Quick! How do you tell if any of your co-workers are gardeners?
If they’re acting more like hunter-gatherers lately it’s a pretty good bet.
See that person innocently wandering the paths in the Beryl Ivey Garden, stopping to smell the roses? Wait a minute! There aren’t any roses blooming. Did you catch the sneaky glances and quick sleight of hand? What the heck?
Look! Over there – over by the Gerald Gladstone sculpture “Flight”. What is that person doing? Is there any truly sane reason for cocking your head downward while grabbing hold of a daylily stem and shaking it?
What about the one casually squatting down over by Campus Police? See? The one digging under that evergreen with a plastic fork – how bizarre is that?
No, this isn’t some weird and whacky stress-induced behavioural syndrome. It’s fall, and the gardeners on campus are collecting seeds and stray seedlings to take home to their own gardens.
Here at Western we’re privileged to work in some of the most beautiful surroundings in the city, and it’s Jim Galbraith and his crew in Grounds Maintenance that keep it looking so delightful. According to Jim, that’s a task not always made easy by the aforementioned ‘hunter-gatherers’ and their kin, the cute little animals found all over campus.
Did you know, for instance, that Western’s squirrels are “purple and proud”? One fall they planted their own private garden of purple and white tulips – later found in full glorious bloom in a compost pile in the bush (too bad about the usual lovely display at the Spencer Leadership Centre).
Anyway, fall brings with it many changes. Falling fruit, falling leaves, falling people… huh?
The next time you see a flattened flowerbed during your Friday morning travels around campus the only animals you should blame are those of the party variety. Apparently they have an unusual feeding pattern. They seem to come out en masse on Thursday nights, and whatever it is that they’re ingesting makes them prone to tipping over into the flower beds and thrashing around helplessly trying to get back up again.
Come spring things change again… or not.
If you enjoy ambling around the gardens in spring, looking to see what’s breaking out into the sunlight and getting ready to greet you with colourful cheer in a few short weeks, don’t bother looking for nice swathes of bright sunny marigolds. Why not? Blame your favourite “pet” groundhog. He thinks it’s a delicacy, the perfect dessert after a yummy hosta salad.
Those marigolds that do get planted (in the big cement planters around campus) aren’t safe either. They tend to simply disappear, roots and all, along with the other annual plants like petunias and Dragon Wing begonias. Last time I looked those groundhogs didn’t eat the roots, and plants don’t simply grow legs and walk away, so – you guessed it – it must be the two-legged wildlife that’s making off with them.
On the other hand, things are just as likely to suddenly appear in the gardens as they are to disappear.
Until I talked to Jim I thought the tomato plants I encountered in the midst of the flowers were the result of seeds left behind by some animal. Silly me. They’re being deliberately planted there by other people. Good thing I never rescued one to bring it home to safety. A tomato plant that is. I really don’t need any more gardeners at home. Besides, I’ve heard that hunter-gatherers become very territorial once they adopt agricultural practices, although those at Western seem to be evolving quite rapidly. You know the ones we observed earlier in the Beryl Ivey Garden? Apparently they’re doing more than gathering and planting. They’ve already branched out into animal husbandry, too, if the goldfish that appear in the pond every year are any indication.
Just out of idle curiosity, if a shepherd cares for sheep, and a cowherd for cattle, what do you call those who care for fish?
I don’t know about you, but I call them cats and raccoons. They love fish and are more than willing to “take care of them” for you. Yet hope springs eternal, and next year the hunter-gatherers will return once more to hone their agricultural and animal husbandry skills. I wonder what new tricks they’ll have learned in the meantime. Any goldfish placed into the Beryl Ivey Garden pond needs to be awful quick on his fins to survive their caretaking for long, and apparently Bruce was one fast fish – and much admired by the Grounds crews. Even he could only tempt fate for so long though. Poor old Bruce. I can’t say for sure what might have happened to him but he just disappeared one day – the last of his kind.
The writer is a technical specialist for Institutional Planning and Budget, Western Information Systems Group.