Location: Toronto, Ontario Date: September 7th, 2024
This past September, with the help of my fellow seedsitters, I had the great privilege of hosting a garden tour for my favorite society: North American Native Plant Society. I first joined this amazing society in 2015 and it has changed how I see my relationship with the more-than-human world that surround me. I knew I wanted this tour to be fun yet educational, so I built on what I had learned from my 2022 tour and created an even better scavenger hunt.
Anyone who renewed or got a new membership to NANPS at the garden tour was eligible to be entered into a lucky draw for an excellent book donated by Sayeh.
At the end of the day, Alice drew the winning ticket and Maria won the book.
Mina manned the welcome station where she handed out the scavenger hunt passports, a clipboard and pen and explained the process. Each host had a binder of interesting points and images for their station if they needed it, but often times the conversations would evolve organically. Here’s a little bit about each host, their binder pages, and what they spoke about in their station:
Karanne was the starting point of the tour and use the many blooming flowers in the garden to explain the close relationship between native plants and wildlife and the ways in which their lives are inter-connected.
Sanam was excited to lead this section on healthy habitats for a second time. She was quick to point out features of a messy garden that invite wildlife into gardens.
As a veteran from the last garden tour, Pat knew that her goal was to help gardeners see the importance of planting the two fall powerhouses: asters and goldenrods, and she succeeded! Our most requested plant was zigzag goldenrod!
Maia led the station on grasses and sedges and thanks to her excellent work, quite a few visitors wanted to take grasses and sedges as their gift plant at the end of the visit. Kudos!
While it’s perfectly legal to create boulevard gardens as per Toronto municipal bylaws, there are increasingly stories of how native plant gardens are classified as noxious weeds and cut down. I had recently signed a petition asking that city officials look into why this was happening. To create awareness of the importance of boulevard gardens, I knew I needed a station dedicated to demystifying them. As an avid gardener who knows the bylaws and has created her own boulevard gardens, Trixie was the perfect person to talk about the importance and strategies for creating and maintaining them. I even had invited my municipal councilor for ward 16, Jon Burnside, who came and got a chance to talk to Trixie about boulevard gardens.
In the summer of 2023, as part of his PhD research, Anthony spent a lot of time observing and counting bees in my backyard, making him the perfect person to talk about native bees and their relationships to plants. He kindly brought his own research collection to show different bees to visitors.
Karen is also a returning host, this time speaking about the pond and adjacent wetland which was constructed as a bog filter to clean the pond water.
And I had the last station where I could talk to visitors about how easy it was to grow native plants through the winter-sowing method, and the proof was in the thousands of plants our group had grown. The different varieties were grouped together and each variety had a label with a description of its growing conditions and benefits so that visitors could browse and pick the plant that was perfect for them to take home.
And for those visitors who really had to know what plants I had and where they were, I had a couple of printed copies of my plant list and location map so they could see specific varieties.
Once again I have to give huge thanks to my friends who stepped up to help me create a lovely experience for the visitors.
