I originally photographed this lovely area of the north-eastern Blenkinsop Valley, just below the western face of Mount Douglas in South Saanich on the outskirts of Victoria, because there were remnants of Garry oak, Quercus garryana, savannah with camas. This suggested a traditional Salish food gathering landscape from the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Because of fire suppression, the oak savannah had been overgrown with young Douglas fir and big-leaf maple trees. What I did not appreciate, in 1979, was that the area would soon be subdivided and fragmented with low-density, affluent suburban housing. In subsequent decades, there have been efforts to maintain native wildflowers, including some of the remaining camas patches.

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fragments

visual, textual & territorial investigations of some ecosystems and cultural landscapes along and near the West Coast of North America