: Ariel Gordon
: Treed Walking in Canada's Urban Forests
: Wolsak and Wynn
: 9781989496176
: 1
: CHF 5.10
:
: Sonstiges
: English
: 296
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

With intimacy and humour award-winning poet Ariel Gordon walks us through the streets of Winnipeg and into the urban forest that is, to her, the city's heart. Along the way she shares with us the lives of these urban trees, from the grackles and cankerworms of the spring, to the flush of mushrooms on stumps in the summer and through to the red-stemmed dogwood of the winter. After grounding us in native elms and ashes, Gordon travels to BC's northern Rockies, to Banff National Park and a cattle farm in rural Manitoba, and helps us to consider what we expect of nature. Whether it is the effects of climate change on the urban forest or foraging in the city, Dutch elm disease in the trees or squirrels in the living room, Gordon delves into our relationships with the natural world with heart and style. In the end, the essays circle back to the forest, where the weather is always better and where the reader can see how to remake even the trees that are lost.

This is Winnipeg’s Urban Forest


It’s 3:30 p.m., mid-June 2014. Time to pick up my daughter from her school, a half a block from our house. Nearly there, I notice a flock of brown-black grackles in the trees, moving like fat raindrops, like jazz hands, from the elm trees to the apartment block lawn and back.

Each panel of the sidewalk between them is full of idiosyncratic illustrations. Mostly these are the remains of Day-Glo green cankerworms, but they are supplemented with pink earthworm segments and shiny black beetles making a run for it on top of white spots of grackle shit.

It should go without saying that the annual cankerworm infestation is at its peak.

Cankerworm caterpillars eat the leaves of American elm, Manitoba maple and green ash in May and June. If they’re present in large enough numbers, they’ll strip a tree bare in a day or two, then spin silken lines and drop to the sidewalk, looking for their next meal. It should also go without saying that the bellies of the birds that eat cankerworms – grackles and robins and sparrows – are filled to the brim with bright green goo.

So the space between the mowed lawn and the seventy-five-foot-tall elm canopy is full of wings and late afternoon raindrops, shadows and bright green worms on silk lines trying to escape the flock. There’s cottonwood fluff stuffed in the cracks in the sidewalk, too, and in the lawn’s five-day stubble. The gilled mushrooms that emerged today on the boulevard – half of which got stomped on this morning by school-bound children – are grey-black and the size of my thumb.

The crossing guards are singing tunelessly across the street, flapping their faded neon-orange flags, stopping traffic in both directions. They’re like monks, chanting prayers they’ve said a hundred times. Parents in work clothes obey their instructions, picking up their children from school and hauling them home.

Nearly there, and rappelling worms have landed on my shoulders and the nape of my neck. There are wings in my peripheral vision. The air is humid, thick with spores and pollen and seeds.

People stop at the edge of the grackle squat, unsure how to navigate it. Go around? Go through? Or fail to notice altogether, causing extra ripples of movement, the swaying lines of silk slowly rotating; birds moving from the ground to the lowest branches of the trees, their tails flicking. Children drop their hats and bags, as they do, even kicking off shoes as they run through.<