Davidsonia

Editor Iain Taylor writes about the shift in botanical science to genetic based research and notes the importance of preserving a natural history based ecological view to to fully understand issues of biodiversity.

Vancouver is known for its street trees, but particularly its flowering cherries. Like Victoria, Seattle and Portland, Vancouver boasts an excellent climate for growing a wide variety of ornamentals. The majority of its street trees are the result of extensive plantings made during Vancouver’s boom years following the Second World War, but the Vancouver Park Board has been maintaining Vancouver’s street trees since 1917. Few cities can boast boulevard tree plantings on every residential street, let alone grassy boulevards between curb and sidewalk in every neighbourhood. However, Vancouver’s park planners strove to provide that and the streetscapes created by long, linear plantings of single kinds of trees were often exceptionally beautiful. By the 1960s, the Park Board and its Street Trees Division had created a vast interlacing gridwork of colour and foliage across the city’s undulating topography. Ornamental cherries were considered ideal candidates for the program as they displayed a wide variety of crown shapes and sizes, flower types and colours, and a long season of bloom.

Life is ‘on the edge’ in the alpine environment. For plants the season for growth is very brief and the temperature at which they can harvest the sun’s radiant energy low. Yet alpine plants do establish and grow. Some of the adaptations or ways by which they adapt are observable to the ramblers of alpine meadows in British Columbia. Moreover some of the adaptations are testable by experimentation.

Editor's list of recent books of interest on botanical topics. Included in this issue is a review of The Jade Garden authored by UBC Botanical Garden staff Peter Wharton, Brent Hine and Douglas Justice.