Glad you had such a good day, Retired! Thanks for giving us the excuse to get together again; always fun. And it's awesome that you got a day of February sunshine AND a seedy saturday. 2 of my very favorite things!
Speaking of Qualicum, I was thinking later yesterday that if you end up a little farther north to be in more affordable territory, one place you might really enjoy is the Deep Bay Marine Field Station, run by Vancouver Island University:
https://www2.viu.ca/deepbay/ It's an amazing place. And that area, Deep Bay, Bowser, etc is about 45 mins north of Nanaimo, but on the coast and definitely less expensive. Oyster country, yum! (well, except for the ocean acidification which is wreaking havoc on the shellfish industry here, but that's another conversation ;) )
As to your question about the sugar maples, they are not an invasive species or anything, so you could certainly give them a try. I think they just don't do all that well here because we don't have the winter chill hours that they like/need. The bigleafs are also well adapted to our acidic, rocky soils, and long summer droughts. They are one of our succession species that start to mingle with fir, before fir turns into cedar rainforest (if I'm not mistaken). We don't get the lovely red sugar maple leaves in the fall (unless you plant japanese maples, which are very common ornamentals here), instead the bigleafs turn gold, so we have gold-green falls instead (very gold, actually, as it really isn't until well into October when the fall rains finally green things up!). Great to hear that you'll get the full experience at the Discovery Centre festival--have a great time!
