Planted and maintained for over two decades, the Asian Garden honours Vancouver’s Chinatown residents. Cottonwood Community gardeners share their memories of watching Asian Chestnut Trees, Mulberry, Persian Ice Plant, Kiwi arbour, White Clematis, Persimmons and more plants mature over time.
Transcript: The Asian Garden is huge. There’s Asian Chestnuts, Mulberry
A belle etoile Mock Orange with red highlights in white blooms
Some Asian maple. And this is what the Persians call an ice plant tree
Cotoneaster. Member of the rose family and white clematis climbing up the back. Also purple monkshood.
I remember I came along three years in and I was looking at these tiny little chestnut trees and persimmons and thinking, what’s the point? You know? We were fighting weeds then just as we’re fighting weeds now, you know? And, and I thought, well, this is never gonna last. But of course it did. And the trees are now trees. Some of them are approaching maturity and some of them are approaching old age.
It’s all muted colours and hydrangeas and ferns and hostas and rodos. Rodos are quite colourful.
See, look here. This is great. See these big fronds here that are coming up. Those are two royal ferns. They get really big. Three, four feet tall. Okay. And, uh, we rescued them. We dug up those two magnificent royal ferns that she had been growing there for years and they’re, they’re taking and I’m so excited. Oh, good. Yeah.
Audio recording, editing, mixing: Lorna Boschman
Audio Optimizer: John Burton
