Gardening an ancient bog

The Devil’s Hole is long-gone, but the Crazy Boggers strive to re-create the only wetlands in a west-coast city.

Published Globe and Mail, Nov. 25, 2005

Deborah Jones, VANCOUVER

The "Devil's Hole" vanished long ago from Camosun Bog, relegated to Vancouver folklore along with the myth that evil humours caused death and disease. Today, the two-hectare wetland on the city's westernmost edge is treasured as parkland and a symbol of our changing perception of nature.

Just three decades ago, before volunteers saved the bog, the area was a construction landfill, choked with invasive plant species. "It was just a wasteland," recalls Laurence Brown, a retired scientist who informally leads a community group dubbed the Crazy Boggers. The group's goal, working with scientists and local park officials, is to restore the bog ecosystem to its state 3,000 years ago, when a lake left by the last ice age had evolved into a true bog.

Since the 1970s, the Boggers have stopped the dumping of construction waste, removed invasive trees and shrubs, worked to restore the water table to prevent the bog from drying out, and planted hardy species such as Labrador tea and carnivorous sundew, which typically live in harsh bog environments.

Denis Underhill, who at 81 is the eldest of the Crazy Boggers, grew up in the West Side neighbourhood and spent most of his childhood playing in the bog, which until the 1950s sprawled over 15 hectares and included a sizable lake. "The pond, which we called the Lily Pond in those days, was considerably larger, and in the wintertime we could play hockey on it," he remembered. Children would build rafts and float out on the lake to the deep southwest corner, "an area we called the Devil's Hole, because we could poke sticks down and not reach the bottom."

"What I remember best was in the early summer the Labrador tea was coming into bloom, and the sound of bees and the smell of it all. It was beautiful,"he said.

He and as many as 20 other volunteers roam the bog almost daily and show up in force for a work party each Saturday morning. It's a changing group of local retirees, pupils and students from elementary schools through university, amateur ecologists who come from throughout the Lower Mainland and scientists with a special interest in the bog.

The rehabilitation of Camosun was officially acknowledged this year when the Mayor's Environmental Achievement Award was presented to the Crazy Boggers.

"It's not just a bog," said Mitch Sokalski, western parks manager for the Greater Vancouver Regional District. "It's about the ecosystem and biodiversity, and the role in biodiversity in the region."

As British Columbia evolved, Camosun Bog progressed from an aboriginal hunting ground to being considered a useless patch of land too wet to build housing. During the First World War, peat was harvested from it to provide wound dressings for soldiers. By the mid-1900s the bog was feared as a swampland, blamed for disease and drained during a polio outbreak, at the insistence of mobs of angry activists. In the 1970s, it was a construction dump.

Despite being hard to find, lying within the sprawling forest of Pacific Spirit Park between residential Vancouver to the east and the University of British Columbia to the west, the obscure little bog is increasingly popular.

At midday it resounds with the voices of parents and elementary school teachers pointing out insect-eating plants, darting birds and garter snakes to excited young children. After school, teenagers show up, huddling on a nature platform to smoke marijuana. Weekend wedding parties pose for photographs against a backdrop of drifting mist and sun slanting through gaps in the forest, while one couple appears faithfully every day to practice t ai chi . In the still of early morning and late evening, sleek coyotes linger on the bog's edge.

The bog's restoration was helped in the early 1990s with grants of $90,000 from the federal and local governments, which paid for invasive 150 hemlock trees to be logged and removed by helicopters.

A new boardwalk, which allows visitors to view the bog without damaging its fragile environment, is being paid for by community foundations and donations from business. "It's become a real passion for me," said Mr. Brown, a retired UBC professor of metallurgical engineering. As a scientist, he explained, the bog appeals to him as "a very important ecosystem. It's very rare, and it's the only significant one in Vancouver." But science, Mr. Brown admitted, isn't why he devotes a large part of his days to the bog.

"It's a very special place. You go into this place and you're suddenly cut off from the city. You're into real quiet and peace, and it's almost a spiritual place to be."

Mr. Brown laughed self-consciously about the passion the bog engenders among the volunteers. There is an ongoing, heated debate about the philosophy of "restoring" nature. In a research paper presented in Vancouver this month, authors Sally Hermansen and Graeme Wynn noted a global debate rages about the meaning of nature, and pondered whether the story of the bog's destruction and restoration is "tragic," "triumphal" or "duplicitous."

Nobody, said Mr. Brown, believes the bog will ever be perfectly restored.

The Crazy Boggers describe their work as intensive gardening. They even admit to some sleight of hand: When the pine trees they planted grew more quickly than the acidic conditions of an intact bog would allow, the group called in a bonsai expert to advise on pruning.

"We have got them looking like they were stunted by being blown by the wind," chuckled Mr. Brown. "They're just beautiful."

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