Hurdman Woods, a Touchstone Recovered

 potsherd, 1.5-2 cm

"flow blue" china saucer, likely English,

late Victorian to early 20th c.

This tiny relic caught my eye, poking up from the soil, while on a recent ramble through the southern parts of Hurdman Woods (that is to say the sherd was doing the poking and I the rambling. The Woods were just being themselves.)

I wanted to believe that my chip of china might have come from a 19th century farmstead midden, but given that the area served as municipal landfill from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, the latter, more prosaic origin story seems likely.

The low, sandy ground between the Hurdman and Billings Bridges was settled in the early to mid-19th century and farmed until shortly after WWII. Dumping on the south half of theacreage was approved in 1948 and continued until roughly 1960. I've drawn an orange line on this 2022 aerial photo show the northern extent of garbage dumping, while the blue 'X' marks the spot where I found my little sherd.

After garbage dumping ceased, the landfill site (extending south past the Alta Vista Hydro Corridor) was graded for parkland and passively rewilded. Around the same time, the hayfields which had continued to grow north of the orange line were acquired for snow-dumping — this began in the early '60s and continued through the '70s. During this time, the fields were a hideous, garbage-strewn waste-ground all summer long. In the early 1980s, the fields were allowed to rewild, apart from the creation of a huge artificial hill in the SE corner.

Now I don't know the official story of the hill, but I assume it to be made of soil excavated from the construction of many high-rise apartment buildings in the immediate area and possibly (heavily contaminated) soil from the Lees Avenue transit station. If the latter is present, it is likely buried under sandy silt taken from the east side of the Rideau River.

6a —sandy silt, silty sand, floodplains and the like

The 2-stage rewinding of the park area has created an odd juxtaposition of tree species in the woods. The older dump section was taken over by various tree types, but Manitoba Maple (Acer negundo) easily dominated. Given their weak, multi-branched growth habit, many of these were torn limb-for-limb during the Great Ice Storm of 1998.

North of the orange line, the former snow-dump was first populated by grasses such as Timothy, and various meadow legumes (Alfalfa, Red Clover, Sweetclover, Cow Vetch.) A stand of Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides) soon established itself and and these tall, fast-growing trees continue to spread and flourish. Rows of Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) line the bike path, and Wild Chervil, aka Cow Parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) has become common over the past decade after travelling up the Ottawa River from Montreal in the 1980s and '90s.