The Battlefields Park

This guide to The Battlefields Park in Quebec City opens with an odd question: why did the National Battlefields Commission order a reservoir the size of a city block dug entirely by hand in 1931? It traces this land from farmland granted to a river pilot named Abraham Martin, through an eighteenth-century battlefield, to landscape architect Frederick Todd's decades-long project, begun in 1909, to shape curving paths instead of a formal garden. Walk the lawns and consider how much of what looks natural here was placed by hand, one shovelful at a time.