Beautiful Botanicals

Sunday 25 May 2025

Writing this on Tuesday on the Amtrak Cascades train en route for Seattle with the NW Pacific coast providing the scenery. Up at stupid o'clock for a 6am check-in at Pacific Central station, but arrival in Seattle will be before lunch all being well so it makes the most of the day. Again, more pics to be added at a later date if you're reading this and interested!

Our Sunday was a beautiful sunny day spent in two glorious gardens. Short Canada metro line and bus trips took us to Queen Elizabeth Park which provided an excellent heightened view of the city.  Its biodome conservatory is full of colourful, exotic plants and parrots, many of which are over 20 years old, though not all of them very co-operative when it came to taking their photos, seeming to choose to do their grooming with their backs to us at the moment cameras were poised! The park also featured a wonderful garden full of evergreens, rhodedendrons and Japanese maple that's been developed within an old quarry which provided a stunning contrast to all the colours.

A particularly special moment came when I spotted a humming bird darting in and out of a tall shrub. I paused to take a closer look, and suddenly it flew straight towards me, hovering perhaps only a metre away at chest level - maybe it was attracted by the red in my T-shirt, but it really did look straight at me with its beady eyes for at least two or three seconds, its beating wings a complete blur, before disappearing back into the shrubs. Too quick for a pic sadly, but I will always remember that look.

Another interesting feature was the lovelock sculptures; normally these padlocks, which feature the names of couples who are at least aiming for a lifelong relationship, are just attached to bridges, railings or piers, but a sculptor had created four lifesize aluminium sculptures of couples locked in tango-like embraces on which hundreds of padlocks of all kinds were displayed. Some had names just scratched on spontaneously, others were neat jobs with "John & Mary Forever 2017" and suchlike already professionally etched.

We took a walk then to the Van Dusen Botanical Garden for lunch and a look-see, about 20 minutes away. This was an equally glorious space with an infinite variety of plants, trees and flowers, considerably enhanced by a temporary floral sculpture exhibition/competition which was based on characters and settings from Downton Abbey. The skill of the floral artists in their craft was just incredible, with every tiny detail which could be seen on stills from the show (photographs were on the descriptors next to each one) faithfully and creatively represented by leaves, blooms, dried flowers and grasses moulded and pinned to lifesize mannequins. I have never seen anything quite like it - evidently it's been done before on a different theme, and I bought some cards in the gift shop of female figures in fashions from different centuries from a 2022 iteration.

Buses being thin on the ground and some distance away, I ordered a very cheap Uber to take us back into the city (sorry Lovepreet, your BO, constant murmuring into your phone and stopping for petrol with passengers in the car cost you a tip), where we time for gelato before our booking of a ride on the Flyover Canada attraction at the end of the pier at Canada Place (where the floating hotel cruise ships dock before heading off for Alaska and the like). We hadn't quite known what to expect but thought "why not" and bought tickets for both the Flyover Canada and Canadian Rockies rides. 

These are indoors - after an introductory immersive video shown on all sides of a room, about 50 people at a time are seated in rows on a couple of levels of airline-style seats. When the ride begins, the rows lift forward into the air so that your feet are dangling, and move up and down and side to side and at a diagonal angle as you become immersed in what is presumably drone footage (considerably speeded up) of both the wilds and cities of Canada. 

For example, you may be immersed in a daredevil ski run in the mountains one moment, then it changes to an urban scene where you follow a skier zig zagging down a snowy street in winter, followed by being lifted into a starry night sky among the skyscrapers. Skilled mountain climbers use crampons to scale up sheer glaciers at jaw-dropping heights, mountain bikers weave and jump through rocky terrains, fishermen haul in their catches, a First Nation rider gallops bareback along a high plateau; the variety of footage (though some of it was duplicated in the second experience) was incredible and sometimes dizzying in its speed, but both experiences were totally thrilling and engaging - I was only sorry that they hadn't included any footage of the Rocky Mountaineer train! The gift shop also yielded a couple of items I had been seeking, and were on special offer, so...

We walked back to the apartment and stopped off for our supper booking, the Italian Kitchen restaurant which had had a long queue outside the night before that we took to be a good sign. And it was a good dinner (though Toni kept hers very simple as she was feeling a little queasy from the chocolate gelato and ride combo), Lucy and I both opting for some delicious salmon (which of course is good everywhere here). It's a very attractive restaurant with white linen, a good menu, comprehensive wine list and wait staff who constantly check "how are we doing here", but an unfortunate and somewhat illogical inflexibility when it comes to any kind of request vaguely off-menu. Nor did we appreciate our bottle of Gavi being dumped on the table with the cork still in it and having to ask for it to be opened when it suited the waitress to do it. Hey-ho - maybe a little pretentious.

Back to the apartment and I wrote up the previous instalment of the blog with a glass of wine before retiring for my final night on the sofa bed (Toni was flying home to Toronto the following afternoon, so I'd get a proper bed for the final night), while reacquainting myself with the delights of Schitts Creek which I'm watching on Netflix for the second time. I now realise how very Canadian it is.