When we left Ottawa on Thursday, our patio looked like this.

The view from the patio here in Vancouver has quite a bit of white as well, except in this case, it’s flowers.

The effect, to say the least, is not the same. And it just gets worse when you look around.

And by “worse” I mean better, as long as I’m writing this from Vancouver.

We went for a walk yesterday in Mundy Park, a small urban park near Vancouver, and marveled at how everything was in bloom. (Not so much in Ottawa.)

One of my favorites is skunk cabbage – it looks so much better than it sounds.

Mundy park was logged a hundred years ago, and later set aside as a park. The contrast of new growth (now getting quite old) and signs of old stumps, creates many interesting effects.

In other cases, you just have the remnants of old trees.

There are also signs of more recent activity, some of it from storm damage…

And some of it from clean up activity.

It can create some interesting effects. This is a closeup of the grain of one of the trees that snapped.

I’ll leave you with a couple more shots from our walk.