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Overview
Trees define so much of Canadian life, but many people, particularly in the Golden Horseshoe area of Ontario, don’t know that much about them. Granted, it is harder here: there are more trees that are native to this area than anywhere else in Canada.
The great storytellers of the landscape, trees are looking glasses into the past. They speak of biology, ecology, and geology, as well as natural and human history. Through a greater understanding of trees, we can become more rooted to the land beneath our feet, and our place in it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459744813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 27 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Paul O’Hara is a writer, field botanist, landscape designer, and native plant gardening expert. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: On the Edges
“So, we going to The Cool Spot?”
That question was usually asked late on a Saturday just before we headed home, usually after a bunch of beers while we were partying either in the woods, in my townhouse garage (my mom used to tolerate us gathering there), or at the home of one of the guys whose parents happened to be away that weekend.
The Cool Spot was a Sunday retreat for our gang throughout our late teens and into our early twenties. Over five or six years we probably made the trek more than thirty times, in all seasons. We even camped out a couple of nights at our ramshackle forts.
Sunday morning came, calls were made. I’d collect my leftover beers in my pack and stand out on my driveway. A few minutes later I’d hear the lawnmower-like engine of my buddy Lee’s old Mazda coming around the corner with Zeppelin, the Doors, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young blaring from the tape deck. I’d jump in, and Lee would grab his pack of Du Maurier regulars, pop one in his mouth, and throw one my way. Car lighter popped, smokes lit, we were off to pick up the other guys. A stop at the Jug store for some dogs, buns, and more smokes and we’d be rolling up Trafalgar Road to Dundas Street.
As we turned off Dundas, we’d descend into the floodplain of the Sixteen Mile Creek at Lions Valley Park in Oakville, where we’d meet up with more of our gang. Fully assembled and looking like a pack of hooligans decked out in red-and-black-checkered lumber jackets, army pants, and all manner of bed-head, we’d start toward the unmarked trailhead, well away from the dozens of park patrons laid out on blankets, throwing Frisbees, and tending portable barbeques in the grassy parklands on the other side of the pedestrian bridge.
Then we’d take a path straight up the valley wall, a forty-five-degree incline. The red clay and shale crumbled underfoot as we’d wind our way through the stunted trees that clung to the slope. At the top, the land opened up into an old pasture bounded by forest. Here we’d stop and catch our breath before continuing north along the valley rim trail at the edge of the pasture. We’d walk single-file along the thin path, ducking under the low, heavy boughs of the trees perched on the valley edge. On the far side of the pasture, the trail entered open woodland and was blocked by a deep tributary valley of the Sixteen that we’d bypass by scaling down the valley, crossing the tributary, and climbing back up the other side. By the time we rejoined the valley rim trail, we’d have a good sweat going, and we’d skip along with greater ease.
The rising wind signalled our destination was close. A few more steps and the trail opened into a grassy flat. We’d reached The Cool Spot.
The slope, which dropped forty metres to the creek below, was populated by grasses and clutches of cedar. From the flat we had a wide view of the Sixteen valley, with its forested walls and shaggy floodplain willows. In the centre of the flat was our firepit, and within minutes we were seated on logs around a roaring fire, drinking beer and whittling weenie sticks.
I had my best fire-cooked dogs at The Cool Spot, when the sun was shining and a warm breeze blew through the valley. We never saw anyone out there besides a few folks on horseback from the farms along nearby Burnhamthorpe Road. The Cool Spot was our place — a place to relax and act like silly teenage boys.
After our campfire cookout, we’d roll rocks down the slope and listen for the splashes, then scale down the cliff and huddle in the cedar copses and smoke cigarettes and cook hash bottle tokes.
When the winds were high, we’d head for cover in the woods where we built a couple of half-assed forts that we’d throw together with hammers, nails, and handsaws — started but never finished. Here it was more of the same, sitting around a fire, cooking dogs, drinking beers, making up games, and taking the piss out of each other. We’d return home by late afternoon, exhausted, hungry for Sunday dinner, and a little more able to tolerate another week of high school.
The Cool Spot was our gathering place and, without ever saying it, we knew our pilgrimage to it was special. There was something that drew us teenagers there. I later learned that that pull was not unique to The Cool Spot. It exists throughout the entire Golden Horseshoe.
Meeting Place
It’s been repeated many times for many years that the name Toronto comes from a First Nations word for “meeting place.” Other interpretations have included “land of plenty” or “land of abundance.” According to University of Toronto linguist John Steckley, the name Toronto actually originates from the Mohawk word tkaronto, which translates as “where there are trees in the water.”
So, how does an error like this get repeated for so many years? It’s because we want to believe it. It’s stuck in the collective conscious of the citizenry because Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe feel like a “meeting place” and a “land of plenty.”
The Dish With One Spoon treaty, negotiated three centuries ago between the Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples of the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence Valley regions, actually does acknowledge the gathering and abundance qualities of this land. The treaty refers to the land as a place to be shared; a metaphorical “dish” from which all were free to hunt, gather, trap, and fish, while eating from a common “spoon.” It is one of the oldest treaties in the New World, and unlike those negotiated between the First Nations and the colonial powers, it has never been broken.
The Niagara Peninsula and the north shore of Lake Erie were also known as a land of plenty. In Early Narratives of the Northwest (1634–1699), French explorers Dollier and Galinée, while camped in Port Dover in 1669, marvelled at the richness of the land around them:
I leave you to imagine whether we suffered in the midst of this abundance in the earthly Paradise of Canada; I call it so, because there is assuredly no more beautiful region in all of Canada. The woods are open, interspersed with beautiful meadows, watered by rivers and rivulets filled with fish and beaver, an abundance of fruits, and what is more important, so full of game that we saw there at one time more than a hundred roebucks in a single band, herds of fifty or sixty hinds, and bears fatter and of better flavor than the most savory pigs of France.
In 1822, the feisty Scot Robert Gourlay, in his Statistical Account of Upper Canada, also commented on the fullness of Niagara: “If there is one [spot] on earth intended for paradise more than another, it is this. In point of climate, soil, variety, beauty, grandeur, and every convenience, I do believe it is unrivaled….”
It’s no wonder St. Catharines is called the Garden City and Niagara is Ontario’s prime production area for tender fruits and wine.
The bounty of the Golden Horseshoe has been attracting human life since the retreat of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet more than twelve thousand years ago, when the earliest Indigenous People hunted caribou and other barren-ground mammals in the challenging tundra-like environment. As the climate warmed, the land was transformed from muskeg to boreal forest to broadleaf forest. The increased biodiversity spurred the development of more populous and socially complex Indigenous societies. Trade networks that ran from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond were established. Sophisticated political systems blossomed. Subsistence based on hunting and collecting was replaced by sustainable horticulture. Camps became villages that were no less complex than their counterparts in medieval Europe.
Five hundred years ago, the Golden Horseshoe was largely the home of the people known to history as the Neutral Confederacy, a sophisticated and independent group of Iroquoian-speaking communities that lived in a “neutral” position between the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy to the north and the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) of what is now western New York State. Tens of thousands strong, their villages ranged from Niagara north to Hamilton, as far west as London, and across much of the north shore of Lake Erie.
With the arrival of Europeans, and the economically disruptive trade goods that they brought with them, the First Nations of the Great Lakes basin found themselves pulled into longstanding European rivalries. As the demand for the pelts of fur-bearing mammals grew, the French and English pitted nation against nation in a proxy war for control of the fur trade. European writers of the day, who often emphasized Indigenous savagery for obvious political reasons, claimed that the Haudenosaunee diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and influenza.
Those who survived were most likely adopted by the Seneca, the westernmost nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose culture, lifestyle, and language was probably most similar to their own.
The Mississauga, a nation of strong, politically astute Anishinaabeg fur traders from the north shore of Lake Huron, moved into the Golden Horseshoe in the 1690s to fill the resulting void. The Mississauga enjoyed another century of hunting and gathering in this land before increased European settlement in the late 1700s pushed them into land surrenders they did not want and onto reserves where it was much more difficult to pursue their traditional lifestyle.
Since that time, millions have made the pilgrimage to the Golden Horseshoe, and today it is one of the most concentrated gatherings of humans on the planet. Almost nine million people — a quarter of the total Canadian population — call the Golden Horseshoe home, with another four million projected to move here over the next twenty-five years. More than one hundred different languages are spoken here and Toronto is recognized as the most culturally diverse city in the world.
But this gathering of life extends well beyond humans, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, insects, and also to trees, as the Golden Horseshoe is the meeting place of three biomes.
Table of Contents
- Maps
- Preface
- Chapter 1 On the Edges
- Chapter 2 First Steps
- Chapter 3 In the Street
- Chapter 4 In the Field
- Chapter 5 In the Forest
- Chapter 6 On the Water
- Chapter 7 On the Path
- Chapter 8 In the Stars
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Appendix 1 Native Trees of the Golden Horseshoe
- Appendix 2 Exotic Trees of the Golden Horseshoe
- References
- Image Credits