Changing relationships

While many pioneers thought that making British Columbia “more English” was progress, the practice weakened aboriginal cultures and altered relationships among people, plants and animals. Some people were more aware of these shifts than others. The most aware tried to preserve the remaining evidence of pre-contact British Columbia in museums so that future generations could understand and appreciate what had come before.

Natural historians were in a good position to observe human-created environmental changes and influence policy. For Davidson, this was a job for amateur botanists:

These changes are still taking place, and the vegetation is constantly changing to suit new environments. It doesn’t require an expert to see what is taking place all around us. Anyone with average intelligence, who will exercise his eyes and brains, can learn it all direct from Nature.

His reaction to the environmental changes indicates that he was a passionate human being who considered it his job to make others aware of what was happening:

The Provincial Botanist sees this struggle, he sees the horrible slaughter of innocents which accompanies the advance of civilization in British Columbia, and how often his heart yearns on account of the callousness of his fellow men who do not seem to realize that these plants enjoy their share of the same life as we ourselves possess. They forget that plants are living creatures, that they were created before us, and that we are absolutely dependent on them for our existence.

In Davidson’s view, the province’s flora had once developed without human interference, which no doubt accounted for the wealth and variety of plant life in British Columbia. Davidson was quite concerned about the effect of European settlement in Vancouver, stating:

hardly a trace can be found of the native plants which inhabited the ground on which the city now stands, & it is impossible to distinguish where bogs previously existed from those places which formed the habitats of plants preferring dry situations.

Davidson described how “this process of extinction” had begun. After logging, landowners used explosives to uproot tree stumps. They then piled these stumps 30 or more feet high (at least 10 metres) and set them on fire. Wrote Davidson:

At night this weird spectacle is presented when the reflection of such fires several miles distant redden the sky & giant flames stand out against a background of pines & cedars awaiting a similar fate.

Bracken and fireweed eventually grew on these lands, except where the surface soil had been removed for purposes such as grading a road. In those cases, dandelions were more likely to appear. In New Westminster and Victoria, both older cities with a long history of human interference, Davidson saw that daisies grew instead of dandelions. These flowers were not native to British Columbia (although there were native species of each). Immigrants from Europe had accidentally introduced them decades earlier. “Thus gradually new & strange plants — grasses, clovers & other plants of cultivation — become the common plants around the city while the native flora becomes obscure,” he wrote. Davidson felt he had to record whatever pre-settlement flora he could before it was too late.

In his lifetime, Davidson’s concerns became reality. The flora he had initially observed at Musqueam Meadows, Crescent Beach, the Caulfields district and the West Vancouver Rocky Bluffs disappeared and were replaced by a mixture of native and introduced species.