Twenty years ago, when we first began exploring the myriad trails that entered and looped about the extensive ravine that anchors this community with its forest and waterways, we had come across a faint offshoot of a trail and looking down into the ravine from that trail we encountered a rather surprising sight. Someone had obviously taken it upon themselves to take possession of a tributary of the main creek, along with its sloped sides,
to deviate from nature's very own natural and haphazard selection.

Introduced by someone was the vision of an orderly, refined and quite extraordinary gardening scheme that took advantage of the natural surrounding to impress upon nature that a human hand with all green digits and a mind to alter and reform, could impose upon her a landscape quite unlike the one she had herself gifted to the community. Except that this was not a gift to the community. This landscaping effort, wide, deep and broad in its execution, was the presumed possession of one individual. A house sat at the lip of the ravine's border, on a small, dead-end street, and it was the owner of that house who had made that presumption.

An enquiry to the municipal offices brought the information that the individual in question had somehow, years previously, maneuvered his local reputation as a pillar of his community, a church elder and acquaintanceship with town councillors to enable himself to be legally invested with the property in question. Elsewhere, anywhere else in that protected natural area, it was strictly off limits for anyone to assume they had the right of encroachment.

From time to time we wandered that way, each time to see new 'improvements' to the area, an elongation, where the sloped sides were tiered and carefully tended with plants, elaborate stairways built, canopies erected, the creek tributary closed off, a languid, cool pool resulting beside which lounges were placed, and planters hosting colourful annuals carefully situated to bring colour to the area, along with garden pot lights to illuminate it at night. There were compost boxes built of wood, and the entire scene below illustrated one man's obsession, and what hard work and determination could produce; a modern-day hanging garden of Babylon.

We hadn't been that way for years, when it occurred to us during a shorter stroll than is our usual wont in the ravine, as a result of incessant rain events, to go along that way out of curiosity. It represents a relatively short walk in a direction we don't normally take. And it was evident as we approached that something was different. The elderly retiree who had devoted so much time, energy and cost to the production of a manicured garden out of nature's own devotion to a natural forested environment had obviously given up the ghost.

We've no idea how long it's been since the treasured garden that had been ringed with "private property" and other warning signs of trespass had been abandoned. But it was more than obvious to us that it had been. It has almost completely reverted to its unadorned-by-human-hands state, to its natural and equally beautiful state. It is now as it should be.