It’s June and they’re ba-c-c-k! Ox-eye daisy, that is
Legacy. It can be all things to all people, I suppose, and take all shapes and sizes, be they physical fact or less tangible. If measured in terms of human achievement, it’s nice to be (fondly) remembered after our brief visit on this mortal plane. The pioneering brothers John, Phillip, Augustus and Edwin Pimbury certainly left their collective mark. They, and Augustus’ wife Ellen, are still with us in the Cowichan Valley, by the way, taking their deserved rest in St. Peter, Quamican cemetery. Their Cobble Hill property is still with us, too, albeit much reduced in size and transmogrified by more than a century of changes. But that’s not where their achievement lies nor why they’re remembered Oldtime Cobble Hill chronicler Nathan P. Dougan referred to the Pimburys at least four times in his reminiscences first published...
Read MoreMore about the Westholme Giant
The Second Largest Douglas Fir Recalls Westholme Giant post has been drawing informed comment this week and I just found this great photo in my files. It was taken in Stanley Park, in the ’20s, judging by the vehicle. Today, this tree would never get to grow to any appreciable size; it’d be logged when hardly bigger than a fencepost judging by the truckloads that I see here, almost daily, in the Cowichan Valley . Sad. See also…‘Second Largest’ Douglas fir recalls Westholme GiantWestholme tree...
Read MoreSecond S.S. Beaver Now at the Bottom of Cowichan Bay
Well, it would appear that it’s the end of the line and Davy Jones’s Locker for the good ship Beaver II. As if Cowichan Bay hasn’t had enough trouble in recent years with derelict ships and barges that, seemingly beyond the government pale, are free to rust away at anchor then to sink and to a foul a public waterway. Go figure. The Beaver II is, or was, a replica of the historic Hudson’s Bay Co. steamship Beaver which has been termed “the first smokestack on the northwest Pacific”. What a difference in just six years! It was in June 2008, in the Cowichan Valley Citizen, that I wrote that the modern S.S. Beaver was going to star in her fourth Centennial celebration in 40 years after undergoing a $1-million dollar refit in time for British Columbia’s 150th anniversary....
Read MoreCapt. William Grant gave us the Scottish broom plant
“He came here when he was 22, in 1849, made himself a figure, a dashing figure, apparently; everyone liked him, though he was always borrowing; always broke and in debt; full of fun; in general, a carefree adventurer…” So wrote one historian of Capt. Walter Colquhoun Grant, Sooke’s first settler and inspiration for Sooke Inlet’s Grant Rocks. Orphaned at the age of 7, the adventurous pioneer was raised in comfort by an aunt and two uncles. His doting relations seem to have given him a taste for the finer things in life and, having quickly squandered his father’s estate, Grant had to sell his army commission in the Royal Scots Greys. To Fort Victoria He then conceived the idea of emigrating to the tiny outpost of Fort Victoria, Vancouver Island, to establish a grand estate where he’d play...
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