Hopewell Garden Audio Story - Part One

This is an immersive and joyful introduction to the Hopewell Community Garden in Walter Saunders Memorial Park. We’ll hear the serene voices of some of the gardeners talking about why they garden there. Audio Describer Rebecca Singh gives us some vivid description highlights of the park, infrastructure, flora, fauna, and a little bit of people watching, fun for blind and sighted listeners alike. We’ll learn some of the history of the garden and the land it occupies, then get some empirical research results showing just how successful the pollinator garden has been at attracting pollinators. Peace, community, human connection, information, and effective climate action: like an August garden, this episode is bursting with life! 
Gardeners heard in this episode: Amelie Gibbons Basha, Xaviier Blake, Kimberly Gibbons, Charity Landon, Charlene (Charlie) Bush, John McMillan, and Anthony Ayers

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The Hopewell Garden Audio Story is created by Christine Malec, Rebecca Singh and Katherine Sanders. They are a trio of artists who came together for the purpose of creating audio experiences of the natural world from a Blind-led perspective.

The Hopewell Garden Audio Story is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Foundation.

Logo Image Description: A square with large yellow text that reads, "Described Toronto" and below it "PODCAST" in all capital letters, within a yellow rectangle. The title is layered on top of a photo of four diverse women standing side by side outdoors in front of a garden in a park. The woman at centre who is white speaks into a mic. She has a white cane strapped to her shoulder bag.

Transcript

It's quite awesome, the idea that you can grow things and eat them yourself.

Welcome to the Hopewell Community Garden in Walter Saunders Memorial Park. Here, something beautiful is happening.

Just to see the stages from the seed down to the part where it starts to come up from the earth and in the other stage where you can see it fully blooming. There's so much peace that comes with that and I like to see it all.

Neighbors in the community have created a communal space to grow flowers and food, cultivate native plants to create a micro habitat for pollinators, grown bonds of human connection where they live, and perhaps landed on one of the most impactful ways to engage in climate action

Because there's a healing element with seeing something grow from a seed to the earth and seeing it go through a stages. And I find as humans- I'll use I statements here, I feel that there's a healing element that comes with it. Mentally, physically, just putting the energy through something. It just helps. It helps.

In this episode, we're going to hear the voices of some of the gardeners get a vivid and thorough description of the park by audio describer Rebecca Singh. Learn some of the history of the land the park occupies and hear about how successful the garden has been at attracting pollinator species.

I do it because it is very meaningful for me to be with neighbors in the community, and it's very meaningful to have conversations like when I met Xavier in his garden to just talk about it. What are you growing and how are you doing this? And just to know each other and to see let's come together. Let's be together in a way that's not commercial, that is public, that is healthy, like we're growing food and we're giving food as well to those who want it or need it most. To me, that's what it means to be a human.

The Garden probably offers, well, especially during COVID times, the garden has offered an incredible space for people within the community to meet and gather. So there was a time a few years ago when as you know, people were not allowed to gather indoors, and so the garden created a space where people could come and meet outside and stay. We made everyone stay six feet apart, even within the garden, but people could collect here and work together. So that was very important at the time and those bonds that were built, those neighborly bonds that were built during that time have persevered.

I never really gardened growing up. It was always something that I had kind of wanted to try. I was nervous to try and I guess that the community garden here was really welcoming and accepting for gardeners of I guess all abilities. Even someone who had never really gardened before. So it was like an entry point into gardening, especially as someone who lives in a condo, doesn't have a backyard, doesn't have a garden of my own. So it's just this exciting new thing that I could try that I've always been kind of interested in doing.

The city of Toronto is on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, the 13th largest lake on the planet. The Lake measures an area of almost 20,000 kilometers, and is slightly larger than the country of Norway. Eight kilometers inland from the Lake Ontario shoreline, in the Fairbank area of Midtown Toronto, is Walter Saunders Memorial Park, not far from the city's delectable little Jamaica, and Eglington West neighborhoods on a map. This land has been occupied for many thousands of years, by many peoples, and has sustained countless folk who walked its ground, and lived off its bounty. Today, much of it is paved over, offering a reliable surface for our feet to walk, and precious areas of it still offer sustenance to us, and to all the life that can thrive here.

The Described Toronto Collective shares a common concern for the climate, and how to live in this time of catastrophic change, and persistant hope. In Walter Saunders Memorial Park, you'll find a group of dedicated people motivated by the same concerns. They're growing food together, and they're also deliberately creating a natural habitat to host and sustain pollinators, the native insect life we all rely on to keep the cycle of growing things going. Our collective is also motivated by principles of inclusion, and we want our work to be as accessible to as many people as possible, and so you'll find these podcasts rich in verbal description. 

As a member of the blind community, I rely daily on audio description, both formal and informal. Not sure what this means? Trust me, you've done it. If you've ever told a story to friends or family about an incident that happened in your day, you've been an audio describer. It simply means using words to convey the visuals of something, to someone who doesn't experience the world visually. And since this is an audio only podcast, that includes everyone! As a Blind person moving through my day, the world around me can sometimes lack context, or the, big picture. A space like a park can seem less welcoming to me moving around the city on my own, because its features and layout aren't obvious, or often simply unknown. Parks have certainly been places of rest and recreation for me with friends, but as urban features, they remain rather, out of focus. 

The chance to have a park described, from its fun features right down to its mundane infrastructure, is gold to me, and a rare opportunity for the blind community. One part of the Hopewell Community Garden Story project is a guided, in-person described walk through the Park in September 2024. In this podcast episode, we're going to hear descriptions of some vivid park highlights. Audio Describer Rebecca Singh visited Walter Saunders memorial park in mid-summer 2024. Later on, we're going to hear her describe some sweet park features, but first, here's the kind of bird's-eye description of the park she was able to offer, the kind of thing that many blind people find so valuable, because it helps us situate ourselves, put ourselves in context.

The park is a long narrow rectangle covering almost two city blocks on its south side. The park is bordered by two blocks of Hopewell Avenue on its southern edge. Hopewell avenue runs east West. The sides of the park are mostly bordered by residential buildings, but on the south side there is a quiet road. The southern entrance sign to the park is at a T intersection of Hopewell Avenue running east west, and Jimmy Wisdom Way, running southward from the park. There is a paved path here that cuts through the park. There are paths that run along the top and bottom of the park, which are the north and south sides, and this is one place where these two paths are connected. The park is on something of a slope, so the southern side is the lower side and the northern side is uphill. At the western end of the park is the pollinator garden, with meticulously labeled plants, and a community garden with raised beds, and a shed behind the fence. East of that is basketball courts, and at the east end of the park are lawns, a treed hill, playground and workout structures, and a water feature. 

Now that we all know where we are, let's talk about the garden! Over the next few episodes we're going to meet several of the gardeners who work and mingle in the park. One of the things that struck me in chatting with them is the diversity of interests and knowledge. John McMillan happens to know some things about the history of the land the park occupies, and in early summer, I chilled out in the community garden with a sun hat and a cool drink, to hear what he knows.

There's two things that are really interesting. One of them is geological, and one of them is industrial history. As much as anything geologically, this is a high point of land in the city and it sits at the crest of sort of a glacial moraine that is the old shoreline of what was known as Lake iis. It was a glacial lake some 50,000 years ago. And as a result, there is one, there's several underground springs and rivers that go through this area and then subsequently go down towards the lake and there happens to be a spring that is about a hundred meters west of here at the top of one of the hills immediately behind where I live. And that spring drew many of the indigenous people because it was a place to get water. It was also for those that were engaged in crop growing crops, it was also able to create to help them grow.

So that was a geological aspect of this area that is important. And then the second thing is somewhat based on the first in that when the European settlers came in, let's say mid to late 19th century, they were drawn by again, by the fact that there was this extraordinarily good quality water coming out of this spring here. So this area was a hundred acre farm. It was a hundred acre farm that was owned by a guy named JW Watson. And he farmed this area, cleared a lot of the timber out of the area and then farmed it, sort of a mixed farming I guess. And then there was an enterprising group of developers that in the late 18 hundreds decided they would build a passenger railway through the north part of Toronto. The assumption being that this passenger railway would become a linchpin for development going on in this growing metropolis of Toronto.

So they purchased the land and arranged for a railway to be built that started more or less over where the Humber River meets Eglington Avenue and then continued along the top of the city and then headed down the Don River with a series of stops along the way. And one of them happened to be here at this area, which was called Fairbank. That railway was built. Mr. Watson sold a portion of his land to the railway company as a right of way for it. And so his land was sort of bisected by this railway. Well, the railway lasted in operation for exactly one year and basically died in 1901 and it was known as the belt line.

And after the railway died, none of the other railway companies had any interest whatsoever in continuing with it. But it did have a series of spurs, spur lines, one of which came into here. So while it wasn't an operating passenger railway, it was a railway that could be used for an industry. So Mr. Watson created a company which was called Fairbank Lumber and Coal Company. So the Fairbank Lumber and Coal Company was set up here and its main yard for both coal and for lumber was more or less in here because it was successful in the forties and fifties. Another series of lumber yards also located in here. And you had three major lumber yards for the city of Toronto, which supplied timber for all the houses that were being developed in the sixties. Well, depends on who you talk to, but apparently it's either some kids that set it on fire or it was a wiring problem regardless.

The whole thing went on fire on August the 28th, 1969, and it was one of the largest fires in Toronto history, and it burnt. Every one of this entire area was basically just char and the flames could be seen almost across the lake. Apparently it was that massive a fire. And many of the houses on this street that is opposite us, all of their windows were burnt out. And finally the fire department was able to get control of it, but it burnt for the better part of a couple of days, and it was a massive fire and one of the biggest in history. So after that point, there was no lumber yard because most of the lumber had disappeared. This became kind of an industrial wasteland, I'll say more than anything else.

The Fairbank Lumber company moved and up to Vaughn, the Oliver Lumber Company moved up towards somewhere north of the city as well, Markham. And so it was basically just an industrial wasteland for a long time. And then the city decided in say late 19 hundreds, early two thousands, that there was a need for parkland in this area. And it was also, without getting into the technical aspects of it, it was that this sort of land could be used for public purposes. Before that point, there was all kinds of liability and insurance problems with it. And so they couldn't really turn it into housing because it had all kinds of chemicals and nastiness. But they made some decisions and said, well, you know what? I think we can actually use this as parkland. So they created a master plan for it, and this became a park with all of the design things that we have right now, including the basketball courts that you can hear in the background, and these bocce courts that were here, and then a kids playground down at the far end. And then it was linked into the BeltLine, the old railway, which of course became a significant walking trail for the city of Toronto.

When the described Toronto Collective began putting together ideas for how to tell the story of this garden, we were in touch with Dennis Boies, one of the gardeners. Here's what he had to tell us via email as an introduction to the space. In 20 16 20 17, neighborhood residents coalesced around the idea of having a community garden in Walter Saunders Memorial Park on an unused bocce pit. The garden would be a group effort, not an allotment garden. We applied for a grant from the city, were approved, and now have a approximately 30 members. During the growing season, the city built beds, as did we, and we added a shed built by a garden member and painted by a local artist. In 2019, the same group of people thought it a good idea to have a pollinator garden next to the vegetable garden. The south facing sloped hillside was a great location for a garden and it is enclosed by walkways for viewing.

We consulted with a local native plant, nursery and garden designer, and applied for a grant from PollinateTO. Our grant proposal was approved and we have had the pollinator garden operating since 2019, slowed some by covid restrictions. It was a big project involving digging the ground, bringing in rocks and planting over 400 plants on successive weekends. The garden is mature now and even needs to be cut back a bit. We recently had a group from York University undertake a study of the pollinator garden to research insect visitations to the site.

The gardeners we're going to hear from in more depth in the next episode, have very personal relationships to both the vegetable garden and the pollinator garden. Growing vegetables together, also grows human connections. Fostering the pollinator garden is accomplishing something even deeper. In a subsequent episode we're going to hear from pollinator expert Lorraine Jonson, about the importance of pollinators and pollinator species. There's a strong sense among the gardeners that the pollinator garden is meaningful, beyond the immediacy of the crunch of a pepper, or the juice of a ripe tomato. It's a statement, almost of defiance, against the catastrophic changes that many can see coming. Here, is a patch of land dedicated not to a uniformly artificial green patch of grass, but to native species, plants and flowers that will attract, neurish and sustain populations of insect life that our biosphere absolutely requires. It's climate action at its most fundamental, and it's just beautiful! Here's Audio Describer Rebecca Singh, on a hot July day, describing some of what she can see in the pollinator garden.

 Now getting to the pollinator garden, there's a rich scent of many kinds of flowers. There are insects buzzing about, just pausing for a moment. It's possible to see countless bees pausing in all of the flowers, going from flower to flower, pausing maybe for a few seconds, and then flying on. There are small paths that are actually wood chipped paths that are cutting through the pollinator garden. So I'm just going to take a few steps into the pollinator garden now myself. There are other people in the park, certainly there's kids, there's a couple of, I guess I would say neighbors that are talking. One person who is gardening and somebody standing outside the garden. And now I'm inside the pollinator garden, and in fact, some of the flowers are at head height, and so I'm able to observe these bees right directly in front of my eyes. And so the bees are small. They're probably, I would say the size of my pinky finger.

They have fuzzy backs and the one I'm looking at right now has three horizontal lines on its, I'm going to call it its bum, and it's just sort of examining all of the little flowers. This plant is called thanks to the signs that are everywhere. I can say that it is called a smooth astor. It is a tall plant. It has a cluster of oval leaves that are actually pointed at the top. They sort of look like a marijuana leaf except there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So there's six of them, and they all go all the way around a tall sort of thick woody like stem, which is a light green. And like I said, it's at eye height. At the very top, I would say the last foot is white spear-like flowers that are each part of the flower, I would say have five or six different shoots. And on each shoot there's about 20 or 50 small white flowers and sticking out of these tiny flowers are the parts that have the pollen on them,

And there's a lot of action happening. Even just pausing here, there's tiny bees, there's bigger bees, they're just pollinators all over the place. So it's really a testament to how successful this is. And it's obviously gathering place too. There's people chatting about, so that was one of, I can't even count how many different types of flowers I see. I see purple flowers, I see yellow flowers. I see flowers that have sort of a bulbous middle and then drooping petals. It's not because of lack of water, that's for sure. So they must just be that way. There's tiny, soft yellow flowers. There's flowers that sort of look a little bit like a lilac of people are familiar with what that looks like or the shape of a lilac bud. There are flowers that are sort of in clusters. They look like little clusters of fireworks. There are low pink flowers and medium purple flowers and tall clustered red flowers.

One plant looks like a bush of raspberries getting a little bit closer. It's clear that these aren't berries, but the flowers do actually look like berries.

But it's not all garden. As a blind person, I've heard about other typical park features, but detailed descriptions just aren't part of my day-to-day world, but this isn't just any day, so now we're going to hear Rebecca talk about playground equipment, workout stuff, and a splash pad, so grab your towel and let's go!

Llots of groups of people around. We're moving towards the eastern end where the park does boast a playground and a water feature. And along the way there are a few rolling hills, not on the park path, but between the park path and the southern end. So the hills sort of mound up on my right hand side.

Most of the ground in the park is actually grass. Toronto has a strong policy of not using pesticides, and so there's a lot of clover in the grass. So instead of just being uniformly green, I see the white flowers of clover. I also see some small yellow flowers, and there's also sound of birds and little insects flying about. I see there are bees exploring the clover in this field as well. 

So we're just across from the workout area. Now, it has a set of parallel bars that are about hip height, so it actually would be higher than a doorknob. There is a series of three platforms which you could use to do step ups. And then there are two structures that have a parallel, a horizontal bar on them at three different heights. One is from knee height to waist height to about hip height, and then the other one is overhead.

The flooring or the underfoot texture in the workout area is wood chips, so it's a little bit soft if you're landing somewhere. And then there's also a, it's like a device which looks like a ladder except for its overhead, so you'd be able to hang from it and swing sort of like in a jungle gym. Moving past this workout area, there is a tall hill. It's not excessively tall, but it's a hill. And there are five mature trees at the top of the hill, different kinds of trees here. We're also getting towards picnic benches, and there are many, many families in this area of the park. So there are also a multitude of different trails around each of the following features. There is a set of swings. It's got two adult swings, an adapted swing and a swing with a harness for a toddler. There is past that, and at the furthest end of the park more swings. There's a tire swing

Which swings in a circle, currently full of children, three girls, and there are many parents. All the swings are currently in action, many parents pushing the children on the swings, toddlers. And then there are two playground structures. The playground structures are for various different ages. So one with a really short slide for say one to three year olds. Another one that would be more appropriate for five-year-olds, a little bit of a taller structure. There are things to climb on, fences to make sure kids don't fall, or if they do fall that they fall safely. There are slides, as I mentioned with little two story toured safe play structures, and there are a lot of benches, benches all the way around, or there are several benches giving parents the opportunity to take a seat as they watch their children play just a little bit in from that. So closer to the middle of the park is a splash head. The splash pad is a ground level circular concrete pad, which has a drain grate at its center. The area is bordered by grass. Inside the splash pad is a hip height post with a yellow button to activate the water. And there are several water features which look like giant seven foot flowers.

Their stems are bending and one has a flower head that has a daisy shape. It's got eight white narrow oval pedals. They're joined in the center with a yellow button cap and water can flow down from that. There is a second flower with an almond shell shaped flower and its head droops down. And when the water is activated, it kind of gurgles out like someone dumping cups of water. Then sprouting from the ground itself. There are four little sprinklers that make a cone shape of water that reaches about maybe 50 centimeters or two to three feet on one side. And then on the other side of the splash pad are streams of water, kind of like a water fountain gone wild. So they shoot up in the air on an angle on I would say a 80 degree angle and reach a height of from nothing swelling up to about three feet tall, and then it all stops again. And in fact, there are two of these posts with the yellow buttons until a kid turns it on.

In the next episode, you'll hear one of the gardeners characterize the pollinator garden as, the jewl of the park. It's something that the gardeners here are rightfully very proud of. 

In 2023, Anthony Ayers, a PhD biology candidate at York University, conducted research on garden characteristic influence on be community compositions and floral associations with the Hopewell pollinator garden. At the beginning of gardening season, he came to talk to the gardeners about his research findings. On a Sunday afternoon in early May, 2024, the group gathered in the communal meeting space of the condo building nearby where many of the gardeners live to hear about the research results. It was incredibly informative, but also you could feel the held breath and focused attention of the gardeners in the room. They'd worked hard, put much thought and effort into creating a thriving pollinator garden. And now they're about to hear the empirical results of their care.

Anthony talked about plant and insect species, and how they connect. Here's a summary of some of the things we learned. Bees are an incredibly diverse group of insect. Toronto itself has over 350 different species, and they come in all different shapes, sizes, and colours, They can be found here in Toronto ranging in size from over an inch for bumblebees, to very tiny, tiny sweat bees that are about only four millimeters long. They have different preferences for different plants and different nesting substrates. Most of these species do not make honey. Most of these bees are solitary, you can think of them as single moms, collecting pollen and nectar for the eggs that they lay themselves. About 70% of bees are nesting in the ground. About a third of our agricultural crops are dependent on bees. They also contribute to the pollination of over 80% of the world's flowering plants. In the Hopewell garden, they observed about 71 out of the 350 plus species that have been found in Toronto as a whole. this is a lot of bees for one little garden, About two thirds of them nest in the ground like the sweat bee. And about another third were cavity nesting or nesting above ground. They either nest in stems of plants or they nest in manmade structures such as bricks. They're usually visiting a variety of different flowers. Bees are interacting with about 43 different genera or genre of plant, with goldenrod being the most popular. Flies, wasps, butterflies, everything goes to goldenrod. Other plants that get visited a lot include bee balm, purple coneflowers, pearly everlasting, and mountain mints. And so how does Hopewell compare to the other 40 gardens Anthony and his group looked at? That's what the gardeners were eager to hear.

And so how does Hopewell compare to the other 40 gardens I looked at? So for the total number of bees we looked at, Hopewell was third, so they took home the bronze and that includes High Park in here as well. So above High Park here, total number of bees, and then for total number of species, so unique kinds of bees, we have Hopewell at second.

In case the info got drowned by the cheering, for the total number of bees, Hopewell was third, so they took home the bronze and for total number of species, we have Hopewell at second place, preceeded only by someone's private yard. Are the gardeners pleased? You bet they are! In the next few episodes, you'll be hearing more from the gardeners. Who, what, and why, you already know the where and when. Then, we'll get an introduction to pollinators and pollinator species, with renowned expert Loraine Jonson. 


Subscribe, to get notified of our next episode. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/describedToronto . Described Toronto is a collective of storytellers including Audio Describer Rebecca Singh, Event Producer Katherine Sanders, and myself, Accessibility Consultant Christine Malec. We're grateful to the folk at the Hopewell Community Garden for their participation in making this project come together. The Hopewell Garden Audio Project is an Arts In The Park Initiative. We're also grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council.