The Western University campus has an amazing collection of trees. I showed off two Magnolias in a recent post. The perennial collection, on the other hand, has fallen victim to digging squirrels and foraging geese, so often what comes up also disappears before much happens.
More successful gardening happens in raised beds, like the purple and white tulips at University College. Or, on the wall below.
And hidden away in the shelter of the Biological and Geological Sciences building, is Jane’s Garden. It is a secret spot that one finds only if happening past it. Sheltered amidst the building itself, it is a fully enclosed outdoor space.
As can be seen in the photo above, the walls suggest the space was not fully enclosed when the building was first erected, and that a later addition caused the garden’s separation from the exterior of the campus. This is not entirely uncommon at UWO, where one mode of expansion has been to annex outdoor spaces that formerly separated buildings and join them together. Here, the space was not made part of the indoors, but became a garden protected by multi-storied walls.
Anyone familiar to gardening has probably observed that a particularly well-sheltered spot can serve to cultivate plants that normally do not thrive in the given climate zone. I suspect this is the case here as well, given that spring-flowering snow drops appeared around March 18, and then in the rest of London a few weeks later. So perhaps it should not have been so surprising to see that redwood trees have been growing here.
According to Wikipedia, the Dawn Redwood is known by fossil record to have grown in the northern hemisphere, and was thought to be extinct. When only a few specimens were discovered in China in the 1940s, seeds were collected and distributed to botanical gardens throughout China and world-wide. Today it is an endangered species in the wild, but has been preserved through cultivation.
These photos were taken on March 18 and April 30. I will try to share some updates over the summer.
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