How would you feel if you spent 12 years creating a garden, sourcing more than 200 natural plants, nurturing their development through drought and deluge, only to have someone cut it down in a single day?
How would you feel if that someone was your local municipal government?
Unfortunately, Deborah Dale, the past president of the North American Native Plant Society, knows how it feels.
The City of Toronto decimated her garden this week after what was apparently a lengthy series of complaints from neighbours.
My first reaction to this story yesterday in The Toronto Star was to look at the date to see if I hadn’t accidentally picked up a newspaper from a decade ago.
Surely we have long ago left behind the stereotype of the natural approach to landscaping and gardening as creating an unsightly mess.
When the City of Mississauga began leaving large swaths of its parks in their natural condition many years ago (largely for economic, not philosophical reasons, it should be pointed out), The News received countless phone calls from citizens outraged that areas outside their pristine backyards were being sacrificed to the laws of nature.
The City should prune everything within an inch of its life, and pour pesticides on anything that even looked like a weed, they believed.
Thank goodness we have come a long, long way from those days. Where once we engineered watercourses, lining them with concrete and gabion baskets that actually made the erosion problem much worse downstream by accelerating devastating runoff, we have learned to mimic the natural systems of filtering shrubs and tree buffers along streams. Now they not only look a lot better with the creation of a green corridor but they work better at holding back runoff too.
If you look carefully around Mississauga, you’ll see a lot of people extending their gardens onto the City-owned lands between the sidewalk and the road allowance and creating front-yard gardens that leave no space for boring, brush-cut grass.
Reduces maintenance. Creates biodiversity. Slows runoff. Provides nesting and feeding places for birds and small animals. Exhibits four-season interest. Attracts butterflies and photographers. Repels neat freaks.
Just don’t forget to tell your friendly neighbourhood bylaw control officer, not to mention your neighbours, that it’s all part of the grand plan and not just an act of civic indifference.