If you were one of many people turned away from a recent presentation on wildflowers held in Canmore, take heart, Ian Wilson and Jacinthe Lavoie are offering it again next week.
Based on their recently released identification guide, Wildflowers of Banff Park, the duo is presenting Wildflowers of Banff Park: A four-season multimedia presentation in the Elizabeth Rummel School gym Thursday (April 25) at 7 p.m.
Admission is by donation and all funds will go to the ERS library.
“We had to turn people away two Mondays ago,” Wilson said Monday (April 15) of the presentation. “We had 100-plus people and we couldn’t accommodate everyone.”
The 45-minute-long presentation, set to classical music and with narration at the beginning and end of each of five segments, follows the lifecycle of flowers from valley bottom right up into alpine.
“In my mind, flowers have character,” Wilson said. “There’s the big, bold flowers that will be with bolder music. The diminutive, delicate flowers will be with quieter music.”
The show closes with fall and the first taste of winter and how both seasons affect what remains of the flowers.
The 200-page guidebook itself is self-published through the couple’s newly-founded Hyacinth Press and represents the culmination of a dream.
“We’ve always loved the park and Jacinthe has been a flower bug since she was a kid. She said she always wanted to do a flower book,” Wilson said.
The identification guide includes 160 of the most common and easily recognized flowers; the ones, Wilson said, that people are most likely to see.
Each page illustrates a single flower with a large photograph, description and the best places in Banff National Park to find these showy plants.
Wildflowers of Banff Park also includes the 10 best hikes and locations to find these flowers.
“There’s certainly a number of flower books, but we wanted to not only tell people about the flowers, but where to find them,” Wilson said. “In my thoughts, that’s what’s really missing from other flower books. People would really like to know where these flowers are. We spent a lot of time finding the flowers and documenting where they could be found.”
The 10 hikes range from low-elevation trails and areas such as Spray River and Johnson Lake right up into the high alpine at Nigel Pass.
Wilson and Lavoie are planning to follow the Wildflowers of Banff Park with flower identification guides for Waterton National Park and Kananaskis Country.
And from there, Wilson said, they have no firm plans as they’ll have met their initial goal. But Wilson, a professional photographer and writer, said they might expand their project.
“I think we’ll stick to flowers; it is certainly Jacinthe’s passion and it’s becoming mine,” he said. “Having said that, we have quite a collection of wildlife photos.”
Overall, and on a more philosophical level, Wilson said the project itself is proof that people with a dream shouldn’t give up on them.
“When we retire many of us don’t quite know what to do, but my thoughts are now, if you have a dream a project you’d like to follow through, you should do it. For us that is our real motivation, having created a book.”
For more information go to www.hyacinthpress.com
