During the winter when  snow enveloped the land, an invitation to my nephew’s wedding arrived from Calgary.  A trip across the Rockies and a brief cruise in my brother’s floating gin palace was thrown in. Since all the plants were frozen solid and showing no indication that they would survive the winter, I accepted with no twinges of conscience about abandoning the nursery to my superb staff.  Anyway I had been sort of delegated last year by my siblings to make the duty trip across the pond. Last time only a few turned up for niece Sarah’s wedding perhaps not unconnected with her determination to hold it in February on top of a mountain accessible only by a ski lift.  As it was,  this time around, a great crowd of us decided to go, the accommodation of which  was to impose a logistical burden upon my sister-in-law, normally only seen after natural disasters. Hurrah, I thought,  a blissful month without endless form filling and no smelly leaves. I know many  “herb lovers” can’t understand that this is a job and find it incomprehensible that I don’t want to think about, let alone talk about the soggy little weeds after I have knocked off in the evening (the great medievalist and garden historian, John Harvey felt the same way about the day-job after hours,  talk to him about railways any time, but phone him about  gardens or even  the divine Eleanor of Aquitaine in the evening and get your ears burnt off. Thank God I was warned before I committed such a dire faux pas) . With me, Music’s OK, WW2 aircraft, Mantegna and even Francesco Cossa but never plants. Anyway, I jumped at the opportunity, booked tickets and by May the sun had come out, the plants had miraculously revived and there was a desperate panic to get some big orders out before I left.  Thank goodness Debz who had been off for over a year with a bad back recovered sufficiently to work the computer in what turned out to be the busiest June ever.

I arrived in Calgary during the heaviest May blizzard since 1932 with all my summer clothes, and did some pretty mind-boggling things in the snow that are irrelevant to this blog but which revived fifty year old memories of  my time as a student specialising in  herpetology.  Alberta is one or the world’s great repositories of  reptilian remains. Yummy!

It turned out that my brother whom I had rarely seen for many decades except at funerals, was an avid twitcher. Anything with wings up a telegraph pole and the brakes would be slammed on quick but a sea of colour beside a prairie road would be whizzed past, its existence lost in the inky void of  oblivion , - and on the eight hour drive across the prairies and mountains to Vancouver where he moored his socking great luxury cruiser, that was some whizzing. Before long though our interests started to converge,  He had fixed a visit to the Burchart gardens on Vancouver Island. Everyone had told me in advance that I would hate them. Well I didn’t, the whole concept was so far removed from my own horticultural sphere that I could enjoy them as one would an alien life form, Everything was so calculatingly superlative that I reckoned that if one single plant among the millions showed less than total  flawlessness, it would be torn up, subjected to a show-trial, ritually humiliated and stood up against a wall and shot before the rising of the sun.

What impressed me most though, was the staff. Perky, bright girls who not only knew their stuff but could talk about it articulately. I suppose Canada has its share of surly, mumbling, ignorant chavs, but they were kept hidden away from the public. The same applied to every waitress I encountered. They would be happy to tell you the life history of the fish they served up in the restaurants and probably its athletic accomplishments and taste in home movies too. Such a contrast with the hotel in which  I stayed in Gatwick where, when I enquired about the “Whitebait” which was in fact breaded chunks of some retextured piscine material, the waitress said “I have no idea, I don’t like fish”  I would hate to think what U.S. visitors coming here think, except that the rudeness and hostility of their own  border control people is guaranteed to leave  such a lingering and foul taste in the mouth that it balances out any adverse impression of us Brits (and NO, ever a tactful soul, I didn’t say anything about dragging us into their stupid wars. Incidentally the Canadians feel even more strongly about this than we do)

Another clever thing about the Burchart gardens which I had never seen before  was the enquiry desk. Here they had a living display of every flower in the garden with a name tag so that visitors could identify what they had seen, notwithstanding that the labelling in the garden itself was impeccable anyway.  Although presumably stuck in some kind of oasis stuff,  the flowers were absolutely pristine and so clearly changed at least once a day.

And so on we cruised across the mill pond sea avoiding being sucked into a watery grave by the legendary giant Puget squid and stopping off for a least two gi-normous gourmet meals a day, plus breakfast.  Support came  during the hungry lacunae from the results of niece Jessica’s shopping skills, honed in the supermarkets of Bristol. We picked up some decent rye whisky in passing so I was alright Jack!

On the way back, we stopped off at the  skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) trail beside the Trans-Canada Highway and I could go into grockle mode and wonder at them without tearing my herb-growers hair out in the despair engendered by years of trying to grow the wretched things at home. Ironically this most fascinating of plants has recently been put on a British list of undesirable alien species, even more ironically when I got home I found that my final 2008 sowing had just germinated. I had said that  if I failed this time, I would abandon the things for ever.    No frogs though amongst the Canadian plants, apparently the melt-water was still too icy for them

Returning to Calgary, we drove at less of a breakneck speed and broke the journey at Penticton Lakeside resort, which was a luxury hotel beside a vast lake in  Canada’s foremost wine growing valley. Here the chef had his own ornamental herb garden which had been planted up after the snow had melted the week before. A splendid advertisement for the quality of the food, but one didn’t ask what he did during the winter. 

So back to sunny Alberta where the snow had by now also melted, and then on to Lethbridge for the wedding via the WatertonNational Park. Waterton is dominated by its hotel which through the mountain mists looks like an up-market version of the Bates motel in “Psycho”. Deer and mountain sheep roamed the streets of the little town and we saw coyotes, moose and a bear that reacted to the massed ranks of clicking cameras like Naomi Campbell on a bad day. The rest of the family climbed up to a viewing point high above the town whilst my brother and I chickened out after a few yards. It was worth it though, I have never seen Hellebore (Helleborus viridis) like it, great masses of the stuff  growing on the mountain side. Again it’s one of the plants which defies me to keep alive in Britain. One of the advantages of a trip like this is to see plants growing in their natural environment which is far more valuable than any description in a book.  When we returned to base, my brother overheard a tourist say to his mate “if those two old blokes can make it to the top, we certainly can”. Did they try? Did they get heart attacks? Are they still there, their  whitened bones  now scattered by the beasts of the mountains, I wonder. The other family members scrambled  down from the summit an hour later,  my brother-in-law at a run, but then he’s army and so he does things like that.

On to Lethbridge for the wedding. Halts for bluebirds up poles (and very pretty they were too) and fields of Balsamorhiza, another invasive I have spent years trying to propagate here. Lethbridge itself was fascinating on several counts, firstly it is split in two by a canyon. This was traversed by the longest trestle bridge in the world which you will often have seen getting blown up in Westerns (no children, not literally) and by Clint Eastwood who has a ranch up the road. Lethbridge Lodge in which we stayed was built as  a roofed  quadrangle containing  a small tropical rain forest, a swimming pool and a bar. The first wedding for my new niece-in-law  was a Mayan ceremony which took place in a room above the forest. As her father is a Guatemalan political refugee and a  master baker, it was pretty disastrous for us diabetics. The next day was a Catholic do followed by  yet more splendiferous food in the museum overlooking the bridge and canyon. Outside the building, the Lethbridge Horticultural Society had laid out a little garden displaying native species from the surrounding prairies, which inevitably used up another battery in my camera.. Earlier I had spotted some vivid splashes of red on the sides of the canyon, and like a slug faced with a sheet of glass, was inevitably drawn to climb up and see what they were. Sphaeralcea sp, as it turned out. Having got to the top and disappointingly not seen any rattlers basking in the now eighty five degree heat, I found the only way down the near vertical slope was to slide down on my bum, carefully avoiding the cacti (Opuntia polyacantha) en route. I am told geriatrics slithering down allegedly snake-infested canyons on their arses is not something you see every day, even in the most outlandish movies, but then most  people are often not familiar with the habits of obsessional plant hunters.

And beside the road back to Calgary, we finally spotted the buffalo roaming. Hurrah. Mission accomplished. Part two Calgary to Pennsylvania will follow shortly.