In the Garden

The five-acre clearing of CougarAnnie’s Garden is set a couple of hundred metres back from the beach at Boat Basin. Protected from the ocean winds, ringed by thick forest, the garden has stood here, in one form or another, for nearly a hundred years. In 1915, when Ada Annie and Willie Rae Arthur arrived here, they had pre-empted a total of 117 acres of raw forest land, with a rough cabin set on it. Their first essential task was to make a clearing in the bush, to establish a subsistence garden as they struggled to settle in this remote and challenging place.

As the years passed, the family grew and so did the garden. Eventually a large fenced clearing surrounded their cabin, with enclosures for goats and chickens. Despite the rigours facing them, despite the difficulties in making ends meet, Ada Annie managed to bring in an astonishing variety of species for her garden: bulbs, perennials, fruit trees, shrubs, and trees. Her garden expanded and flourished, and she began to sell her plants by mail order, sending them out on the coastal steamer to customers all across Canada.

Against all the odds, Ada Annie – who became renowned as Cougar Annie, because of her hunting prowess – kept her nursery garden going until she was well into her nineties. The garden was her passion, her love, her burden; she knew every flower, every shrub, every corner of it, even as she gradually went blind in her old age. As a very elderly lady, she would be found sleepwalking amongst her flowers.

After her death in 1985, the fate of the garden seemed clear. Already becoming overgrown and neglected before Cougar Annie’s death, it surely did not stand a chance. Like so many pioneer gardens in remote places across Canada, it was doomed to die with its owner. The rainforest moved in remorselessly: young hemlocks and cedars swallowed up flowering shrubs, salmonberries overwhelmed berry bushes, swathes of bulbs disappeared beneath blackberries and salal, and perennials simply vanished into the overgrowth. With the fence down, bears wandered freely through the garden, breaking limbs from the fruit trees as they clambered up for a snack. The old outbuildings collapsed, the old pathways disappeared.

Yet the garden remained full of life. Bright glimpses could be seen as rhododendrons stubbornly continued to bloom through thickets of overgrowth; heathers spread into the forest nearby; day lilies persisted in poking through thick mossy hummocks. When Peter Buckland came to live on the property in 1987, he embarked on a seemingly impossible task. He set out to restore the garden, armed mostly with loppers, chainsaws and boundless enthusiasm – and unencumbered with much botanical knowledge! He knew the native species very well, though, so when he saw something he did not recognize, something Cougar Annie had planted, he would give it air and space, clear the overgrowth, and leave it to see what would happen. The results were amazing.

This is the story of a garden that refused to die. Thanks to the efforts of Peter Buckland, Cougar Annie’s garden has taken on new life. Thanks to him, a remarkable renaissance has occurred, as shrubs regained strength, spread, and thrived, as dormant perennials and bulbs re-emerged, as swathes of heather, massive rhododendrons, and heart-wrenchingly lovely irises and lilies began to bloom again. Peter’s many years of dedicated work, clearing and restoring the garden, took place often in the pouring rain, often entirely on his own, but determined that this garden should have a future, he persisted. Against the odds – as everything that ever occurred in this garden seems to be against the odds – the garden blooms once more in the wilderness. It stands as a statement of hope for the future, and as a remarkable tribute to a pioneer woman of great strength, who stubbornly maintained her home here for most of the 20th century.

The following passage is taken from Margaret Horsfield’s book, about the early days in garden:

In the early years at Boat Basin, Cougar Annie experimented continually, trying to establish different species, seeing what would grow and thrive here, seeing what she could profitably grow for sale. To this day, a striking variety of trees and shrubs appears in odd corners of the garden; they are no doubt survivors from early experiments, survivors that have lived long and done well. In common with all dedicated gardeners, Cougar Annie planted any number of attractive species just for her own pleasure and interest. The garden still boasts over a hundred different species of trees and shrubs alone, representing decades of planting and experimenting, and also representing what could be the earliest known introduction of some ornamental species on the coast. Amongst the trees she planted are a linden tree, a black locust, an English chestnut, and red-veined enkianthus, a now huge liriodendron…not to mention many varieties of ornamental cherry, crabapple and plum, and dozens of fruit trees. As late as 1979, a visitor recalls picking over twenty varieties of apples alone. The Latin names of all her plants and trees were familiar to Cougar Annie, anyone who asked would hear a litany of favourites: Berberis darwinii, Escallonia organensis, viburnum odoratissimum, Pieris japonica, Daphne mezereum, Philadelphus virginalis, Veronica traverse, Amelanchier alnifolia – and on and on, including the Latin names of each of the many varieties of azalea and rhododendron and heaths in the garden.

A yellowed copy of the Western Producer, dated April 21, 1938, selected at random from a mucky heap of newspapers in one of the garden sheds, contains a page of small print advertisements for “Seed, Feed and Nursery Stock.” In the middle of one column appears the following ad: “Exhibition Dahlias: Flowering shrubs; clilmbing roses, $1.00 doz. Perennial flowers; Lilies; Mixed dahlias; gooseberries; currants; blackberries, 50 cents doz. Gladioli, Montbretia, 25 cents doz. Peonies 25 cents each. Strawberries 40 cents per 100. Mixed dahlias $2.00 per 100. Rae-Arthur, Hesquiat, Vancouver Island.”

The variety listed in this advertisement shows the impressive level of productivity in Cougar Annie’s garden by the late 1930s. A marketable profusion of roses and berry bushes, shrubs and dahlias, lilies and gladioli and peonies was bursting from the garden. Never highly organized or disciplined, this garden always ran a bit wild, looked a bit ragged, but it was planted with a liberal and knowing hand, allowed to spread and grow as it wished, always expanding and developing, controlled just enough to produce what Cougar Annie needed and what buyers wanted. The potential productivity of the place was probably evident to Cougar Annie from the very beginning and its reputation had begun to spread even during the 1920s…

Dahlias always figured largely in Cougar Annie’s production, and over the years at Boat Basin she became best known as a dahlia grower. Some of her stock originally came from Holland, some from Canadian growers. She grew nearly two hundred different varieties of dahlias in the heyday of the garden. Visitors recall with awe the teetering stacks of wooden boxes dimply visible in the dusty storage area at the back of the house. In these boxes the dahlias were layered in newspaper and stored away for winter, each box bering a different label and containing a specific variety of dahlia. Only Cougar Annie could understand her way through this maze of dahlia boses, and she would sit at her table for hours with a sharp steel knife in her hand, paring the tubers into small pieces and sorting them, sit surrounded by piles of dried sphagnum moss in which she wrapped the dahlias before packing them up for shipment. Meticulously packed in cardboard shaped and formed into boxes, carefully tied with string, and franked with the Boat Basin postmark, hundred of parcels of dahlias went off in the mail…Her dahlias travelled far, and in some gardens they are blooming still.