Sensational Victoria

Emily Carr’s 100-year-old Oak Bay cabin could be yours for $5.5 million dollars! The good news is that it comes with a 10-bedroom heritage house designed by Samuel Maclure. In 1913, Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in Oak Bay. According to a story,* she built a 12 by… Continue reading Emily Carr’s $5.5 Million Cabin

We probably have more monkey puzzle trees in BC than in all of their native Chile. The quirky trees started arriving in gardens in the 1920s. In 2012, I wrote a book called Sensational Victoria and one of my favourite chapters was Heritage Gardens. I visited and then wrote about large rich-people’s gardens like Hatley… Continue reading Vancouver’s Monkey Puzzle Tree Obsession

Name recognition: Her name adorns a university, a school, a bridge, and a library. She is the subject of several documentaries, museum exhibits, books and plays. In 2009, her painting Wind in the Tree Tops sold for more than $2.1 million, one of the highest-priced Canadian paintings ever sold at auction. Tourists visit her family… Continue reading Emily Carr’s James Bay

I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro. He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back… Continue reading Jim Munro (1929-2016)

It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun. What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10… Continue reading The Curve of Time: national bestseller after more than 50 years

To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria. Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of… Continue reading The Titanic’s British Columbia Connection

Some of my favourite pictures in Sensational Victoria are the then and now ones in James Bay. There’s a fabulous archival shot of Carr House on Government Street taken in 1869 and a current photo that doesn’t look all that much different—143 years later. Another find is of the Queen Anne house on South Turner… Continue reading James Bay – Then and Now

On October 23, 1918– six years after the sinking of the Titanic—the SS Princess Sophia sailed out of Skagway, Alaska. Four hours later the ship slammed into a coastal reef killing all aboard. These men and women formed the backbone of the North and it was a devastating tragedy for the Pacific Northwest. More than… Continue reading The Sinking of the Princess Sophia