The gardens and the wilds

At the Belvedere, Reford Gardens

Sunday morning, June 28th, we drove to the Reford Gardens, aka Jardins de Métis. Métis is the nearest community to the lodge and its grounds where the Reford family lived. Elsie Reford was quite a girl, beautiful in her youth, bold and creative in her 50s when, inspired by the example of Gertrude Jekyll in England, she started making these gardens. This year, black and white photos from the 1920s can be seen through telescopes dotted around the grounds. I went here on my own once; this time I persuaded Chris to come and look round with me.

Blue poppy at the Reford Gardens, June 2015

We found the famous "glade" where the blue poppies from the Himalayas were blooming; Chris makes fun of people's reverence for these rare plants, calling them the purple turnips. Unlike the poppies we're familiar with, this variety grows in the damp and the shade. I was also delighted by the yellow lady's slipper orchids in the vicinity of the poppies, by the peonies on the verandah of the old house, the lupins in the meadow and the pansies and primulas by the woodland walks. It features rock gardens and garden sculptures––the latest installation being of shiny "fish" (with scales made from sequins) leaping through the topiary. This place is the eastern equivalent of the Butchart Gardens that I saw in March, with a lookout over a salt water inlet that reminded me of the views from Vancouver Island. To my amusement the flowers blooming in the Gaspésie at the end of June were the same ones that I saw blooming in British Columbia in March.

Ladies Slipper orchids at the Reford Gardens

Lupins and buttercups at the Reford Gardens

Azazleas at the Reford Gardens

Pansies, primulas and ferns at the Reford Gardens

Rivière Matane

After the Gardens, we drove along the coast road to Matane for lunch, where we walked round a nicely / recently landscaped playground and park on a river island to stretch our legs. We ate at an old favourite place for the locals, the Café aux Délices. followed the Matane River inland from Matane (by the coast) and parked by an information hut for the sake of a short hike in the forest. We could have driven 40km further into the wilds of the Réserve Faunique and seen some spectacular scenery, but the river with its cliffs was satisfying enough. So we also saw flora in the wild that day: bunchberry flowers under the fir trees. By the narrow trail near the river were heaps and heaps of moose droppings along with moose hoof prints, but we never spotted the actual moose. No other fauna either, except for one very large hare (snowshoe hare?) that hopped in front of our car as we set off back to the main road.

Bunchberries in the wild

Rivière Matane

Moose droppings, with Chris' foot for scale!

For the rest of the afternoon we drove along the country roads of the Gaspésie, fun to drive, like a switchback––Rte 195 to Amqui (where we stopped to see another playground and a covered bridge over the Matapédia River), then Rte. 132, past Lac Matapédia, and along back roads through farmland, back to Ste. Flavie.

Bridge at Amqui

Saint Octave de Métis, St. Laurent estuary in the distance

Wednesday, into Quebec

August 8th

Lifting off from Charlo we struck out across the Baie des Chaleurs, IFR but in good visibility, climbing to cross the hills on the Quebec side and eventually "maintaining 6000" feet ASL, which gave us a good vantage point for spotting the towering cumulus ahead. Even in the morning the bigger clouds appeared to be building quite rapidly above the Gaspésie once we had left the coast. We requested a detour around one cloud before returning on course which took us straight towards another, that we penetrated. We reckoned it was towering to 20,000' at most, not really dangerous yet; despite definite turbulence as we entered and left the cloud it didn't seem too drastic in the middle, just very wet––heavy rain washed our windscreen clean; it needed that. Beyond this encounter with "active weather" we could see our way to the coast, i.e. the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

A twin-prop Navajo ahead of us cancelled IFR to allow us to do a long RNAV approach over the water, partly covered in a thin low layer of mist, to Mont Joli (CYYY). We know this airport but hadn't approached it like this before, flying a 12 mile final quite low over the sea! This airport is much livelier than the one at Charlo, advertising chartered flights to the Ile d'Anticosti: rich people fly there, willing to pay $4000 for their hunting and fishing experience. Another vehicle that stops at Mt. Joli airport is the courtesy shuttle bus from the Motel Gaspésiana by the shore at Ste. Flavie down the hill. This institution takes pride in the service it provides, so we were willing to order our lunch at their restaurant with its view of the rocky beach (tide out). The tables were stylishly laid, the waitresses looked smart in their navy blue uniforms and freshly caught cod was on the menu.

Before going back up the hill to our 'plane we decided to take a walk along the road (Rte 132) to see Le Grand Rassemblement again, Marcel Gagnon's concrete figures emerging from the sea and clustering together by his house, the Centre d'Art that I've mentioned before in this blog, where we stayed in 2009. There they were again, none of them submerged because of the low tide and some with seaweed for hair, this year. There were extra ones on tethered rafts, and when we turned away and returned up the road to the airport we passed another Gagnon creation, a flock of concrete sheep with their shepherd on the grassy slope by the Mont Joli Motel.

This time round we chose not to stay in Ste. Flavie but to fly on to Rimouski, taking the precaution of booking a room at the Comfort Inn before setting off. It was the high season. We feared we'd be too far from the centre, around the Institut Maritime, but we found we could walk there in less than an hour, along the Promenade de la Mer. Rimouski is a cultured town and a chamber music festival was going on in the area: the Concerts aux Iles du Bic, now in its 11th season. If we'd known about this beforehand we might have planned our summer trip differently! Unfortunately most of the concerts were happening in country churches at some distance, e.g. in St.-Fabien-sur-mer. The Bic islands are in an area of outstanding natural beauty, but we'd have needed more time and preparation to get there and back from Rimouski ... or perhaps not! I have just discovered from the website that a festi-bus shuttle could have served our purpose: how frustrating to find that out too late. Anyhow, we did catch part of a free, outdoor concert that was taking place in the central gardens of Rimouski's Place Publique, hearing two young performers, David Stylenko, on saxophone and Olivier Tremblay-Noël, on the marimba. I haven't been able to discover who composed their duet for "anche et baguettes" (reed and sticks) but it was French-style music of very good quality. Lots of people were sitting on the grass listening carefully.

We had a panini at Tim Horton's, a walk down the Boulevard where the shops are, including a good French bookshop that stays open 12 hours a day in the summer season, and wandered back to the Promenade just before high tide. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page (or read the French version) you'll find some information about the Tide Tower. We climbed onto the lookout to see the view and while we were up there heard the signal announcing the turn of the tide––la pause entre le flot et le jusant. An elderly gentleman sitting on the bench up there told me that, and kept talking to me when not reading his book (marking it with a pencil from time to time). He comes up to sit there every evening. He said he was born in Rimouski but had left the town for 43 years until he came back six years ago. He had missed the sunsets.

Grand Manan to Ste Flavie

Written in a notebook on Tuesday evening, when we couldn't get the Internet connection to work.

We'd booked a room at Marcel Gagnon's Centre d'Art and Auberge here in Ste. Flavie weeks ago so were obliged to arrive today. It's another place with a sea view from the bedrooms, this time including the artist's Grand Rassemblement of concrete figures wandering up onto shore or being submerged in the waves.

There's amazing clarity in the air here as well. We flew through a "mild cold front", hardly noticeable but for a few bumpy clouds and a clearing of the haze that lay over the New Brunswick coast when we took off across the island of Grand Manan to the north, with one last glimpse of the Swallowtail light, fishing weirs and cliffs. We crossed the open water parallel to the route taken by our friends in the ferry on Sunday, with a view of The Wolves, small islands in the Grand Manan channel. Even hazier views inland though we could make out the military practice area south of Gagetown and as we approached our destination we passed a series of ponds in the muskeg magically full of cloud reflections that made for some good photos (appearing here soon). Joining left base in the circuit for "Freddie" (Fredericton) we saw the elegant bridge over the St John River, and then we were down for a late breakfast in the terminal building. 70 nautical miles.

The second leg of our journey was 180 nautical miles, east of the St John River on a line almost directly north (i.e. magnetic north) from Fredericton to Mont Joli. This route took us over some very wild country where the only sign of human interference was a maze of loggers' tracks in the hilly forests. There wasn't much on the map either though I identified the Tobique River, the Kedgewick River and the Restigauche in the valleys in the vicinity of the Quebec / New Brunswick border. We could hear other pilots coming into Charlo on the Baie des Chaleurs, but I never spotted the bay for the hills that were now covered with dark blobs of shadow as the clouds thinned out. They finally disappeared as the St Laurence estuary came in sight with the sunny rolling countryside--fields of barley-- on its south bank. That's where we were headed.

While Chris was tying PTN down and having her refuelled I went into the Mont Joli terminal and rented a car for our two days at the "Gateway to the Gaspésie". We drove to our lodging then back up the hill to retrieve the SPOT device that Chris suddenly remembered leaving on PTN's nose, and so on up the road a couple of kilometres into Mont Joli which is liberally decorated with frescoes depicting past times, called Les Murmures de la Ville. I like that name. We had a snack at the railway hotel restaurant, rather a grand place considering that the Montreal-Gaspé train only stops here twice daily, both times in the middle of the night.

During the rest of the afternoon I drove us to the edge of Rimouski, discovering the Pointe-au-Père Historic Site where were three tourist attractions, the 2nd tallest lighthouse in Canada, a museum about the wreck of the Empress of Ireland (a Titanic like disaster) and a naval submarine... these to be described in the next blog because we visited them on the morrow.

We watched the sun go down behind the distant shore, at which Chris made hissing noises, then ate an excellent supper at a window table, where we could gaze at the afterglow.