CARLTON OCEAN BEACH.
In 1853, I removed to the village of Carlton West, on the gravel road to
Weston, and distant seven miles north-west of the city. My house stood
on a gravel ridge which stretches from the Carlton station of the
Northern Railway to the River Humber, and which must have formed the
beach of the antediluvian northern ocean, one hundred and eighty feet
above the present lake, and four hundred and thirty above the sea. This
gravel ridge plainly marks the Toronto Harbour at the mouth of the
Humber, as it existed in those ancient days, before the Niagara River
and the Falls had any place on our world's surface. East of Carlton
station, a high bluff of clay continues the old-line of coast, like the
modern, to Scarboro' Heights, showing frequent depressions caused by the
ice of the glacial period. In corroboration of this theory, I remember
that for the first house built on the Avenue Road, north of Davenport
Road, the excavations for a cellar laid bare great boulders of granite,
limestone, and other rock, evidently deposited there by icebergs, which
had crossed the clay bluff by channels of their own dredging, and melted
away in the warmer waters to the south. I think it was Professor
Chapman, of Toronto University, who pointed this out to me, and
mentioned a still more remarkable case of glacial action which occurred
in the Township of Albion, where a limestone quarry which had been
worked profitably for several years, turned out to the great
disappointment of its owner to be neither more nor less than a vast
glacial boulder, which had been transported from its natural site at a
distance of at least eighty miles. This locomotive rock is said to have
been seventy feet in thickness and as much in breadth.
While speaking of the Carlton gravel ridge, it is worth while to note
that, in taking gravel from its southern face, at a depth of twenty
feet, I found an Indian flint arrow-head; also a stone implement similar
to what is called by painters a muller, used for grinding paint. Several
massive bones, and the horns of some large species of deer, were also
found in the same gravel pit, and carried or given away by the workmen.
The two articles first named are still in my possession. Being at the
very bottom of the gravel deposit, they must have lain there when no
such beach existed, or ever since the Oak Ridges ceased to be an ocean
beach.
My house on the Davenport Road was a very pleasant residence, with a
fine lawn ornamented with trees chiefly planted by my own hands, and was
supplied with all the necessaries for modest competence. It is worth
recording, that some of the saplings--silver poplars (abeles) planted by
me, grew in twelve years to be eighteen inches thick at the butt, and
sixty feet in spread of branches; while maples and other hardwoods did
not attain more than half that size. Thus it would seem, that our
North-West prairies might be all re-clothed with full-grown ash-leaved
maples--their natural timber--in twenty-five years, or with balm of
Gilead and abele poplars in half that time. Would it not be wise to
enact laws at once, having that object in view?
I have been an amateur gardener since early childhood; and at Carlton
indulged my taste to the full by collecting all kinds of flowers
cultivated and wild. I still envy the man who, settling in the new
lands, say in the milder climates of Vancouver's Island or British
Columbia, may utilize to the full his abundant opportunities of
gathering into one group the endless floral riches of the Canadian
wilderness. We find exquisite lobelias, scarlet, blue and lilac;
orchises with pellucid stems and fairy elegance of blossom; lovely
prairie roses; cacti of infinite delicacy and the richest hues. Then as
to shrubs--the papaw, the xeranthemum of many varieties, the Indian pear
(or saskatoon of the North-West), spiraea prunifolia of several kinds,
shrubby St. John's-wort, oenothera grandiflora, _cum multis aliis_.
Now that the taste for wild-flower gardens has become the fashion in
Great Britain, it will doubtless soon spread to this Continent. No
English park is considered complete without its special garden for wild
flowers, carefully tended and kept as free from stray weeds as the more
formal parterre of the front lawn. Our wealthier Canadian families
cannot do better than follow the example of the Old Country in this
respect, and assuredly they will be abundantly repaid for the little
trouble and expenditure required.