Cathedral Grove
The Anglican Cathedral on Quadra Street in Victoria is a big pile of stone on a not very large lot. This is the garden area on the south side of the Cathedral – I don’t believe it was ever used for burial. Some of it is now occupied by a parking lot, and in this picture a pavement maze, of sorts, can be seen. I called this, rather wistfully, Cathedral Grove which if you know Vancouver Island you will recognise is a reference to a magnificent patch of old-growth forest with giant Douglas fir trees (some great photos of it here). While this is a very tranquil scene I would so much prefer an old growth forest to wander in at lunch time. My pictures would sure be different.
There was beautiful light this day. This photo was taken a few minutes before the picture of the side of the Royal Theatre that I posted a couple of weeks ago, and also the same lunch break as my View Towers images.
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burnt embers 
Thank you so much for the mentions, my friend, it really means a lot to us!! GREAT post here today, love your composition and the colors in the trees really pop!
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Hey thanks Toad. Its a delight having you as a resource so I can just point people to all the hard work you have done, and can continue my own lazy ways uninterrupted 🙂
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It’s a very nice setting for the church, and a beautiful photo as well. The problem with the old growth forests is that there never seems to be enough parking for the entire congregation. Thanks for the link to Toad Hollow, there are some great photos posted there.
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Hi ken – I just wrote one of my long-winded responses and then did something to lose it entirely. So here goes again, and hopefully I don’t run out of wind. 🙂
Thanks for commenting once again – I really enjoy finding a comment from you when I get up in the morning. I was saying that the darned congregations seem to spread their parking needs so widely that they end up mindlessly paving over all the old growth. There is an extraordinary dialogue that develops around the bits that are protected. British Columbia, in the 1990’s, greatly expanded its parks system to the point where 13% of this huge province is now included in parks. The problem, in the minds of politicians (not the same ones that created the parks) is that many of them are inaccessible, or if they have a road running through them, there is nowhere for people to camp, and no nice resorts for people to stay in and enjoy nature from a comfortable pew, through a window or from a patio, to which they have driven their precious cars without a single scratch. So the parks start getting nibbled away. The concept of preserving for the future gets lost in the immediate political needs for satisfying an electorate that don’t want to make a reasonable effort to get out and enjoy the park on its terms, and political buddies that want to make some money off the park system. Still, there is a lot of it, so the chipping away is going to take some determined effort – the 13,500,000 hectares (52,000 square miles – New York State is 47,000 square miles) of protected lands in BC will accommodate an awful lot of asphalt before they are all paved over.
Toad Hollow is a great place to visit. I especially like it because it is local to me, the photos are great and the stories interesting. We sometimes photograph the same places, though not intentionally thus far, so it is also instructional, especially to compare his HDR work with my lightly processed images. The Toad has been particularly supportive of this blog as it gets on its feet by including my posts in his weekly and widely distributed round up of his favourite photography posts of the week where I always find some new blog to poke around in and admire the photos. He has pointed a couple of thousand views to this blog so I am glad to be able to link to his photos as a resource to illustrate my own work.
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Clearly I did not run out of wind.
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