Heard just now on the tannoy: "You're on a ship that can sometimes move unexpectedly"

Yes, as in "drop the main anchor unexpectedly". That was last week's hiccough.

This week, as in today, waiting for the Duke Point boat to load at, let's guess now, Duke Point, heard the steam whistle over at Harmac mill blow 30 times in a row. Yes, I counted, I am like that.

Hope that all the workers are safe: they make the raw material for the spun-fibre innards of N95 masks.

#Harmac #DukePoint #Gabriola

Here is a tree-picture from the north side of Phoenix Way in Harmac, actually across the road from the arboretum.

We see here a stand of second-growth firs, and burgeoning golden-leaved Douglas Maple -- at least that's what it looks like, one can never tell with maples, what with hybridisation .

The gravelly loamy soil is regolith, derived from r-working of frost-shattered De Courcy sandstone.

Photo RC5751/22, taken this morning, November 20th, 2022

#Harmac #Nanaimo #tree-pictures #arboretum

No pictures to post today, although I did get down to Harmac to take advantage of the low-angle sunlight -- great for taking more tree-pictures.. So I did.

I found more pathways through the forest, and I made further exploration of moss-covered ruins of research station. There are blowdowns of trees across internal roadwayse, so the pathways are the only way in unless you are up for bushwhacking up the northeastern slopes of Holden Creek -- where brambles and windfalls serve as fences.

#Harmac

One more tree-picture for the day:

Block No.38, planted in 1957, the European Larch (Larix decidua). Notice that our plucky little larch has not yet shed all of their needles.

Image RC 5722/22.

#Nanaimo #Harmac #arboretum #tree-pictures

And now for the main event, here looking southeastward, gently downhill, from the grassy meadow through the pines and sequoias and onward to the Hinoki plantation at the back of the Arboretum.

My image RC 5732/22, 8 Nov 2022.

As with all images in this series,, photographed with an elderly Sony Cybershot camera, model DSC-H80, with no post-processing. What you see is what I shot.

#arboretum #tree-pictures #Nanaimo #Harmac

Well, that worked.

Here attached is the beginning of one of the secret forest pathways (not quite as secret as it used to be, ahem) that connect the Arboretum to the abandoned research facility.

My image RC 5730/22 taken on 8 November 2022.

#arboretum #tree-pictures #Nanaimo #Harmac

Back just now, from a late-morning outbreak of whimsey that saw me drive nearly the entire length of the dual-carriageways of the Inland [Salishaan] Island Highway, to take photographs at the Ainscough-Hume Harmac Arboretum. Over 225 kilometres on the road, for a sublime moment hugging the hinoki-trees (Chamaecyparis obtusa) which were trandsplanted from Japan almost sixty years ago.

#arboretum #treelets #Harmac