Is this a London planetree (Platanus x hispanica) that’s been pollarded? It could be. There are two clues: (1) London planetrees are often pollarded; (2) the anti-vermin wrap of metal around the trunk reminds me of the London planetrees in the heronry in Stanley Park that are wrapped to protect the young Great Blue Herons while they are still in their nests.
And yet, the trunk doesn’t look like it is London planetree. I will have to wait until the tree grows leaves to know what it is.
The
It’s salt! It’s snow! It’s blossoms!
Ornamental plum blossoms in fact.
Here we are in the last week of February and the plum trees on Vancouver’s streets are already speckled with blossoms.
Our winter has been mild. Of the 30,000 members of the Prunus genus on our streets, 11,000 of them are purple plums with various common names such as the Pissard plum and the night purple leaf plum. The majority of these trees are Prunus cerasifera ‘Pissardii’
Winter is a surprisingly good time to identify some deciduous trees. Yes, they are no longer carrying some of their best features for identification–leaves and flowers–yet many of them are bearing fruit, their bark is often recognizable, and even their roots can tell a tale.
And there are other ways.
From a distance, this street tree looks like a tall stick below and a red cloud above.
Getting closer, the redness turns out to be red berries growing separately; I would say alternately
The promise of spring is everywhere: breezy warmth, leafy buds, blue skies, and sweet birdsong. Already, white snowdrops, purple crocuses, and budding daffodils are emerging from dark, rich, warming soil.
Red berries are everywhere, attractive to look at and most of them edible to birds. I am always on the lookout for happy plants of heavenly bamboo, Nandina domestica. It is an airy shrub with compound leaves, some of them bi-pinnate and some tri-pinnate (pinnate meaning the leaflets
This banana palm plant growing in Vancouver was cut down at the end of November 2025 before our winter got going, thereby preventing winter rot, caused by a fungal disease in the soil. Had the banana leaves fallen with the cold weather, they would have created the perfect warm and moist environment for the fungus to get established.
The four pseudostems show how the banana leaves wrap around the central core and then around each other. Take a look at ScienceDirect’s article about how much more
This last week of January 2026 has been foggy and wet and berry-and-leaf colourful.
Seeing the two leaders of a tall (60 to 70 ft.) northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) outlined by the fog was awesome. Meanwhile, the fog horns blew all night for a couple of nights.
Moisture clung to this grass one early morning.
And the same morning, moisture still speckled the silvery leaves on this silver ragwort display assembled in planters outside a condo. I learned from Missouri Botanical Garden’s plant finder
Now in January 2026, with the days getting longer, plants are waking up. Sequoia sempervirens, also known as coast redwood, is growing male cones bearing pollen for the wind to blow on to female cones on the same tree. This particular tree grows in Stanley Park, between the Ted and Mary Greig Rhododendron Garden to the west and Lost Lagoon to the east.
Camellia sasanqua is the smaller of the two camellia species; its native home is the mountains of China and Japan. This blossom photograph