Growing wild
Peaches and cosmos going wild, tricycling and cycling in Scarborough, and another way to look at one’s library.
September 2021
It’s peak harvest season, and I’m working on the next issue of Spacing, which is themed around “growing.” Together they’ve stimulated a couple of the items in this month’s newsletter and inspired this month’s title. Meanwhile, my friend and fellow-walker Nadia Halim invited me to one of her online Kitchen Parties, where she got me talking a bit about what inspired me to start this newsletter, along with great conversation about history, walking and cycling, and how to make a vol-au-vent (the pastry folding is so clever!).
The Sneak Peek
I spent the first four years of my life in Scarborough, but I remember almost nothing – maybe vague images of flying a kite with my Dad on a grassy slope, and riding a tricycle to a neighbour’s. Even after I returned to live in Toronto, I almost never went there – until my wife and I moved to the east side of Toronto, next door to Scarborough, a decade ago. Since then, I’ve explored Scarborough a little bit by foot, bike, transit, and car, even driven by that first home, and begun to understand its variety and vastness.
One of the ways I’ve experienced Scarborough is giving a regular guest lecture at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus in a class on urban issues taught by Prof. Andre Sorensen. This summer, Andre got a grant to hire five of his best students to create a plan for a comprehensive walking and cycling network for Scarborough. I was honoured to be on the advisory panel for this project, and also to be hired to edit the report. It’s an amazing, inspiring vision of how Scarborough could become a place where anyone could – and would want to – walk and cycle for many of their trips, and in so doing help meet Toronto’s climate goals. Look out for its release in October. Little did I know that my childhood tricycling on Guildcrest Drive was a foreshadowing of future work!
The Tidbit
We just bought a late batch of huge Ontario peaches at our local market. Peaches are so delicate, I’ve always thought of them as a crop that needs careful nurturing (especially in our northern clime). Then I read that, once upon a time, peaches were wild across much of the United States, right up into upstate New York – and who knows, perhaps southern Canada. It turns out that peaches were introduced very early to the United States by some of the first Spanish arrivals – and they took off as an invasive species, growing wild ubiquitously, and also growing in the orchards of Indigenous peoples who quickly appreciated their flavour and ease of growth.
So why aren’t there wild peach trees everywhere in the US now? Because the North American ecosystem eventually evolved a defence against them – native pests adapted and learned to feed on this abundant new tree, which in turn didn’t have defences against them. Now peach trees need human care to survive in most of our ecosystem. But thank goodness some farmers make the effort, so we can enjoy that sweet, delicious flavour of summer.
What’s Up
Property taxes are a bit of a strange beast. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Spacing titled “Property taxes are weird” to help me – and it turned out many others – puzzle out how they work. Also a few years ago, I read Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and, like many of his readers, became engrossed by questions around the role of wealth in our society and economy. Earlier this month, I brought these two interests together in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, “What property taxes can tell us about wealth taxes.”
I’m excited to have made a start into publishing material about wealth in our society, something I have thought about a lot and want to continue exploring. Property taxes offered me a way to segue from my experience with urban issues into the question of wealth inequality (housing offers some of the same connections). I’m hoping to learn, explore, and write more about these connections in the future.
Quotable
“Books are old friends” – Tim Reid
Last month I chose a quote that was a justification for having a library of books you haven’t read. This month, it’s a justification for having a library of books you’ve already read. When my father moved into his retirement home, he had a custom bookcase built into the heart of his small new apartment, and he brought a selection of the books of his lifetime with him. Perhaps he means to read some of them again, but they also are companions, reminding him of ideas, of parts of his life, of pleasant times spent reading. One day, he came out with this phrase, and I thought it perfectly captured why we keep books we’ve already read on our shelves.
Pic Pick
I love the way cosmos flowers will grow in any little opening in the pavement, bringing greenery and beauty to hard surfaces and neglected spaces, exploiting the cracks in the man-made structures of the city. Although they are introduced as a garden flower, they’ve broken loose and become an agent of the wild in the urban landscape. Between the flower season in Toronto wrapping up and working on Spacing’s “growing” issue, they seemed like just the right September pic.