City Daily Photo Theme Day: Best Of The Year

 Today I feature my favourite shots from the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. I start with this February view of the Canadian Museum of History.

In between the curatorial and exhibition wings of the Museum, this view looks across the Ottawa River to Parliament Hill.

In May I wanted to photograph the tulips on this side of the river for the Tulip Festival. This bed lies at the far end of the Portage Bridge.

Back at the grounds of the Museum of History, I took this shot, an iconic one. The flowerbed is dedicated to Malak Karsh, the landscape photographer who was very much the founder of the festival.

And this is back on the terrace between the two wings of the Museum.

In early October I took a shuttle up into Gatineau Park for the fall colours. I stopped for a hike at the lovely and unusual Pink Lake in the hills.

This lake is a rarity in the world, a meromictic lake, where the waters from one layer do not mix with the other deeper layer.

Beyond, the shuttle took me to the Champlain Lookout, where this part of the Gatineau Hills is called the Eardsley Escarpment, and affords a view right down to the valley floor. The Ottawa River can be seen in the distance.

My last destination of the day was the Mackenzie King Estate, deep in the hills, where one of our finest prime ministers, William Lyon Mackenzie King, built a weekend retreat for himself, surrounded by nature and his own dreams for the place. This is Kingsmere Lake- named before he got there, but the name itself would have appealed to him, so he started buying up land here.

The main house bears the name Moorside, a fitting place for entertaining the great and the good.

Mackenzie King had a sentimental streak to him, and part of what he did here was create follies- using pieces of buildings being demolished in Ottawa and beyond, and reassembling them here. This is one of them, at the far end of his garden, called the Window On The Forest.

Another is the Abbey Ruins. You can imagine the estate is popular in the fall.

I finish where I began, on the grounds of the Museum of History, with this autumn view.