How the gardens at UBC began

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In 1916, the controversial closure of the Botanical Office led to the relocation of the garden’s many specimens. In May of that year, John Davidson, Mary Jane Gruchy, I. Van der Bom and James A. Wattie moved thousands of plants and shrubs to the university’s Point Grey campus, a huge job that required a 25-mile (40-kilometre) truck trip to UBC at a time when roads were not very good. The trees in the Essondale arboretum were already too well established, so they had to be left behind. These trees still stand where Davidson had originally planted them.

West Mall became the home of Davidson’s new Botanical Garden. At the time, the campus consisted of only one permanent building and two temporary buildings. Classes took place 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) away in Fairview, where the Vancouver General Hospital now stands. From his new office in Fairview, Davidson, the “demonstrator in charge of herbarium and botanical garden,” began his work planning the second garden and arboretum on the new campus.

University architects assigned part of the future five-acre (two-hectare) UBC botanical garden between two roads (PDF, 112 KB). The roads did not yet exist, but were planned for future development. Labourers then drained, graded and set up a water supply for the garden’s use.

Transforming the logged forests of Point Grey into a university campus with a botanical garden involved clearing the second growth of native trees and stones, blasting the stumps and growing a series of crops that were then plowed back into the soil as fertilizer. Although this clearing of the land was necessary for growing plants, it made the land suitable for construction as well.

In creating this botanical space, Davidson faced several obstacles. Crows carried off his tally sheets, and he had problems with his gardeners whose horticultural backgrounds made them only interested in “showy plants.” As a result, the gardeners often weeded or hoed out non-showy botanical specimens by mistake.

As the newly appointed head of the botany department, Andrew H. Hutchinson became Davidson’s boss in 1917. In the next few years, Davidson and his staff converted the scrubby second-growth forest into an organized botanical garden.

Davidson planted an arboretum that contained all of the genera and most of the species of BC trees and shrubs. He also created lawns, herbaceous beds, borders of native plants and more.

In his Native Garden, Davidson laid out fifty beds — each with space for 50 species — and arranged them systematically, according to Torre & Harms’ Genera Siphonogamarum. He labeled the plant life, using both common and scientific names. Davidson described these plantings as “a revelation of the wealth of the native flora,” and said that “more can be seen in a few hours inspection than one can see in a week’s sojourn through the Province.”

Davidson also set up a variety of themed gardens. The exotic garden housed non-native plants, and the medicinal garden allowed pharmacy students to experience the smells of plants used for essential oils and identify plants used in medicines. The aquatic garden, a clay-bottomed pond with cement walls, supported hydrophytic (water-loving) plant life. The first UBC Garden housed as many as 1,100 species.

South of the garden (at the site of one of the two planned roads), the horticultural department grew bulbs. North of the garden, Davidson created a forest nursery. The annual graduating class tree-planting ceremony took place here “on the belief that the trees would be permanent when the roadways and boulevards were completed,” Davidson wrote in a letter to Hutchinson.