Un esprit persistant Ce dimanche 27 septembre, visite guidée des arbres du Cimetière Mont-Royal, gratuit, 10h à 13h, inscription: (514) 279-7358. Même visite, dimanche prochain en anglais, 13h à 16h. Cet été, j'ai eu le plaisir de me promener au village de Bic dans le bas du fleuve. Au bout d'une des rues principales se trouve le cimetière du village. À ma grande surprise, il y avait cet énorme arbre au milieu. Il faut bien comprendre que, normalement, dans les cimetières catholiques, on ne met pas d'arbres entre les pierres tombales mais plutôt sur les marges. Fallait que je m'approche pour mieux enquêter. En fait, comme vous voyez ci bas, il s'agit de deux grands tilleuls à petites feuilles.  Ce fait  m'a aussi intrigué: À mes connaissances, les tilleuls à petites feuilles - la même espèce qui se trouve sur bien des rues de Montréal - n'arrive au Québec que vers la fin du 20ième, comme le plus grand que je connais au coin nord-est du Parc La Fontaine. Pourtant, ce cimetière semble être établi vers 1850 quand le Village du Bic est établi. [caption id="attachment_4197" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Un mémoire bien protégé"][/caption] Je dois vous avouer que j'oublie le nom de la personne-ci enterrée mais je me souviens que son nom était français. Mais, je soupçonne une sensibilité écossaise quelque part dans son identité. Pourquoi? Parce que les Protestants plantent souvent des arbres en association avec leurs morts. C'est par croyance que le renouvellement constant de l'arbre gardera vivante en perpétuité l'esprit de la personne partie.

Promenade guidée cette semaine: Parc La Fontaine, le mercredi 29 juillet, 17h30 - 19h30, au coin nord-ouest du parc, inscription: 514-284-7384 ou bronwynchester@gmail.com Pour moi, la noisette était longtemps une noix  exotique qui vient peut-être de l'Europe ou de l'Asie. Ce sont des avelines moulues que nous mettons dans les gateaux sans farines, les tortes allemands et hongrois, souvent avec du chocolat car le marriage entre le cacao et la noisette était concu en paradis -- comme ont très bien compris ceux qui ...

Walnuts are trees of the Gods. It's right there in the name: Juglans means the nut, or acorn (as in the French, gland), of Jupiter, top God of the Romans. And the tree carries itself like royalty, spreading its long, strong branches almost as wide as high. Think of the tallest tree in the Redpath Dell, the hollow immediately to the east of the Redpath Museum on the McGill University campus. What you see here in this photo are the fruit of the black walnut (Juglans nigra, Noyer noir).  The edible nut is within the shell encased in this lime green husk. But this is not the fruit of the great walnut of the McGill campus, circa 1882, nor of any other establishment of 19th century, institutional Montreal. I took this photo yesterday in a post-industrial vacant lot. Not the sort of place you expect to find the regal Juglans, a tree that in this part of the world generally needs good soil and a certain amount of pampering, being a little north of its usual territory in Canada, which is the Carolinian zone of southwestern Ontario. So, what was Jupiter  doing in the Mile End Meadow (my name for the old Canadian Pacific railyard where Henri-Julien street meets the tracks, across the street from the Carmelite Monastery), growing amongst such hobos as the cottonwood poplar, sumac and Manitoba maple? It's easy to identify the source of the original nut planted, from which this walnut -- and its numerous sibling trees in the vicinity -- sprang. When I first began frequenting this meadow, in preparation for a guided tree walk, I could see that many of the tree species originated in the Carmelite garden where there is an orchard of fruit trees and numerous century old broadleaf trees, including silver maples, honey locusts and ... an enormous black walnut. Clearly, squirrels had crossed the Great Wall and planted the fruit. Still, I was mystified by the location of the five or six young trees I had spotted, all growing on the periphery of the field, along one wire fence or another. One morning last fall, waiting for my group to arrive, I sat quietly and observed a squirrel with an enormous -- at least relative to the size of the squirrel -- walnut in its mouth. After crossing Henri-Julien street, it dashed to the nearest bit of metal, mesh fencing. Squirrels don't like to travel on the ground; there are too many potential predators, such as dogs, and their short legs aren't meant for tall grasses. Fencetops, therefore, comprise an important element in their channels of transportation. The Mile End Meadow (MEM) is fenced, in intervals, by several long stretches of Frosst fence, and I watched as the squirrel traveled adeptly along the fencetops with the large load in her mouth. Finally, I lost sight of her at the end of western stretch of fencing, a point where there just happens to be a trio of young walnuts. So, I surmised, the squirrel either drops the fruit at the end of the fence or buries it there. And, given that the lawnmowers, which periodically  trim all that grows in the field, including young trees, can't get too close to the fence, the walnuts -- and numerous other plants -- thrive within the grace of the margins. Of course, it's not only the mowers that can't get too close to the fence, it's the walkers and cyclists too. So, all the vegetation that grows close to  fences, and buildings too, have a greater chance of survival than those in open. What's good for the squirrel is good for the walnut. I am fascinated  by the self-seeding trees, those that "escape from gardens," as we say. None, of course, escape on their own except those whose roots pass under fences and walls and send up new shoots, such as sumacs and black locusts. The self-seeders, are, in fact, seeded either by wind, water, birds or mammals. They depend on disturbed, open soil in which their seeds may fall or --in the case of the animal-seeded -- be buried. At this time of year, for instance, in my alley near des Pins and St-Denis streets, there are always a few cottonwood seedlings, sent by the wind from the next alley over where a Titanesque lady cottonwood literally casts her fate to the wind in the form of millions of tiny seeds attached to threads of cotton-like fibre. So far, none have survived more than the summer. There is likely too much competition in the narrow line of opportunity where the curb meets the asphalt.

Je suis à l'âge d'avoir des blancs de mémoire et d'avoir des mémoires des blancs. Des fois, ces derniers m'aident à retrouver les premiers. Prenons par exemple le blanc de la neige des peupliers deltoïdes (Populus deltoïde, Eastern cottonwood poplar) que Cedric Sam a décrit il y a un couple de semaines. À chaque fois que je vois ces petits bouts de coton qui flottent autour de mon coin près des rues St-Denis et Roy, je suis transportée à un parc de mon enfance et de mes ...

SOLSTICE TREE WALK: MONDAY, JUNE 22, 5:30 to 7:30 pm, RARE, SACRED AND MYTHOLOGICAL TREES OF McGILL's UPPER CAMPUS. Meet on steps of Redpath Museum. $12/$10. The date of the summer solstice is determined by the angle of Earth when it is closest  to the sun. This year, it falls on June 21, at 9 p.m., a date and time determined by physics, not by weather, unlike the blooming times of trees. You see, I associate the blossom time of the black locust, the tree pictured above on the right, with the solstice. For the past three years, I have give an annual summer solstice tree walk and the black locust has been in bloom. If you look carefully at the centre point of the photo above you will see a pannicle of white flowers. This, below, is what they look like up close. Gorgeous. You can see that each flower has the typical formation of a flower in the pea family which makes sense as the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia, Robinier faux-acacia) is part of the pea family, Fabaceae, as in the French for beans, les fêvres. When I went out hunting for a photo of the tree in flower, I thought I'd have no trouble finding one. Only last Sunday, there were fresh blooms on the black locusts that grow high on the southeast ridge of the Mount Royal Cemetery, near the Molson mausolea and not far from Camilien Houde road. But the situation downtown was different. The colony of black locusts most familiar to me runs along Prince Arthur Street on the north side, between Clark and Ste-Famille streets. A little north of the intersection on Sr-Urbain, you'll see the likely grandmother-grandfather (the sexes co-exist on one tree) on St-Urbain, a little north of Pr. Arthur. Its late afternoon silhouette always reminds me of the African acacia trees, St-Urbain being a bit of a savannah on this stretch. When I arrived this morning to photograph the black locusts, there was little left of fresh blossoms; most of the blooms were dried out, either on the branch or on the sidewalk. Only this young one, an offshoot from the roots of the elder to its right, still had fresh blooms. It also had thorns, which it typical of young black locust trees. If you're familiar with that steep area on in the Piedmont section of Mount Royal, directly below the lookout/parking lot on Camillien Houde, you may have seen the thorns on the young colony of black locusts that thrives in this area that's largely used for dumping snow and other urban debris. As the tree ages it loses the thorns, presumably because it is well enough established to withstand browsing by deer, cows and sheep. In the photo below, you can also see the delicate, leaflets that form the tree's compound leaf. It's a leaf that's easy to distinguish from other trees with compound leaves, due to the elliptical shape of the leaflets and to the blue-green colour. The silhouette shows the black locust leaf in contrast to that of a Norway maple.