Urban Botanicals

The Urban Botanicals Project is an outdoor installation consisting of botanical name identifiers for plants that are no longer growing in the area due to urbanization. The names of the original native plants are interspersed within the imported classical Chinese plants in the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Park. Cut from leaves and attached to bamboo stakes, they spell out the names of plants of the region, acknowledging the original landscape that the downtown east side and the city of Vancouver were built upon. For example, the Coastal Western Hemlock Zone of Vancouver’s land surface was once “covered with some of the …