for more than a decade now, that it was indeed one of those slugs. She responds by asking, to the bemusement of other friends, if I licked the slug’s bum? One of the first pieces of nature trivia we somehow picked up in BC was the fact that if you lick a snail’s bum (hard to imagine, I know, and never tried by me) your tongue will go numb.

Make a mental note that if I ever reach the point where I’m ready to start emailing my cousin Peter for long distance gardening advice I will have to mention not only deer proofing, but the threat posed by mutant slugs.

Day 12

Still bloody raining. In a somewhat vain attempt to feel as if I’m doing something, anything to move this project along, I dig out a couple west coast gardening books I bought many years ago and start rifling through them.

Of course they’re both about what you should be doing every month of the year and make the assumption that everything is already in place, simply being properly tended. It’s a depressing reminder of just how far I have to go before I can start to catch up with the bloody books.

However, I do discover in one of the pest sections that mutant banana slugs aren’t actually that big a threat – the ones you have wage war with (beer traps for me) are the little black ones we all know and hate. (I remember going for a walk with Mike one summer’s evening many years ago and seeing an army of black slugs out and about.) This cheers me up, but only for a second or two.

Nowhere in either book is there any mention of how to keep deer at bay. Methinks some internet searching is called for.

When, oh when, is it ever going to stop raining?

Oh, shit. Just remembered the whole point of keeping this Gabriola garden project journal is to set up a blog to share my progress (ha!) with friends and family. It's now June. Better do it.