A Love letter to the trees of the Farm
Pathways to the Trees at the Central Experimental Farm, by Eric Jones, Richard Hinchcliff and Roman Popadiouk. Ottawa, Friends of the Experimental Farm, 2024.
A Love letter to the trees of the Farm
Review by Emma Bider
Pathways to the Trees at the Central Experimental Farm is part of an explosion of interest in urban forests and the individual trees within them. I can’t help but feel that the impetus for this book has something to do with the slow yet persistent encroachment on the Experimental Farm, from the controversial Civic Hospital expansion to a series of proposed high-rises that threaten to shade its fields.
The book is written by Eric Jones, Richard Hinchcliff and Roman Popadiouk and published by Friends of the Central Experimental Farm. It is divided into eight walks, along which the reader can journey through the history of the Experimental Farm from its establishment in 1889 to present day.
For those of us who enjoy walking through the Experimental Farm’s arboretum in all seasons, it can often feel like a stable, unchanging oasis in the rapidly changing downtown Ottawa. The authors insist that the Farm remains a dynamic place for research and experimentation. At its inception, trees were planted with the goal of identifying hardy fruit trees for Canada’s northern climate and suitable trees for farm shelterbelts. Today, the arboretum has transitioned into a place to test the suitability of trees in Ottawa’s increasingly warm, wet and unstable weather patterns. Of course, until the world stops emitting fossil fuels into the atmosphere and warming our climate, the effort to identify trees that can survive our changing climate will remain cutting edge.
The authors do not shy away from addressing climate change in their descriptions of the trees featured on the eight walks. Indeed, because so many trees in Ottawa’s urban forest are not “native” to the area, it is valuable to learn both where some trees came from and what led to their survival in Ottawa.
Take the Sweetgum tree, which you can see on the Lookout Walk. The Sweetgum grows in warmer climes in Central America and Mexico but also in Ottawa, due to impressive persistence beginning in 1893. For almost a century, each time the tree was planted in the arboretum, it was killed by our famously frigid winters. Then the two planted in 1993 survived and have just marked their 30th birthdays!
I also appreciate how the authors consider the relationship among each tree, the urban environment and human impacts more broadly. The euonymus species (North Path Walk), for example, are “adaptable to city environments,” whereas the Greek Fir (Conifer Walk) does not handle urban pollutants well and is becoming rare in naturalized forests. According to the authors, “it was severely impacted by the extreme wildfires in Greece in 2007.”
Each tree is also given a paragraph or two on its uses by humans, which led to some enjoyable discoveries. I learned that the Korean Pine (Conifer Walk) produces the pine nuts used for cooking in North America and that Basswood bark (Lookout Walk) is “ideal for duck decoys.”
Though the authors often mention the ways Indigenous peoples use various tree species, these comments seem quite generalized and are always written in the past tense. They use Indigenous, First Nations and “native” interchangeably, which an editor might have corrected. This is a shame, as a bit more research would have led to some valuable specificity. The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Cultural Centre worked with the NCC on Remarkable Trees of Canada’s Capital in 2020, and I am sure they would have been happy to provide valuable context and tree names for this project.
Overall, Pathways to the Trees is an enjoyable love letter to the trees of the Experimental Farm at a time when they are increasingly at risk from urban stressors like road salt, air pollution and development. The authors demonstrate how much humans have relied (and continue to rely) on trees for sustenance, medicine and materials. The descriptions of efforts to hybridize and cultivate different species at the Farm illustrate the relationships that trees have with soil, geology and climate and also their unending adaptability. I ended my literary tour of the book’s eight walks with renewed appreciation for the Farm’s collection of urban trees and the Friends of the Farm’s efforts to keep them in our hearts and minds as they and our city continue to grow and change.
Emma Bider’s PhD thesis explores the relationship between humans and trees. She is active in defence of trees and writes often on climate change and the environment.
