Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:04 on 2022-05-29 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 16:51 on 2022-05-29 Permalink

  Yesterday at dusk I was walking through Mont-Royal Cemetery, it was kind of magical with all the dandelions gone to seed in the fading sunset. Lots of raccoons and groundhogs out, too.

  I don’t know if the Catholic cemetery has the same issue but there are a lot of low spots on Mont Royal so the ground is still a bit mushy in parts, probs not ideal for tractor mowing just yet.

• MarcG 19:13 on 2022-05-29 Permalink

  Is it normal that the city doesn’t mow in May? Summer came early this year and the plant life is loving it.

• Kate 19:18 on 2022-05-29 Permalink

  MarcG, I was just throwing that out, and the cemetery doesn’t belong to the city anyway. The thing seems to be a shortage of staff: it’s come up before, since the pandemic, that the Sulpicians, who own the place, are too cheap to hire enough workers.

  I went up there Sunday afternoon after reading that article. La Presse’s photo overstates the general condition of the place. Grass is long, but I saw few flowering weeds. I remember how the place looked some years ago during a lengthy strike, and that really was gothic. Today it was just a bit shaggy.

• MarcG 07:45 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  Gotcha. I just noticed that places the city normally keeps tidy are shaggy right now and am curious if it’s on purpose or because of the weird weather.

• JaneyB 08:14 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  No-mow May? Is that a thing because over here in Verdun (but not Lasalle), the grass everywhere is higher than I can recall. Maybe it’s something else though – none of the flower beds have been planted yet. Could be all the rain of course.

• Meezly 09:03 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  Mowing is overrated.

• Kate 09:28 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  JaneyB, No-mow May is a thing that started in the UK but is becoming popular here.

  I could rant about lawns. Basically, they’re a class thing: in England, the wealthy have lawns because they have expansive land, and sheep to crop it, or else a servant class to keep it tidy. Lawns are of zero utility, they’re simply a way of saying “I have this land but I am wealthy enough not to have to cultivate it, so I’m just growing short grass, and if you don’t also grow short grass on your smaller piece of land, I will prosecute.”

  Lawn maintenance wastes a huge amount of water and poisons the runoff with pesticides. They’re a relic of the past we should leave behind.

• Richard 09:45 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  That was something special, when Notre Dame des Neiges ran wild back in 2007.

  https://imgur.com/a/mrDyS3Z

  I imagine the relatives of the deceased, sitting in reefer trucks for weeks on end, were not too thrilled with the situation.

• Kate 09:57 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  Nice photos, Richard!

• R.Thibault 17:08 on 2022-05-30 Permalink

  >>Summer came early this year and the plant life is loving it.
  Plant pollination comes earlier but are the pollinators also arriving on the scene earlier?
  This is not the reality my botanist friends are describing to me about spring arriving weeks ahead of the traditional pollination schedule, and sounds a lot more like a dire warning.
  Btw, the cemetery ground was mushy primarily because of Friday’s torrential rains.