• WHEREAS, Irish reunification would address the root causes of conflict in Ireland and establish the basis for a permanent peace settlement;
• AND WHEREAS, the Good Friday Agreement created a political framework in which Irish reunification can occur;
• AND WHEREAS the Good Friday Agreement has already facilitated the establishment of all-Ireland governing institutions;
• WE THE UNDERSIGNED pledge our support for the peaceful and democratic reunification of Ireland.

I encourage all those who believe in a United Ireland to sign this pledge. Please join the Facebook Group dedicated to this cause.

Located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Hagan is accessible by a dirt road that begins at the very back of the San Felipe Hollywood Casino parking lot. Although the site is only a few miles from Interstate 25, the trek will take about a half hour. Do not attempt this drive if it is raining, the many arroyos will flash flood and cause serious grief for you and your vehicle.

The history of Hagan is intertwined with the history of coal and the rail road. First settled by coal miners in the first years of the 20th century, the town had under a hundred inhabitants. Named for mining investor William Hagan, by 1910, the coal mine and settlement were abandoned as transporting the coal by wagon to the nearby San Felipe Pueblo was too costly.

In 1919, a Louisiana investor re-opened the mines and connected the town with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in San Felipe. By then, the town had over 500 inhabitants and its own power plant, running water, post office, a general store and a hotel but before long the coal ran out in 1931 and the town died out by the 1940s.

Today various buildings are still partially standing; they are the power plant and the mercantile. Others, built with adobe brick, are dissolving away with time. Take your time when visiting Hagan and don’t forget your camera! The colourful landscape offers tones that go from golden to ochre, a stark contrast to the crisp blue skies that are so frequent in the land of enchantment.

Photos: S. Kelly

I have often wondered why people when planting trees or shrubs rely for seedlings almost exclusively on the commercial nurseries when we have so many varieties of lovely wild trees in Cape Breton that can be had for only a little trouble of digging them up and transplanting. Then, too, they possess the advantage of being acclimated and will withstand the rigors of our winters much better than most imported trees and will bloom for generations, whereas many nursery shrubs and trees have a very ephemeral life, more especially if the plantation happens to be near the sea and is exposed to the cold, salty winds of the spring and fall.
As for beauty, we have trees growing wild in our woods than which none can be lovelier. Our wild pear and cherry for instance, which bloom long about knee deep in June, are breathtaking in the loveliness when they appear all in white. ‘June brides’ of our native woods.

Then there is the dogwood, which is not the true dogwood, but mountain ash. This tree is lovely in spring with its close-packed clusters of yellowish white blooms, and perhaps even lovelier in the autumn when it’s laden with its grape-like bunches of scarlet berries. I have mentioned only three, but there are many kinds of wild trees and shrubs that are easily grown and lend themselves readily to transplanting either in early spring on in the fall after the heat of the summer has passed.

What I have said of trees also applies to flowers which are native to Cape Breton or have become native through long acclimatization. Many of them and our wild ferns also make lovely transplantings, especially for rock gardens. One hardly ever sees old-fashioned gardens today, gardens of perennials such as heliotrope, penny royal, foxglove and phlox. I think these are among the most beautiful of all perennials flowers and they will bloom practically untended for ages. The heliotrope has one of the loveliest of all flower perfumes, indescribably sweet and penetrating, though not strong. It will scent a whole garden or a room if it used as a cut flower.

The penny royal is perhaps the most old-fashioned flower of all. I think it was originally brought to Cape Breton from England and I believe it has the longest continued period of bloom of any of the perennials, about a month, from late June in this part of the country, to late July. Its foliage is very soft in texture, a deep green in color and its pale yellow blossoms cover the whole stem from the ground right to its tip. It too, has a delicate perfume and is lovely for a vase flower.

The foxglove or digitalis has no scent but makes a brave showing in any garden of perennials with its beautiful bell-shaped blue flowers and tall, graceful stem.
Phlox, sometimes called late lilac, blooms long and profusely through August and September. It is very sweet-scented and one of our lovelies fall flowers.

I have named only four old-time perennials here but there are many more equally as hardy and long-lived. I have seen penny royal blooming in full vigor in a country garden that had been abandoned for more than twenty years. So for the gardener who has not too much time to spend in digging and weeding these perennial are ideal.

But perhaps those old-fashioned flowers are not for the city garden. They belong in the country where many of the still bloom in untended gardens, mute but beautiful reminders of the vanished hands that set them there so long ago.

Some flowers will leave the garden and go wild in the fields if long neglected. A few summers ago I came across some Irish shamrocks which had evidently done this, for I never heard of shamrocks being native to Cape Breton. The nearest garden, our own, contained no shamrocks, and these were the true variety and not clovers, as so many flower-shop shamrocks are. The true shamrock has a tiny yellow flower, star-shaped, with give petals, and according to a Dublin gardener who told me so, no other is the real shamrock. Those were in full bloom when I found them and I successfully transplanted some to our garden, but I couldn’t get them to grow indoors.

Nature seems to have no set pattern with regard to flowers or trees. I can remember a splendid black ash tree that grew on our old homestead, one of the most perfect specimens of that tree I have ever seen and I never had a seedling or a shoot, although we were anxious to get some for planting elsewhere. One winter a very destructive storm occurred and the tree was completely broken down and we regretfully cut it up for fire-wood. What was our astonishment next spring to see literally dozens of young ash seedlings coming up around the stump within a radius of twenty feed or more. Why was this? I don’t know, but I believe it to be an inanimate instinct of preservation – the species must go on.

Speaking of native trees, I never knew untill some few years ago that we have a native holly. I had always thought of holly as being purely English, but when our walking in Ingonish one morning in early winter after a recent fall of snow, I came abreast of a little valley or lowland and there I saw two trees if full bloom or red blossoms and surrounded by snow that sparkled in the sunshine. I stopped still in wonder, scarcely crediting my sense of sight, or thinking I had come upon a fairy ring, but when I approached nearer – they were about a hundred yards from the highway – I discovered that the trees were not in blossom but were covered from trunk to branch end with tiny coral red berries so think and uniform as to give the trees from a little distance the appearance of being in full bloom. It was one of the loveliest sights I have ever beheld, and live Wordsworth’s daffodils, they still “flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.”

I did not know until long after that they were Nova Scotia holly and I have never seen them growing anywhere else.

After that I found many other specimens, but in more remote places in the woods. The ones I first saw were, I imagine, fully mature, some twelve of fifteen feel tall, shaped somewhat in the spreading form of a crabapple or peach tree, and of perfect symmetry. I succeeded later in finding a smaller one to dig up and transplant but with the greatest difficulty, as their roots are deeply embedded and spread to a great distance. I have never send these trees in blossom and no one I have spoken to seems to know much about them.

I think it was very natural for the ancient Druids to worship oak trees, for the love of trees seems to be inherent in most men. Poets have sung of them, painters have painted them, and great prose writers have described them – all extolling their beauty. Any of us can plant them, but too few of us do. A man who plants an accord in not thinking of himself alone but of future generations, for it takes many, many years for an accord to grow into a great oak.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his delightful little volume of essays, Travels in England, tells of being entertained by an old English landed squire whose family roots went back for hundreds of years, and he was bemoaning the fact that the nouveaux riche were trying to usurp the place in society of the old landed gentry.

“Their guineas” said he, “can mould stone and mortar into a great mansion in a very short time, but thank God they can’t build an avenue of stately oaks overnight”.
No one can have a better monument to his memory than a tree he planted. It will not bear his name, but while it sends forth a green leaf in summer or poses its leafless silhouette against a winter sunset, it will contain a little portion of that man’s heart and soul. A cemetery full of tombstones is an ugly and depressing sight, but a stately grove is a thing of beauty. “Where the tall company of trees look down on the green fields below, they are truly ‘ambassadors from earth to heaven’.”

Note: this article was written by my great-uncle, John Francis Daly, in August of 1953 for the Cape Breton Mirror, a Monthly Magazine.

The picture above was taken over ninety-one years ago in Nîmes, France. My grandfather, Charles Cormier (centre born 25/09/1884) was recovering from several injuries suffered at the front when he wrote this postcard on February 8th 1918 to his uncle living in Miquelon Island.

Charles Cormier went to war in February of 1915 with 348 of his compatriots from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. These men boarded the ocean liner Chicago on route to France from New York when moored in Saint-Pierre harbor.

Once in France, Charles Cormier and many of his compatriots from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon was sent to the Front as a soldier of the 33rd colonial regiment (Battle of Champagne 1915, Battle of the Somme 1916). Promoted corporal, he was severely wounded to the leg by a shell, suffered from poison gas attacks and contracted malaria while part of the Allied expeditionary force landed at Thessaloniki, a base of operations against Bulgaria. I never knew him: he lived to age 64,  some 21 years before my birth year.

PBS: Bill Moyers’ Journal remains the most serious of the progressive voices on the air, however some of his interviews wallow in the obtuse world of academic liberalism. The show makes for a great podcast with its though provoking analysis and commentary. The week’s journalistic post-mortem remains in the able hands of Howard Kurtz and his Reliable Sources. Real Time with Bill Maher was once reason enough to get HBO and his show is still well worth considering despite the terrible opening monologues that make Jay Leno sound like Richard Feynman.

Drama. Mad Men. Disturbing, deep, dark and the greatest opening credits ever. Mad Men is back on AMC and will remain one of this season’s best shows. That is until season 3 of Breaking Bad …

Science and debunking. Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Debunking pseudoscience and paranormal claims is a welcome respite from the deluge of junk science and gobbledegook that is now so prevalent it is even embraced by Oprah. Mythbusters is in the same vein, but more polite and in many ways much more effective: the scientific method always trumps sarcastic commentary. Penn & Teller remains the guilty pleasure.

Classic movies? AMC & TCM …

What are your picks?

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RadioBarachois.net acts as a central repository for all news about the islands. We also produce our own content. RadioBarachois.com, remains a  French language news site about Saint-Pierre and Miquelon with three main audiences: citizens of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (including expatriates), French citizens from Europe and Overseas territories, and Francophones from around the world.

By reporting daily about issues and news affecting Americans, I believe a better understanding can be achieved between the two Republics. En Amérique’s readership has exploded in just under a year from just a few visitors to over 200 readers a day with some articles reaching close to 3000 readers.

En Amérique was selected by the French daily Le Monde in early 2008 and was featured on it’s US 2008 Election page.

Since those early days, I have built numerous websites with varying degrees of success. Most have been niche projects, some political, others cultural, but all in all, the fact remains : it’s all about content. It doesn’t matter if you hand code your pages in Notepad, or you run Joomla, Drupal or WordPress, it’s all about what you say and what people want to know and read.

This Blog on the other hand does not aim to be a content provider, it is simply a repository for most of my public accounts and links towards my many projects. I hope you enjoy these many sites.