The Secret Gardens of Merville

On Sunday, May 25, eight Merville gardens were open to visitors who had registered for our first garden tour. By all accounts it was a great success. Many thanks to board chair Eva-Marie Trebell for covering so many details and organizing a stellar group of volunteers, including some master gardeners who answered questions and gave pruning advice at McLoughlin Gardens. Likewise, many thanks indeed to the gardeners who welcomed visitors.

The frothy pink shrub in the background of this photo is tamarisk. According to Nature and Garden, Tamarisk is wind and salt resistant, but invasive in some regions.

McLoughlin Gardens Society AGM & Guest Speakers

by Marla Temoin

The McLoughlin Gardens Society was pleased to welcome two guest speakers at the AGM on February 13. Attendees enjoyed informative presentations from the president of the Comox Valley Land Trust (CVLT), Nick Page, and Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD) Parks Manager, Mark Harrison. The CVLT and the CVRD have been instrumental partners in the maintenance of the McLoughlin Gardens and the implementation of the creative residency program.

Nick described current projects and the ways in which the CVLT continues to evolve in vision and programming since its inception in 1999. To date, the CVLT has protected approximately 600 hectares (over 1400 acres!) of land and greenspace in the Comox Valley. Mark Harrison shared exciting news regarding the planning process for a new neighbour of the McLoughlin Gardens, Maris Nature Park. In 2022, the CVRD received a 40-acre land donation from Christopher Investments and an additional 4.5 acres was donated last year by Resolute North Holding Ltd. These lands, encompassing 44+ acres of mature second growth forest and including approximately 940m of oceanfront, are located right next to McLoughlin Nature Park and Eagles Greenway.

 This new park is the result of two land donations through the federal Ecological Gifts Program. To qualify for the program, lands must be certified as ecologically sensitive, meaning they are important in terms of biodiversity and environmental heritage.

At this time, Maris Nature Park is not open to the public as the management planning process continues. Phase 1, consisting of background studies and ecological assessments, has been completed. Phase 2, public engagement and plan drafting, is in progress and will continue into the summer. Next winter should see the third and final phase, plan review and adoption, completed.

The McLoughlin Gardens are thrilled to welcome Maris Nature Park to the neighbourhood. Please stay tuned for more details about park progress and check the project page on the CVRD website for information about public engagement.

Barry Godfrey, friend and neighbour

We lost our dear friend and neighbour Barry Godfrey on October 28th. Barry and his wife Terry moved to Vancouver Island from the Kootenays in 2010 and a year later took up a caretaking position on the property adjacent to the McLoughlin Gardens. At that time, Brian and Sarah McLoughlin were still spending several months a year in Merville. Barry was a frequent visitor in the garden, walking through on his daily walk and stopping for a chat with his dog, Eli at his side.

When the McLoughlins passed their property to the regional district in 2016, Barry took on an informal role as caretaker and steward. He assisted with opening up and closing down the cottage every year, which involved climbing down into the crawlspace beneath the house to turn off the U.V. system. Barry's presence nearby and his availability to keep an eye on water levels in the reservoir was critical to the success of our residency program. Whenever he noticed the level was dropping he would fire up the pump and fill the reservoir. Knowing that we would be losing Barry this year was the main impetus for installing our new water system. Barry was also a welcoming presence for guests, answering questions about the operation of the wood heater and sharing stories of wildlife sightings.

Barry loved living at the beach, and didn't have much interest in travelling. Like Brian and Sarah McLoughlin he would save up his town errands for a weekly trip into Courtenay, preferring to be down by the water, puttering about and tending to things, keeping an ear out for the sound of eagles, loons and herons. He enjoyed meeting the many artists and writers who spent time at McLoughlin Gardens and easily found an anecdote to share with them that connected in some way to the place they were from or the work they were doing.

Recent visitors John England and his wife Catherine met Barry in the summer of 2023 and enjoyed meeting him again when they were in residence in September this year. John concluded his report on his residency with some words of appreciation: “Barry and his gentle companion Eli added further hospitality to our visit, passing by unobtrusively every morning to check up on us and stopping occasionally for an always informative visit about the Gardens. Barry’s kindness personalized and elevated the enjoyment and memory of our visit, indeed was an important part of it for Catherine and me.”

A McLoughlin Gardens Walk in Late October

by Lisa Hamilton

The gardens and forest around the McLoughlin home currently host summer’s extroverted mingling with autumn’s introverted quietude.  Summer is like that one charming friend we have: they are so much fun to be around, but their boundless energy is also somewhat exhausting.  We might find ourselves looking forward to the doldrums of winter days as an excuse to hibernate and rejuvenate.  Still, we feel a bittersweet sadness when our summer friend finally leaves, and we must reorient ourselves to the quiet again.

As I wandered around McLoughlin Gardens one morning in late October, I witnessed the merging of these seasonally strange bedfellows: summer and autumn.  Ruby red Lily-of-the-valley berries poked out from under fallen maple leaves and darted through the stubbornly emerald-green hellebores.   A rare and brilliant huckleberry dangled from the bush, still resisting the sacrifice of leaves to soil.  A tangle of cranesbill geraniums flowered beside the bracken fern, brown and recoiling.  The hydrangeas in the garden wore their lacy caps; their blooms, albeit substantially faded and worn, lingering into the cooler days of fall.  These fading blooms share their structure with an even lacier companion, those hydrangea flower petals decaying until only their skeletal veins remain.

At this point in the year's wheel, the season is imbued with liminality.  We are in the season of transition when life is still evident on the plants around us, yet the muted pallet of senescence creeps in to carry us into winter's dark stillness. 

I’ve been curious about liminality lately.  Those transitional, in-between spaces make us question our reliable tools for measuring time.  Liminality fills time with a fertile pause. I want to call this pause an emptiness, except sometimes we misconstrue emptiness with lacking when, in fact, emptiness can also be a vessel for fullness; except, what this liminal space contains is not entirely held within it… yet.

I am fascinated by liminality precisely because it is so hard to define. It is more of a feeling: calm potential and easy anticipation.  Liminality is the empty cup; you cannot have the cup without the emptiness to define it.  The cup needs to be empty to be filled; there is no other way.  In music, liminality fills the spaces between the notes.

There is, of course, McLoughlin Garden’s constant neighbour, the Salish Sea.  The smell of the ocean seems headier to me in autumn, the scent of storms and decay.  As I turn to face the water, a chorus of waterbirds sing, a single loon croons, and my ears catch the soothing wuffle of a sea lion, a veritable water horse.

Seeing the Season Out: Artists Ester Strijbos and Janny Thompson

by Lisa Hamilton

It is fitting that two artists whose work features the seasonal shifting of nature’s elemental beauty wrapped up the creative season at McLoughlin Gardens, tucking in the studio residency program for the winter.

Ester Strijbos is a ceramicist originally from the Netherlands. Janny Thompson is a mixed-media printmaker. The two artists landed in Victoria via Cortes Island, with Janny herself a fourth-generation Cortes Islander. Together, the two artists collaborate and spark innovation from one another: a natural motif in Janny’s monoprint may move Esther to include the design in her ceramics and vice versa. They intentionally include one another’s creative vision and explore how this vision shapes their unique expression. The wild landscape significantly influences both artists’ work, so it is no wonder McLoughlin Gardens served as their muse during their stay there.

Ester and Janny’s residency was the last one until 2025, and the timing could not have been more perfect. They arrived just as the full Hunter’s moon began waning, yet still rising gloriously from beyond the Salish Sea and coastal mountain ranges—the McLoughlin cottage’s eastern view. The artists’ thematic collaborative project for a show in the new year happens to be the moon and her tides. During their residency, Ester sketched, painted, and wrote in her mixed-media art journal, collecting the ideas soon to be pressed into clay. Janny worked on elegant, framed collages of lunar crescents and tidal charts. 

“Our focus is moon and tides, and we could not have been luckier in arriving at this beautiful spot when the moon comes up over the mountain and beams light over the water at night, spilling moonlight into the windows. The gardens and the wildlife are so amazing, the cottage feels so welcoming and is gorgeous with all the sunlight coming in from every window at a different time of the day,” says Ester.

An artist’s workspace, with a view of the shore and the sea

Ester and Janny expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be afforded the gift of time and creative collaboration at McLoughlin Gardens. I was grateful to be so warmly welcomed into their creative space and witness the magic of their beautiful, artistic partnership. 

“It takes a lot of time to develop collaborative work, and it is an amazing experience to be here together. We work for a few hours on our own and then get together and talk about what we are working on. Then, we inspire each other to take some of those ideas and incorporate them into our own work. We have been able to do a lot of that this week and we could not have done this at home or separately.” 

I lingered at the water’s edge before I left. Ester and Janny were also on the beach, gazing out to sea. 

“I’m so glad you had a chance to see the sea lion!” Ester called to me, waving.  Thank you, Ester and Janny, for letting me peek behind the curtain on your creative processes after a reverential autumn walk around McLoughlin Gardens. 

Artist Book Reading and Talk, October 3rd at CVAG

The Comox Valley Art Gallery  hosted a reading on Thursday, October 3rd, with artists Lois Klassen and Deanne Achong. The artists were conducting creative research and development during their residency at the Gardens.

Lois and Deanne read from RML3: Undercurrents and Folds publications and discussed the process of making artist books and zines on the topic of migration.

The Migration Library, a long-running artist project that has produced events and publications in the theme of migration and displacement, has just released its third and final series called RML3: Undercurrents and Folds. Artists Lois Klassen and Deanne Achong are thrilled to present six new small edition publications in the series of creative responses to topics of displacement, diaspora, arrivals and failed arrivals, arrivants, travel over sovereign Indigenous territory, and the violence of forcible containment caused by colonizing states.

Lois Klassen is the founding artist-editor of RML with a hand in creating previous publications and events. Klassen hosts Light Factory Publications which has produced RML, Present Cartographers, and Renegade Library.

Deanne Achong works across disciplines. She is the artist-author of Workin’ for the Yankee Dollar (2017), published by RML, as well as the web designer-developer behind ReadingtheMigrationLibrary.com and LightFactoryPublications.ca.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: RML3: Undercurrents and Folds would not be possible without funding and support from BC Arts Council (Individual Arts Award); Canada Council for the Arts (Research Creation, Explore and Create grant); SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Critical Media Art Studio (cMAS), School of Interactive Art and Technology, SFU; Centre for Inter-Media Arts and Canada Research Chairs Program; SITE/ation Studio, UBCO; and, Light Factory Publications.

Ma Whales Collective

Nané Jordan:

Ma Whales: Arts and healing practices

During our week at McLoughlin Gardens, we experienced co-sustenance by gathering together as women, immersing in the natural beauty of this place in co-presence with the more- then-human-world of trees, plants, earth, rocks, seals, seaweed and shoreline of the powerful Salish Sea. Waking each morning to hear and see waves crash into the shoreline from wide windows of the Cottage, we were beckoned outside by this naturally healing land-place. We worked outside and in the studio space with the doors open to the Salish Sea, taking turns leading each other through an artmaking process each morning. We committed to time for personal or further collective artmaking in the afternoons, with evening check-in circles. We offer descriptions and highlights of our arts and healing practices, and the experiential, art-making impacts of dwelling on the beautiful land of McLoughlin Gardens.

Nané

Our initial multiple arrivals at the Gardens felt tinged by over-business, yet we each arrived in awe of, and grateful for, being in this beautiful place together. As mothers and community caregivers we often feel a sense of overwhelm as an impact of our maternal gifting work. We long for co-creative spaces of community care and restoration. Feeling our energies scattered and wanting to collect ourselves, I offered to lead the first artmaking process on Monday morning. The intention was to open a grounding way to feel into ourselves, attune to and draw from the natural beauty of the land. I offered a gently-led process of cyclical wisdom teachings, embodied womb-movement, followed by a period of resting on Mother Earth to sense into our dreams, with art making of textile-based dream flags in the studio.

We experienced powerful results with this workshop by collectively taking time to breath, feel into ourselves, and lie down on Mother Earth, leading into an imaginal art making space of the dream flags. We spent the afternoon sewing these through a calming sewing and chatting bee, as women have done for millennia. Later the next day, we co-created a spontaneous dream-releasing ritual by parading our flags onto the beach, sending our dreams and love out with the elemental forces. Later on, we brought the dream flags up on the Cottage porch to hang outside and be elementally blessed throughout our residency.

The artists at work in the studio at the McLoughlin Gardens

Parade of dream flags on the beach

Paula

I offered a Mandala/personal symbols artmaking process. We started with a 14-minute moving meditation of dropping into ourselves and the Earth, seeing if any symbols came to us through movement and music. “Mandala” means the centre, coming from all patterns and rhythms of life. As humans we have a fascination with circles, which are used for self-expression. Circles are in every part of our lives from the egg we grow from and the womb that first encircles us. We are birthed through circles; they are integral to our lives. Circles of the seasons, the round Earth and moon, the spiral of all our inspirations from the time of the ancients. As an art practice, we took an hour to create a pattern/Mandala that reflected how we feel and where our energy was focused at the moment, using the question of: What is your personal direction/compass guiding you to at this moment?

The artists working on their mandalas in the studio.

The mandalas

Personally, having space and time to reflect and sit quietly on the beach, watching seals and the waves, and just being, was time to process my own life and enjoy nature. Also, reflecting upon nature through art making, poetry, and song was so fulfilling within our week of shared art-making.

The Pinhole Photography Project

Article by Glenn Gustafson

On June 20th, I participated in a very unique workshop that was hosted by the Comox Valley Art Gallery with artist Sarah Crawley. Sarah was one of the artists-in-residence at the McLoughlin Gardens this year and as part of her outreach she organized a Pinhole Camera project to involve the community in creating ‘solargraphs.’  At the workshop, participants were provided with mini-pinhole cameras that allow photographic paper inside of them to be exposed to sunlight through a tiny hole in side of each the handmade film canister cameras. The cameras were to be placed in a location of the participant’s choosing - preferably facing the sun.

As a photographer, I was quite amazed to hear that the cameras were to be positioned in a stationary place for a six-month exposure of the paper within. Then, instead of the standard development of the photo paper, it will be scanned with a high resolution scanner to reveal the image captured. 

Participants are to turn in their cameras for the Winter Sosltice, after which the artist will scan the images in order to provide them to the photographers and to display them as a digital exhibition in the gallery in 2025.

I placed my camera on our backyard fence facing the forest behind our house - see below.  It will be very interesting to see what type of images is captured over the next six months!

The Pinhole Camera Project

A pinhole camera strapped to the post on Glenn’s
back fence.

Trio of artists to show their work at the Pearl Ellis Gallery

The McLoughlin Gardens will be featured in an exhibit at the Pearl Ellis Gallery in Comox from October 15 to November 9, 2024.  Called “Triple Vison”, the exhibit will showcase the creations of three artists who took part in a one-week studio residency at the Gardens in July of 2022 . Working in different media, each artist focused on capturing their unique vision of the forest, ocean and garden landscapes that feature so prominently at the site.

Thom Rypien (Courtenay, BC) specializes in glass art and focused primarily on creating stained glass representations of the three ecological zones at the Gardens.  Glenn Gustafson (Courtenay, BC) expresses his artistic vision using many media, however for this residency he focused on creating free-form woven tapestries to illustrate the three types of land and seascapes.  Brenda Kramarchuck (Rosthern, SK) focused primarily on photography to capture the beauty and diversity of the three ecosystems on site. Brenda also wrote poetry in response to her experience of being at the Gardens.

Make sure to stop by this fall to view this unique and fascinating show.  The Pearl Ellis Gallery is located at 1729 Comox Avenue and is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm.  The Gallery web site is at:  https://pearlellisgallery.com/

Field Journaling on a summer afternoon

Poet and professor of geography Maleea Acker led another wonderful afternoon of field journaling at the McLoughlin Gardens on Saturday, August 10th. For the first exercise, Maleea had us find an object from the surrounding environment and do a blind contour drawing. As Maleea explained, the aim of the exercise is to slow down and engage with seeing while letting go of producing an acceptable end result. With a camera we can zoom in and take a picture in a matter of seconds. The question remains, however, how much seeing really takes place in those few moments? Field journaling offers an opportunity to be present and make a record of our experience in a way that captures the feeling of being there. It also allows for an emotional connection, something that requires both time and attention.

The last exercise of the day was an invitation to connect with some plant or feature of the landscape, to sit with it for several minutes and write a poem, addressing it, and then read the poem out loud to the plant, tree, creature, rock or mountain.

Some opening lines from participants’ poems follow:

Hello Wavelet
by Chistina Nienaber-Roberts

Hello Wavelet,
I admire your ability to shape-change
To peek up, then disappear
quietly beneath the surface (...)

The Dark Spotted Cobble
by  Keith Roberts

You beautiful sphere
What a journey you've had
Born in the heart of a long dead star (...)

Distant Coastal Mountains
by Margaret Huff

Well, distant coastal mountains across the strait. 
I've been eyeing you some years, avoidantly, 
Seeing summer snow caps gradually gone.
Before you the sea laps, seemingly oblivious to your now dark peaks (...)

Viper’s Bugloss
by Margo McLoughlin

The bee comes to you
and I do too.
I love your unpretentious
sway and tilt
your casual display
of softest shades of blue (…)