Cottonwood’s Native Plant Garden honours both the Indigenous communities who live locally, as well as the plants that traditionally thrive in our area of the Pacific Northwest.
Transcript
That’s probably my favourite area of the garden now is the Native Plant Garden. And that’s where I wanna spend more time.
We sat here for a long time looking the big blackberry patch, thinking, ‘what the hell can we do about this,’ right? Then, EYA. For one of their projects decided they were gonna soil test. Right? And they came back to us saying, “You know, we’ve got serious contamination down along the track and the only solution that we could affect and in fact, this solution that everybody else uses this to bury this stuff.”
We actually got some free soil from UBC and hired the cousin of a gardener to bring his bobcat over and spread it, and then planted some trees in there. And so now we’re working on the understory, the ferns.
Well, we fought the city when they, we developed the park here. And when we dumped the soil here, the city said, “How could you do that? Who, who gave you permission?” And I said, “Well, nobody did, but it’s on our license and, you know, it’s polluted. We either use it or we’re gonna lose it. Right?”
When we had gotten money from the city to build the expansion, which is now called Accessible Garden, the Native Garden came into focus. So we decided, okay, we gotta do something. We gotta plant it. We gotta, you know, make it more of it than we have. And I got on the native garden team and I worked with them.
So we largely planted this off with no money. We might have got, you know, a couple hundred dollars from the garden every once in a while. So we would every winter take cuttings. If we were gonna buy anything, we’d buy one thing and take cuttings from it. Basically no money was spent down here.
Audio recording, editing, mixing: Lorna Boschman
Audio Optimizer: John Burton
