Self Guided Tour: June 2025

Self-Guided Tour JUNE 2025
Canada’s Carolinian Zone & Beyond

Contributor: Lyn Anderson, VanDusen Volunteer Guide

This tour of VanDusen Botanical Garden focuses on plants native to Canada’s Car-olinian Zone in Southern Ontario. This zone is surrounded by the Great Lakes, from Grand Bend on Lake Huron to To-ronto on Lake Ontario. It is home to the largest number of native species of any region in Canada. These same species are found in North and South Carolina. The tour then visits plants native to the West Coast.

Upon entering the plaza, facing Living-stone Lake, turn right and follow the ar-rows to the Eastern North America sign. Left of the sign is 1 – largeleaf cucumber tree (Magnolia macrophylla), native to the Southeastern United States. This spe-cies has the largest leaves of any decidu-ous tree in North America, reaching 80 cm (nearly 32 inches). Its snow-white blos-soms are dinner plate size. Fruit is long and cucumber shaped. The Magnolia Family (Magnoliaceae) is ancient, dating back 95 million years ago (mya). Members of the Magnolia Family have widespread but fragmented ranges, because they have survived many geological events such as the ice age. The genus Magnolia was named for Pierre Magnol (1638 – 1715) director of Royal Botanic Garden in Montpellier and one of the first botanists to classify plant families.

The cucumber tree (Magnolia acumina-ta), found in VanDusen’s Canadian Herit-age Garden, is Canada’s only native mag-nolia. It has smaller leaves and blossoms have a yellowish green tinge. Brooklyn Botanic Garden has bred several yellow hybrid magnolias using Magnolia acu-minata as one of the parents. One such hybrid is 2 – Magnolia x brooklynensis ‘Elizabeth’.

Continue down the path to 3 – pawpaw (Asimina triloba). It is the only temperate member of the mostly tropical and sub-tropical Custard- Apple Family (An-nonaceae). The fruit has a soft texture, like banana, and can weigh just over 500 g (1 pound). It is brownish yellow and rip-ens quickly making it unsuitable for ship-ping to your local grocery store. The flowers are a beautiful rich purple colour. Our tree is young, however UBC Botanical Garden has a more mature tree that is in bloom during the month of May.

Across the path is 4 – tulip tree (Lirioden-dron tulipifera). The Magnolia Family has two known genera: Magnolia and Lirio-dendron. The ancestors of Liriodendron evolved before bees and like magnolia species are pollinated by beetles. The emerging flowers are large yellow tulip shaped and are hard to see due to the height of the tree. Continue to down the dirt path until you reach the pavement. Stop and look across to the bench. Next to it is Magnolia ‘Yellow Bird’, another hybrid from Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Turn right and follow the curved paved path until you reach the wooden bridge.

On your left is 5 – joe-pye weed (Eu-trochium maculatum). The name is at-tributed to Joseph Shauquethqueat, a well-respected Muhhekunneuw (Mohi-can) sachem (leader) known as Joe Pye during the 18th and early 19th century. Today it makes a dramatic addition to any garden and attracts moths, butterflies and honeybees.
Walk back to the grassy area.

6 – Ken-tucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus). Gymnocladus comes from the Greek words for ‘naked branch’. The large bi-pinnate leaves are late to sprout in the spring and fall early in the autumn, leaving the tree bare for a good part of the year. The pods may have evolved to be dis-bursed by megafauna that are now ex-tinct; this may help explain the limited range of this tree today. The seeds in the long brown woody pods contain a toxic alkaloid, cytisine, which is poisonous to most animals and birds. Cytisine is de-graded by roasting, which enabled early settlers to use the beans to make a coffee substitute, hence its common name.

7 – Mayapple or American mandrake (Podophyllum peltatum) bears a small white flower on a single elongated erect stem under its umbrella shaped leaves in April. The small lemon shaped ‘apple’ starts to appear in May and matures into a fleshy golden yellow fruit in the summer. They are easy to spot in the fall when the plant is dormant, and the leaves die back. It is edible and tastes like passion fruit. All parts of the plant except the fruit are poi-sonous, so caution is paramount.

Across the grassy area is 8 – eastern white pine (Pinus strobus). Look up to take in the tree’s feathery appearance. Needles are long and slender, in bundles of five reaching up to 15cm (six inches) in length. It is the provincial tree of Ontario and the only pine species native to the Carolinian Zone of Canada. In Britain it is known as Weymouth pine named after George Weymouth, a British naval captain who took seeds back to England in the early 1600s. Back in America the British also called it the mast pine due to its very tall straight trunks. It was logged exten-sively; ships were purpose-built to carry huge loads of logs back to England to use as masts.

Back across the path 9 – ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is native from Alaska, through Canada and Eastern USA. The fronds resemble ostrich feathers once they unfurl. The genus is named for Carlo Matteucci, a 19th century Italian physicist. This fern is a source of edible fiddleheads, considered a delicacy, which must be har-vested as the tightly wound fronds first emerge in early April. They are said to taste like asparagus with a “hint of soil” and are a popular wild foraged vegetable in eastern North America.

A few feet ahead is 10 – white sassafras (Sassafras albidum). The chemical saf-role which gave root beer and sarsaparilla its distinctive flavour was deemed car-cinogenic and banned in 1960 by the American FDA. Modern day root beer is now made with such plants as winter-green. Being dioecious, male and female flowers develop on separate trees. Small yellow flowers appear in spring along with polymorphic leaves that can be three-lobed, bilobed (mitten shaped) or unlobed (oval shaped). The population of this tree is depleted as it was heavily harvested by early settlers who thought root bark used for medicine was a cure-all. It was also the second most exported North Ameri-can plant to Europe, after tobacco. Our tree is young – planted in 2016. There two other trees in the Canadian Heritage Gar-den.
Leave the Eastern North American collec-tion; walk across the grass to the paved path, continue past the grove of giant se-quoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum).

On your right are four 11 – hybrid white flowering dogwood (Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’) bred by British Columbia nurseryman and rosarian Henry Matheson Eddie (1882 – 1953) during the 1930s and 1940s. Here east meets west: They are a cross between the eastern flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) and our BC na-tive Pacific dogwood (Cornus nuttallii). This cultivar has big, bright white flower bracts and disease resistance to dogwood anthracnose.

Continue to the corner of the path to the BC Habitat Garden which showcases local plants favoured by wildlife, birds, and bees. Coastal First Peoples used some of these for medicinal purposes. This area of the Garden contains evergreen conifers indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.

12 – Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) planted next to the nurse log is a new addition to the Garden and is very young. Last spring a local farmers market vendor offered spruce tips for $5.00 per 100 grams. She cited five health benefits and eight culi-nary uses. The nurse log is the top of a 1,000-year-old western redcedar felled by a windstorm in Stanley Park.
More BC native plants are in the bed op-posite and are backed by a row of 13 – western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), a graceful tree with drooping leader and branches (note the blue underside of the needles). In BC it is used for pulp and lumber. Take your time to read the labels of BC native plants here.

Amongst the maple grove opposite is 14 – sugar maple (Acer saccharum) native to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Can-ada is the leading producer of maple syr-up in the world. It is too warm in BC for the sap to form. The maple leaf has long been the symbol of Canada and in 1965 the flag bearing a stylized 11-point red maple leaf was officially adopted. July 1st is Canada Day. This year Canada cele-brates 158 years. You will see a flurry of flags flying that day.

Kitty-corner on the path is a candelabra-shaped 15 – western redcedar (Thuja pli-cata). The western redcedar was named British Columbia’s official tree 1988. It is also known as the ‘tree of life’ and has been the cornerstone of Northwest Coast aboriginal culture since time immemorial. A natural fungicide thujaplicin prevents rot in its moldy temperate rainforest habi-tat. 100-year-old fallen trees have been salvaged and used for shingles. Walk around to the back of this tree to fully ap-preciate the girth of vertical branches growing out from the main trunk. This growth pattern may have been caused by some damage to its leader (main upright stem) when it was young, causing it to branch out horizontally.

We hope you have enjoyed this east to west tour of Canada’s native plants. Can-ada’s Carolinian Zone shares plants with the eastern regions of the United States, as BC does with the Pacific Northwest of the United States. From this point you can return to the entrance or carry on up the path to the Maze, the new Learning Garden and recently planted BC Heritage Apple Orchard. Be sure to return soon, every day brings a new delight.