(Photo by Lorraine Johnson, October 3, 2023) The Violation Notice for the native plant garden in the photo above. The native plant garden in the photo above received a Violation Notice from a Toronto bylaw officer on September 30, 2023. The following are direct quotes, captured on a security camera, from the conversation between the gardener’s son and the bylaw officer. (The full conversation is roughly 5 minutes and includes a bit more of the same.) Bylaw Officer: “I want you to cut the grass and weeds.” Gardener’s son: “It’s not weeds. This is a native plant garden, no weeds anywhere. This ..read more

Douglas Counter’s native plant garden in Etobicoke. (Photo by Douglas Counter) Douglas Counter is exactly the sort of gardener and volunteer that the City of Toronto’s PollinateTO program is intended to support and encourage. Not only has he created a native plant habitat garden in his front yard, backyard and boulevard, but he regularly offers community tours, sharing his knowledge and inspiring countless others to grow habitat in their yards, balconies and community projects. Even more, he is a native plant propagator extraordinaire, growing and giving away thousands of native plant seedlin ..read more

All that was left of the plants nurtured by Karen Barnes after the City of Burlington, Ontario, mowed down her natural garden on June 20, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Karen Barnes) On June 20, 2023, the City of Burlington, Ontario, mowed down a natural garden that Karen Barnes had been cultivating for more than a decade—a garden that was free of any provincially designated Noxious Weeds and that posed no threats to public health or safety. The City flagrantly disregarded the two Ontario Court decisions (Sandy Bell case and Douglas Counter case) that have affirmed the constitutionally protected ri ..read more

LINK TO INVITATION ..read more

One of the habitat logs in the Sinclairs’ garden ordered removed by the Town of Smiths Falls (Photo by Craig Sinclair) The Town of Smiths Falls has a Land Acknowledgement that is read when official municipal business is being conducted. The Town acknowledges that the “sacred land” on which Smiths Falls is now located is “unceded territory” and that the Town is grateful to the “Algonquin ancestors who cared for the land and water” and “mindful of broken covenants and the need to reconcile with our relations.” The acknowledgement ends with a vision that “together we may care for this land and e ..read more

Wild hyacinth (Camassia sciloides), a native plant restricted in the wild in Ontario to the extreme southwest (Essex County) Photo by Frank Mayfield, Creative Commons While working on a new book and deciding which native plants to profile, I was confronted with one of the frustrating ironies of native plant gardening: numerous species of native plants currently not available for sale at nurseries would be grown by gardeners if they were commercially available, but nurseries aren’t growing them due, in part, to a perceived lack of demand! It’s more complicated than that, for sure--especially t ..read more

The Sinclairs have been working hard for years to create a garden that supports wildlife and biodiversity. They’ve spent thousands on native plants, had their yard certified as habitat by two non-profit organizations, and followed scientifically sound advice to add habitat features such as dead logs to their landscape. The Sinclairs’ habitat garden in Smiths Falls, Ontario, is repeatedly visited by bylaw enforcement officers. (Photo courtesy of Craig Sinclair.) A neighbour has been making regular complaints to the Town of Smiths Falls about the Sinclairs’ habitat garden. Bylaw officers have v ..read more

A borchure I co-wrote with Ryan Godfrey has just been published by the City of Toronto. The subject is goldenrod, and we’re encouraging people to rethink these wonderful plants. Along with photographs, we provide cultivation details for many goldenrod species for any garden conditions: dry sun, dry shade, rain gardens, wet spots, balcony pots, community gardens. We wrote it because there’s a lot of misinformation out there about goldenrod. Too many people think it aggravates hay fever when ragweed, not goldenrod, is the culprit. Or they think that all species of goldenrod will “take over” the ..read more

Through some kind of perverse tenacity, I tend to gravitate towards impossible sites for planting native plant habitat gardens. But it’s more than willful single-mindedness: I think these are the sites that we desperately need to figure out, especially as urbanization and climate change create difficult conditions everywhere. My first impossible site was at Harbourfront, on Toronto’s lakeshore, where I was invited, in the early 2000s, to create a garden as part of their Artists Gardens program. I was offered three raised beds, in a building site in a high pedestrian traffic area, in a wind-tun ..read more

For most of the 30 years that I’ve been writing books about native plant gardening, I’ve participated in the settler erasure of Indigenous knowledge by neither engaging with nor acknowledging the millennia of wisdom held by Inidgenous communities and knowledge keepers. In the past few years, I’ve been learning from Indigenous writers’ books and from Indigenous earth-workers. The following are just a few of the books I’ve been learning from: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer: I am always reading this book! I think I’m on my fourth session wi ..read more