Cougar Annie's Garden: students prowl where cougars once roamed

Cougar Annie's Garden
By Margaret Horsfield

Salal Books,
259 pages, $40

By Lynne Van Luven

NANAIMO, B.C. - In the rainforest northwest of Tofino, where the indefatigable Cougar Annie once stumped about in her gumboots checking her cougar traps, visiting students from California now stalk plant specimens.

The five-acre Eden that Ada Annie Rae-Arthur (1888-1985) and her family carved from the West Coast wilderness 80 years ago is now the subject of an award-winning book, Cougar Annie's Garden, and the centre of the newly established Boat Basin Foundation dedicated to protecting the landscape and promoting botanical education. As a result of all this, Cougar Annie herself, who gave birth to 11 children, outlived four husbands and in her latter years was described as "a tiny little old lady who looked like a logger," is in danger of becoming a cult figure, as more people learn about her hard-won legacy near Hesquiat Harbour in Clayoquot Sound. (As to just how many cougars Annie killed, the figure is debatable since she wasn't above enhancing her own myth. Some say 70 cougars became pelts, thanks to Annie's need to protect her livestock and augment her homesteader's meagre income with bounty money, which ranged over the years from $10 to $40 per kill.)

When Cougar Annie's Garden, by Nanaimo author Margaret Horsfield, won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize for the best book about B.C. this spring, it proved that self-published works can be both finely written and beautifully produced. Created without a penny of grant money ("no Canada Council, no small-business loans"), the book is already entering its second printing, after the 7,500 books released last year sold 6.000 copies, mostly by direct order, half of them dispatched from the author's home for the Christmas-gift rush. But since Horsfield and her partner (in both life and business) Peter Buckland have dedicated the past six years of their lives and at least $138,000 of their own money to the Annie Project, who can begrudge the success of their project?

"Call it a mission," jokes the soft-spoken Horsfield during an interview in her Nanaimo bungalow on a recent weekend when Buckland was "back from the garden" and impersonating a townie, rushing around to place copies of the book in craft shops and a local chainsaw store ("Well, I've given them a lot of business over the years," says Buckland, who confesses to owning a fleet of eight chainsaws, "so why shouldn't they sell our book?").

Horsfield and Buckland seem unlikely partners - he's an exuberant (some might say headstrong) entrepreneur who retired from his broker's job in the Vancouver finance world and has spent the past dozen years "living on his savings" and reclaiming Annie's garden from the underbrush and overgrowth, then enhancing it with two metres of trails, a Japanese garden and a cedar boardwalks. Horsfield is a self-confessed Anglican minister's daughter who worked as a journalist in Britain for the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent, as well as for the CBC. She's an elegant, incisive writer whose last book, Biting the Dust, explored the "joys of housework." When it comes to money, she's a timid conservative; his motto is "If You Don't Go Big, Don't Go At All." She wanted the book to come out in black and white; he insisted on the gorgeous colour shots that augment the black-and white historical pictures.

The pair met over a decade ago when Horsfield visited Annie's garden with a friend and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place - and Buckland's vision for the site.

"I call what he did 'chainsaw gardening,' " Horsfield says of her partner's gargantuan efforts to resuscitate the meandering bush garden. In Chapter 16, she writes. "To take on a garden like Cougar Annie's, a person must be slightly crazed."

"Friends thought I was nuts," Buckland allows cheerfully.

Of the two, only Buckland has actually met Cougar Annie, although he remembers more of the place than the person.

"It was overwhelming, it was like going into a time warp, out of the Ozarks - there was no use of mechanical stuff, everything was handmade," he recalls of his first visit to Boat Basin in 1969, when he was taken there "by a prospector friend." In 1981, he bought the propery, but kept on working in Vancouver. In 1987, two years after Annie's death, he moved permanently to Boat Basin and began his reclamation project.

"The material was there - all I did was to free it up and reshape it," Buckland says, adding that Annie was attempting to create "the English-garden-type thing, along with most of the settlers up and down the coast" -- even though nurturing a garden of indigenous plants would have made far more sense.

Horsfield's task, though less physical, was no less difficult: it involved "conjuring" Annie and her "cussedness" from the remnants of her life left in the garden, as well as from family recollections and historical records.
"Writing the book involved pulling a lot of slender threads into a narrative," she says. "I didn't have enough information to make the book only about Annie. She didn't lead a big enough life for a biography, so the story came out of the entire context of the place."

In 1994, four years after she first saw the garden, the focus for the book clarified after Horsfield spent the winter housesitting Buckland's home near (but not inside) Annie's garden. "I love solitude," Horsfield says, "and that was a very haunting and important time to me."

"I realized from the mess of material swilling around in my mind that we had to tell the story of Annie through her garden. I realized the key was to root myself in that garden, to try to talk about the things that trace out of the garden." Which is what Horsfield does beautifully in Cougar Annie's Garden, which guides the reader through both place and time: "The front door of Cougar Annie's house leans drunkenly open, hanging by one rusted hinge, its white paint, flaking away, is still bright, gleaming through the rain at the end of the long walkway leading into the garden . . . ."

Ada Annie, Horsfield says, was one of many eccentric settlers in British Columbia (and Canadian) history who pitted will against wilderness, trying to transform what she found, even as she recognized its bounty. "She was a typical period piece, but she lived so long and stayed in one place, that made her special."

Apparently, Annie moved her family to Boat Basin from Vancouver in 1915, to save her husband from opium-addiction and thereby ensure that the remittance cheques from his family in Scotland continued to arrive. To augment that pittance, she ran a mail-order nursery garden, a general store and a post office from her tiny home. She gave birth to eight of her 11 children there, and remained in her garden into her mid-nineties, by which time she was blind, but still "knew" where each plant was.

For Peter Buckland, the Boat Basin Foundation flows organically out of his work on Annie's garden. For now, "the foundation is me," in that he's donated 117 acres of wilderness land as a "millennium project," and he hopes to draw other like-minded preservationists to his cause. For donations of $50 or more, a tax receipt will be issued and donors will become members of "Cougar Annie's Garden Club and receive postings about garden developments. He's gone online for Annie, too, with a website that spells out his objectives (www.cougarannie.com) and plans.

Meanwhile, for those of us who cannot afford the float plane or the boat trip from Tofino to Annie's garden, there's always the book itself.

This article first appeared in Mix magazine, The Vancouver Sun, August 20, 2000