the sculpted landscape

 

Welcome to the north end of Hurdman Park, summer 1991. This aerial view (courtesy of geoOttawa) relates to my post-before-last and offers a glimpse of a landscape then-recently transformed. And yes, I've been at it with the crayons, gussying up those bare patches.

The blue patch is an expanse of dead ground left behind after years of city snow-dumping, a practice that continued here well through the 1970s. Recovery was slow, but the area now boasts a stand of mature Eastern Cottonwood (Populus tremuloides). Grasses dominate the open spaces, and there's rose bush growing in the middle of it all, please don't ask me how it got there.

The yellow patch is the man-made hill. This one in fact, rising some 12 metres (40 feet) above the surrounding landscape.

As I write this, I don't exactly know where this heap of soil came from. Did someone, on a whim, decide to build a sledding hill and then forget to use it? I think not. While I don't have an exact date for the hill's creation, I do seem to remember it appearing in the early '80s, a time-frame that corresponds with a lot of digging in the immediate area — the Lees Avenue Transit Station on the far side of the Rideau River, as well as several high-rise apartments (on both sides) with extensive underground parking. All that excavated dirt had to go somewhere. Btw, I say "dirt" — I also seem to remember this fill as being a sand/silt mixture, prone to being carried away by the wind before a cover of charlock, alfalfa, red clover, sweet-clover and various grasses took root to hold it down.

For a sense of scale, the red line along the long the hill's long axis marks a distance of almost exactly 360 metres, or a fifth of a mile.