Stanley Park’s giant Hollow Tree used to be a world-famous landmark. Tourists and locals engaged in increasingly ridiculous behaviors of seeing just how much could fit inside of it. Many tourists and locals had a photo of them inside the tree…while inside a car. In a moment that captures that sense of wonder, remnants of mystery, and, well the, hubris of the era, an elephant was once transported out to the tree for a photo opportunity.
The Hollow Tree has not weathered the Anthropocene well. Despite being already dead when non-indigenous Vancouverites found it, it used to have this sense of immortality from maybe always being there. Today the hollow tree is more human than tree, as it is held up mostly from steel and brilliant engineering. Tourists and locals no longer flock to it.
I don’t mean to create a sense of competition, but I think Pacific Spirit Park now has the most awe-inspiring hollow tree in Vancouver. (No who am I kidding! Pacific Spirit Park is the better park! Our city-wide collective decision to not tell tourists this was a great choice). Located on the Lily of Valley trail, we have this marvel of a dead – and burnt! – giant western redcedar hollow tree. A tree I’ve affectionately started calling “Lily”.
Standing inside this tree, surrounded by forest, you quickly understand that there is a difference between looking at a big tree vs being enveloped by one. Big is bigger than you thought. How tall was this tree when it was alive? How is the whole inside so black from being burnt? What crazy creature like this could still be standing after a giant – it’s so black in there! – fire tore through its insides?
The inner core of trees, the heartwood, often rots away in most ancient trees. Fun fact: a lot of old-growth trees are mostly hollow inside!
Western Redcedars are particularly good at turning hollow. Maybe the best. There’s a multitude of reasons for this (as there always is in botany), but maybe the most important one is how cedars have long strips of inner and outer bark that run from root to branch. These strips allow water and sugars to transport between branches and roots. Meaning that the heartwood isn’t actually necessary for the tree’s survival. Although of course – structurally – the heartwood helps! and lends strength against wind, but typically big hollow cedars only form in dense forest where wind isn’t a problem.
The best way to see this strip bark in action is on culturally modified trees. If you are interested you can read this other blog post I wrote about what a fascinating phenomenon it is.
Hollow Western Redcedar trees are well known as a favourite spot for bear dens. Pacific Spirit Park used to have bears! Lily was around and likely hollow when bears still roamed the Park, it’s possible at some point she was a bear habitat. There are many indigenous stories about hollow cedars as places for shelter, resources, and learning.
In the late 1800s old-growth in BC was being rapidly logged and all large trees were cleared from Pacific Spirit Park. However, a lot of hollow cedars were left unlogged and standing. Why? Not to preserve wildlife habit, but because hollow trees were considered junk trees. Worthless trees. Wood at the time was mostly being used for construction and long beams were what was wanted. Loggers wanted solid and straight Douglas-firs and Spruce. Hollow cedars, which no longer had their inner wood, almost survived the axe. Almost.
If you start digging through BC logging reports and publications from the early 1900s you will find lots of cases of lumber barons and politicians getting frustrated with hollow cedar tree forests – prime wildlife habitat – and suggesting they should be cut down and burnt, so that new, “good” trees that produce usable lumber could be planted in their place.
Soon though, the world’s population started booming and created a need for lots of new homes. Suddenly cedar, with its easily split wood and water-resistant properties, began to provide shelter for life in a whole new way. Not the natural shelters it had been providing for millions of years, but now by being cut into thin, foot long pieces of wood. A roof shingle.
Oh, what an industry roof shingles were and what a perfect tree cedar was for it! BC shipped its cedar shingles all over the world. There was probably a peak point in history where most of those living in North American houses were kept dry from the rain by BC cedar shingles on their roof.
Since shingles were just small blocks of wood they could be cut from previously deemed worthless hollow cedars. Hollow cedars, now in demand, started vanishing quickly from BC Forests.
Now logging, especially early logging, has always been dangerous work. Cutting shingles is no exception and, back then, the case could be made that cutting shingles was one of the most dangerous jobs. Typically, when cutting long beams of wood, you are standing a safer distance from the saw. But when cutting these much smaller shingles, you are extremely close to the saw. Just take a look at the below GIF of an early shingle cutting machine. Imagine having to reload pieces of wood with that giant spinning saw right there. Imagine trying to fix and jiggle it when the wood gets jammed.
Shingle cutting is the perfect deadly combination of monotonous and dangerous. You’re loading and cutting hundreds of these blocks a day. It’s repetitive and slow. You zone out for a second and the saw jolts as it hits a hard knot in the wood and then you notice your hand appears to be gone.
Who would do such a monotonous and dangerous job? Hm. Oh hey what about those foreign minorities that we have a long history of exploiting and discriminating against? Perfect.
Asian immigrants in BC – Chinese brought in to build the railroads and Japanese to catch fish in the fisheries – now once again would become participants in an incredibly important industry that treated them incredibly terribly.
Some worked in Shingle Mills – factories where wood was delivered for sawing – others would work in lumber camps or squat in forests, where they would do both the tree falling and the sawing. The Shingle Mills were particularly bad, as only a factory can be.
Vancouver shingle workers worked in terrible conditions and constantly struggled to convince management that they deserved human treatment. In 1916 seven out of ten Shingle Mills workers were Chinese. Chinese workers had to work 10 hours a day while white shingle workers only had to do 8. Chinese workers tried to unify and strike for better treatment, but struggled because of mistrust, suspicion, and open racism from their fellow (white) workers.
This history is well documented and discussed by Winnie Ng, I would encourage you to read their article – Chinese Canadian Shingle Workers’ Historic Organizing. In 1919 Vancouver Chinese Shingle Workers held a general strike that improved their work conditions and pay. They went on to form a national Chinese Shingle Worker union and fought for Chinese worker rights all across the country.
In the 1900s in Pacific Spirit Park there were an estimated 100 squatters – mostly Japanese – living there who were logging cedars and cutting shingles. In 1907 the BC government decided to get rid of them and gave them a 30-day eviction notice. An act of overt racism, the government was quoted as saying that it was no problem to get rid of the Japanese and that “they [would] just go fishing”. The Japanese then appear to have been forcefully ejected from the land by police.1
Pacific Spirit Park had been cleared of most of its big trees by loggers a few decades before the Japanese Shingle cutters began living and working in the park. Shingle cutters would often move into newly logged forests and start using the leftover trees – the hollow cedars and stumps and new growth – for shingle wood. Somehow, our hollow tree, Lily, was overlooked.
Maybe because Lily is so big, she was used as shelter or home? Maybe her blacken and burnt insides made her wood useless for shingle wood?
It’s unclear when Lily got burnt. It could have been multiple fires over many years. Hollow cedars can still survive with burnt insides. It’s also unclear if Lily had died because of the fire(s) or after them. We do know that in her section of the forest there were wildfires during the summer of 1910.2 It had been an extremely dry and hot year.
Lily still holds a lot of mysteries! Was she a victim of the 1910 fire? Or did she die before it?
While Asian immigrants were relying on hollow cedar trees for their livelihood another immigrant soon appeared and together these three species (humans, cedar trees, and our new arrival) did something magical together.
Honey Bees arrived in Vancouver in the late 1800s brought over by European immigrants who steadfastly cared for them and harvested their honey. Bees are going to be bees though and go on long searches for new sources of pollen! They soon discovered Pacific Spirit Park, which having been recently logged, was teeming full of new growth, flowers, and pollen. Maple tree flowers are a particular favorite of Honey Bees and Pacific Spirit Park’s new growth had a ton of maples. It was Honey Bee Heaven.
Now if only they could find a spot to build their hive. Hm. Somewhere large, warm, and dry. Where could they find something like that in this forest cleared of big trees? Ah! Of course.
Honey Bees began hiving in hollow cedars.
Now imagine being a squatter in Pacific Spirit Park, finding a leftover hollow cedar perfect for a couple hundred shingles. Then hearing a strange buzzing sound. Poking your head inside the cedar and wow. Liquid gold. A gift.
Honey was a luxury back then. A thing rich Europeans had. Now it is another gift from the cedar tree.
The bee, Asian shingle maker, and hollow cedar tree story of Pacific Spirit Park was repeated all over BC. Asian immigrants became some of the largest and most important honey harvesters.3 The practice died off as forest regrew, hollow cedars were logged, Asian immigrants moved to the city – or the city moved to them. However, for that brief moment, amidst all this terribleness, it must have been wonderful.
I encourage you to read W.H Turnbull’s 1958 book One hundred years of beekeeping in British Columbia, 1858-1958 to learn more about this fascinating history. It tells the story about how an incredible eight hundred pounds of honey was found in a hollow cedar on UBC/Pacific Spirit Park land.
References
- Kahrer, Gabrielle, et al. A Mosaic of Destinies, a Mosaic of Landscapes: The History of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, 1860s to 1950s. Greater Vancouver Regional District Parks, Vancouver, 1991. ↩︎
- Thompson, Grant A., Greater Vancouver (B.C.). Parks Department, and U.B.C. Technical Committee on the Endowment Lands. Vegetation Classification of the Endowment Lands. vol. 4;4.;, Greater Vancouver Regional District Parks Dept, Burnaby, B.C, 1985. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://ecoreserves.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/1985/04/Thompson_1985_Vegetation_Classification_UBC_Endownment_Lands.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjaw6XHqoCLAxViEDQIHXUoK1cQFnoECB4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1cEcXpVp8VING_vZjOZZoM ↩︎
- Turnbull, William Henry. “One Hundred Years of Beekeeping in British Columbia, 1858-1958.” B. [Vernon] : B.C. Honey Producers’ Association, 1958. Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. SF531 .T8 1958. Web. 18 Jan. 2025. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcbooks/items/1.0416474. BC Historical Books. ↩︎