2012-07-06 A walk / climb / scramble in the River Valley

Post date: Jul 06, 2012 6:44:37 PM

The north campus of the UofA runs up to the North Saskatchewan River, which winds its way through Edmonton. The River Valley is a large urban park running along both banks and connected in places by the bridges which span the river. Much of the vegetation in the River Valley is still (or perhaps once again) Indigenous to Alberta.

On the titled walk / scramble / climb, we were able to find quite a few of the plants in our garden and other Indigenous plants which perhaps we will consider adding once we have more space.

Right along the edge of many trails were plants like wild strawberry, which we have in the garden

and Saskatoon berries - not quite ripe - which get a bit too big to grow in our planters.

One of the plants we really wanted to find was sage. However, sage grows a bit better in drier conditions, which means in the River Valley it likely won't be down by the path but up somewhere on a hill or an embankment. Hence, the climbing and scrambling. We did eventually find some, way up a hill, well hidden under some brush. Of course, once we knew it was there, we found lots.

The main goal of our adventure was to get a sense of what was actually growing out in the world in a place that will be accessible to us for teaching and learning. We are already thinking that some of our fall classes will move from our balcony gardens into the River Valley, connecting the learning we do in university to exploration out in the world. And we found a great site for that ...

... but I'll share that in a later posting.