Cultivating connections
As the plant world goes into hibernation, some reflections on what our relationship with it can tell us about ourselves.
October 2021
The city is a living thing. A theme this month is our relationship to the plants that grow in and around our structures, and how they help to connect us as people. We garden together, our parks bring us together, our front yards speak about us and connect us to our neighbours and passers-by – for better and, sometimes, for worse.
The Sneak Peek
We’re just finishing work on the next issue of Spacing, which will head to the printer’s soon. The theme of this issue is “growing” – specifically, greenery. We’d been getting a steady stream of pitches about gardening, urban agriculture, trees, landscapes, and I wanted an issue where we could bring these all together. But it was a bit of a challenge to make it sound exciting – “plants” doesn’t really resonate, however fundamental they are to our world and however deeply many people are engaged with tending to them.
Yet what became clear is that the plant world makes a compelling metaphor for the city itself. How to balance nurturing and regulation with letting things grow on their own initiative, how to ensure variety and diversity rather than a monoculture ... it brought to my mind a new way of thinking about the city – “city growing” rather than “city building.” The next issue explores this theme, with arborist Todd Irvine on trees and climate change, Sarah Hood on ancient trees, Jennifer Cole on gardening in the margins, and Joseph Wilson on creating Indigenous landscapes on the Toronto islands, as well as myself on letting gardens loose.
The Tidbit
This month I learned that under the waters off the coast of British Columbia lie the remains of complex Indigenous systems for cultivating fish and seafood. The technologies vary depending on the specific ecosystem and the catch being targeted, some using stakes and fences to trap fish, others using stone walls to create “sea gardens” as seafood habitats. The systems were lost sight of when Indigenous populations were decimated by disease, and then forcibly moved by colonial governments, but they are starting to get recuperated.
The story reminded me of one of the books that has most influenced me recently, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It tells the story of how the landscapes of the Americas were deeply shaped by Indigenous peoples to sustain a large and thriving population before the arrival of Europeans. But by the time Europeans began settling permanently on the shores of North America, diseases introduced by earlier explorers had wiped out most of that population, and without it the land the early settlers found was much more wild than it had been in recent history, creating the myth of the untamed North American wilderness. There’s even a theory that the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century was triggered in part by the massive growth of new forests in the now-depopulated Americas. It’s a reminder that landscapes are not always what they seem.
What’s Up
For the upcoming Spacing, I had the privilege of getting a tour of Nina-Marie Lister’s garden and having a fascinating conversation with her about growing a “natural” front yard. I wanted to call it “gardens gone wild” but that would have underplayed the amount of work it takes, as I learned, to nurture a garden that grows naturally in places where humans have long meddled with the landscape.
Some may recall that a year ago, in the fall of 2020, there was a kerfuffle about her front yard – a neighbour complained about it and a bylaw officer came around with a warning that it broke the city’s “grass and weeds” bylaw – a warning that was quickly withdrawn when the City realized she was a professor who headed the Ecological Design Lab at Ryerson University. But there wasn’t a lot of follow-up in the media about what happened after, which is that she and others successfully pushed the City to deeply revise the relevant bylaw to be much more open to her kind of garden (though it still doesn’t go as far as they’d like). I wanted to follow the story to the end – including getting the point of view of the City staff. I didn’t have space to capture the full fascinating discussion (perhaps I’ll be able to fill it out someday), but I’m glad I got a chance to tell the gist of the story. Read all about it when the issue hits newsstands and mailboxes!
Quotable
“Like a good book or piece of music, a park bench allows for a sense of solitude and community at the same time, a simultaneity that’s crucial to life in a great city.” – Jonathan Lee
This quote (in the New York Times) made me think of front porches and front yards, which I think provide something of the same combination. During the early lockdown phase of the pandemic, it was really noticeable how people who had access to front porches could use them to connect to the world while still keeping a distance. And later, when we could be with people only outside, parks – benches, lawns, and trails – really came into their own in the same way, allowing us to be alone yet part of a community.
One evening last summer, coming out of the solitude of both winter and lockdowns, my wife and I walked over to join the throng who gathered to watch the sun set from the slopes of Broadview Park East. We were seated on the grass, not on the limited benches, but the effect was the same. Every group on the lawn was socially distanced, but we just felt so much joy basking in the overheard murmurs of the nearby conversations. We were part of a community of strangers.
Pic Pick
This photo captures some of the vibrancy of Nina-Marie Lister’s front yard, bringing a last splash of colour to the late summer fading of September foliage – yellow goldenrod, purple asters, and a shot of sumac red. What you don’t see in the photo are all the bees that were humming happily as they feasted on these flowers, bringing movement to this scene. It’s a wild image, yet made possible by careful tending.