Ancient Gardens Persist in British Columbia’s Forests | Hakai Magazine
Imagine traveling back hundreds of years and finding your way up a salmon-spawning river in British Columbia to a small village. You walk into the trees and find yourself in a patch of forest dramatically different from the conifer growth around it. Small fruit and nut trees form the canopy, and there are clusters of berry bushes and cleared paths. The forest floor hosts tended herbs used for food and medicine. One child carefully peels moss from the bark of a pruned crab apple tree; another clears the ground next to a salmonberry bush.
A new study shows that once-managed gardens like this are still distinct from—and more biodiverse than—the surrounding forest, even 150 years after Indigenous people were displaced by colonial settlers and the gardens abandoned. More diverse ecosystems are generally thought to be more resilient to environmental change and resistant to the incursion of alien species.
Chelsey Armstrong, a paleoecologist and paleobotanist at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, studied four sites: Dałk Gyilakyaw and Kitselas Canyon, both in Ts’msyen traditional territory in northwestern British Columbia, as well as Shxwpópélem and Say-mah-mit, both of the Coast Salish people of southwestern British Columbia. Each site hosted several villages that were occupied for thousands of years, up until the late 1800s.
