Hopewell Garden Audio Story - Part Two

Warning, this episode may lead to healthy snacking. In this part of the Hopewell Community Garden story, we'll get a guided tour through the lush veggie garden in high summer. Even more nourishingly, we'll get to know some of the people who garden there. As they talk through the why and how of their experience in this space, they map out a practical, emotional and thoughtful landscape of what a garden is and what it can do. They're warm, thoughtful, smart and caring, and in their words, we find answers to what we can do in the face of the climate crisis: form communities, and create spaces where nature can survive, adapt, and thrive. 

Voices you'll hear in the episode: Kimberley Gibbons, Charlene Bush, Xaviier Blake, Charity Landon, John McMillan, Dennis Boyes, Marias, Amelie Gibbons Basha

Follow our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/describedtoronto

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

Maybe we could do it on the garden. I'm just going to close the gate, so just a tiny bit. And do you want to smell the garden? Sure. Tomatoes. Okay, we can go again because the tomato plants are starting to go smell.

In the last episode, we got some vivid description highlights of Walter Saunders Memorial Park and of the Hopewell Community Garden that nests within it. We learned something about the history of the land, the park occupies, heard about exciting empirical research showing that the pollinator garden is extremely successful at doing what a pollinator garden wants to do. And we were briefly introduced to some of the gardeners.

So we're going to walk straight. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. And right here we are at bag six. We reach out. There's tomato black. If you reach low, you can smell. It's really starting to smell. Oh, the smell of a tomato plant. It's so evocative. Yeah. Here's a tiny little Basel leaf coming up next to the tomatoes. Oh, lovely. So there's always a smell

In this episode. We'll be taken on a tour of the vegetable garden and properly meet some of the gardeners. They're a lovely lot.

So each bed we have 10 big beds that are built by the city. Eight of them are kind of like a big square and they go down to the ground. And then two at the front are wheelchair accessible beds. So they're high beds, which means there's less soil, which means those beds are not good for everything. But in the bed we're standing at, there are 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 tomato plants, two eggplants, some basil in between on the bottom.

My tour of the veggie garden took place in late June when things were really starting to fill out. I spoke to gardeners over the course of a month or so, which gave me the opportunity to hear about what goes on in a garden at different points in the growing season up to midsummer.

Can I touch the eggplant? I've never, I don't know what they look like. Yeah. Here if you put your hand forward there, they're kind of big. The leaves get actually the eggplant plants right now. You can reach down and feel The plant itself is about How big is that? 30 centimeters. 40 centimeters high. But this plant eggplants grow quite big as a plant. Ari plants, the eggplant itself doesn't always get big. Sometimes they're long, skinny ones. Oh, they're not like the big plump ones. Yeah, like the Asian ones maybe. Yeah, but the tree, like the plant, it has good big leaves and broad and fuzzy and the cup. Yeah, they're nice and they're pretty, they're like a green and what it called the veins are like purple. They're very nice. Are they eggplant colored? Purple eggplants are sort of purplish, right? Yeah. I had no idea what the plant look like. Wow.

Any garden is a place of life and hope you don't have to spend much time in the Hopewell Community Garden to know that it's really developed a life of its own. But in speaking with the gardeners, it's clear that it's also its own story, its own community. In this episode, you'll hear the voices of some of the gardeners and some of the stories from the garden, but there's a background of people and stories that simply live here and with the people who garden here. The people I spoke to are the ones who are happy to speak with me. There are many others who contributed and contribute to the creation and maintenance of this garden and who work in it regularly, who we won't hear from. And that's okay. There are gardeners who are no longer with us, but who I heard about in fond memory. There are stories of fun things that happened here in the past or social stuff that happens outside the garden because of the garden. And we won't hear about those either. And that's okay too. What we are going to hear is a guided tour of the veggie garden and the voices of folk who are willing to talk about the garden and what it means to them.

Okay, next bed. We have the same. So we're at bed seven. Right in front of you here is parsley. You can take some Nice, there

You go. Don't mind if I do. Oh.

Thanks. And it's actually pretty big's. Two parsleys are quite bushy. And then we have a whole bunch of tomato plants in here. So right now they're about, say, 60 centimeters high. There's several that have little yellow flowers, which is what the tomatoes will be.

There's some advantage isn't there? To putting basil and tomatoes together?

There is, I forget. What was it? Charlene was telling me theres not enough basil this year for those of us who are basil eaters.

What gardeners have in common is I think we like to see things from start to finish. Yeah, we have a vision. And even though you plant a seed and it's nothing's going to sprout for weeks, but you got to go out there, you got to water it, got to make sure that the pests are kept away and then throughout the season you get the benefits of it through fostering growth. So I think that sharing that vision of not just growing the plants in the garden, but growing this community and having it as this root that people can come and enjoy. 

Just to be around all this nature and harvest is amazing. To see it in the kitchen and how one could actually utilize it in our way of our existence of eating and the source, the nutrients that comes from it.

So many people walk by and stop and look at it and their children explore it. And so every time I come to the garden, I'm just rewarded in a lot of different ways. If I were an individual trying to manage a garden to decide, it would be an enormous amount of work to do all the planting and weeding and gardening, even just to keep up with the harvesting. But we have teams of people coming here every day, like three to five people a day, maybe more. So there's only really a little bit of weeding to be done day to day, a little bit of planting, a little bit of watering, and it's really very easy. It's really almost like play. There are several species and plants chosen within the pollinator garden that I specifically requested in memory of my father. And I thought about what plants and shrubs and trees were most meaningful to him, like flowering dogwood, like blue, starred grass, pussy toes for different reasons. And so every time I see those plants, I'm reminded in a small way of my father and everything that he sought to accomplish in his life and what I'm likewise seeking to accomplish.

I approached these conversations with some questions I wanted to ask everyone. Unsurprisingly, I got a wonderful range of answers and perspectives. First, I wanted to know more about how the garden and gardeners came together. We heard some of that story from Dennis Bo and John McMillan in the last episode, but Kimberly Gibbons also played a role, and as I learned, there's a lot more to a community garden than just getting your hands dirty.

I guess thinking back to 2016, I was walking in this park all the time with my daughter who was six at the time. And this spot where we are right now was the bocce ball pit. And I never saw anybody playing bocce ball. I just see rocks and a square container and a lot of weeds and things. So I think at the time I was interested in gardening, but more interested in the community and then seeing how could we meet people. I started to meet people here that had other children, but I was new to this neighborhood. And I guess at that same time, the whole world was beginning to work on the sustainable development goals. And I was thinking about this as a project of how could we begin to address climate change, gender equality, how do we build community and how do we take a space that is part of the city?

So it's not a private space, it's a public space. How could we work with the city and our neighbors to get to know each other and to do something? And so that for me is how this started, was just seeing a place that wasn't used and wanting to see what we could do together. And in my mind, it was going to be a pilot project to just see can we come together? What would it look like? At the same time, there were other neighbors who lived closer to this garden who also saw the space and had the same idea and we didn't know each other. And so Marla is the person who doesn't live here anymore, but she lived just across from the garden and she had put in an application to the city for a community garden here. So I didn't even know that was a process myself.

I went with my daughter to meet Josh Cole, who was our city counselor. We met him at the library and we pitched our idea and then some months later we followed up by calling the city and seeing what was going to happen. And then they explained that this application was underway. So I was very excited thinking, how did this happen? You have one meeting with the city counselor and then all of a sudden an application is underway. But over a couple of months of follow-up, then I began to realize that Marla didn't work for the city. She was a neighbor and she also had this concept. So we met and then the city, we coved a consultation with people in the neighborhood who to learn about the idea. We pitched a concept of, I remember having a slideshow because for my work, I had recently been to Tanzania and was seeing what gardeners are, well not gardeners, but what farmers are doing there and how nonprofit organization is working to train people on sustainable farming projects.

So we talked about all of these ideas as a community and there was no significant opposition. I think there was some concerns in the neighborhood of the nearest buildings around what would it look like, would it be well-maintained, would there be rodents? All of these kinds of general concerns. But I guess the city must've felt like it was a good enough idea because then they invested in building the garden and it was a big investment. I am not sure, but I think it would've been worth at least $50,000 to build the original 10 beds and the fence and the waterline. So they dug a waterline all across the park so that we have here two taps and we're able to work. So I think that over the course of that first probably two years, the whole group of people, there was a very large group of people that was meeting regularly with a lot of flip charts and sticky notes and brainstorming and creating committees and envisioning what did we want it to look like and some visions were different.

We started off actually having small teams instead of one big garden. And we tried it and then we realized that it would actually work better to have one collective garden so that we were planting things more effectively and that we would all share everything and including the responsibility for maintaining the garden and for watering the plants and for harvesting and all those sort of things. So I guess one of the things about the original time period that stands out for me is we wanted to have a tagline. And so the Hopewell Community Gardens vision statement is growing healthy food, growing healthy community. It is challenging to garden as a group in some ways that because people may choose to want to grow different things or different volume of them or harvest it how they want. And I know that that is not always easy for people in this garden that you're not fully, it's not your spot, it's everybody's spot.

And we have to respect that we're working as a collective. But for me, this was always the vision that I could be just because of my own values and my own professional work. But I believe in building community and doing things together and in an act of solidarity with each other and with broader community. So I think that what's the difference with this garden and what would be, I don't want to say challenge, it's an opportunity for other communities to do it the same way, is that it's a real investment of time and of commitment to those values. So we begin working, usually we plan to start in January, but we might start in February or March as a steering committee and we begin to think about what are the activities we're doing this year? How will the committees run? We do a survey every year. We have an annual meeting. We run this garden much like a nonprofit organization, which it is not. It's just a community based organization, but it does take a core group of people who are willing to see through all of the organizational side. So running a collective space is an act. It's an act. It's a community act to do that.

My first question to each gardener was why do you garden in this particular space? Answers covered a spectrum from this is where I live through because I have some and useful knowledge to, I want to connect to my neighborhood.

So I live all of 20 meters from this garden and I'm sort of that cranky old man that looks out and sees kids coming in and hucking tomatoes at each other. And then I come out and go, Hey, you kids, get out of that garden. That's not for you. That's for us. And so I'm always keeping a sort of a jaundice eye on what's going on in this garden. And then when we created the pollinator garden, I was really excited by that because it's just become an extraordinary part of the community in terms of education for people and other sorts of stuff. Anyway, I'm going on. But so I've been part of this garden mainly because I live very close to it and look out on it. And also because there's a bit of gardening in my background, and so I know plants, I don't have a lot of sentiment with regard to plants in the sense of, oh, I think we can fix it. No, throw it out. But I do not understand why something is dying and whether it really needs water or it really needs to be thrown out. Is it an insect or is it a fungus? It shouldn't be so close together or it won't grow, stuff like that.

The garden and seeing the garden in the neighborhood is one of the reasons why my husband and I decided to buy our condo here. We live right next door to the park, and the garden was a feature that we looked at and thought, this is really neat for this neighborhood, kind of a selling feature for us, buying a place, like I said. And I think from walking around the neighborhood and kind of envisioning us fitting in, it was one of the things that we had spoken about wanting to participate in. So just I guess the curb appeal of the garden drew us in and we joined up that year. 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 had always been kind of interested in doing.

More people get a chance to connect with each other and build on genuine connections, which I find is lacking right now in society. So having a community space such as this brings people together, educates people on nature, on how we can take care of ourselves internally. So that's the beauty of why I continue showing up here because there's a balance. It creates a balance for me, and I can meet individuals like Kim and all the other people here that have been volunteering and building a friendship with these people.

Another question I came with was what's your background in gardening and how did you learn what you needed to know to garden? Here again, answers were as diverse as any community from what grows well with how to organize people to work together effectively.

I am quite familiar with native plants. I grew up in a family where nature appreciation and nature study was strongly encouraged. And I remember my father, who's now deceased, planting native plants 20 or 30 years ago and talking about that, and he belonged to the Native Plant Society. So when I went home to visit, I would read his newsletter on the coffee table, that sort of thing. So he was very knowledgeable. And I also work at a nature oriented organization where I spend my days fundraising in support of nature conservation activities.

Well, I was really lucky, I guess to, because this is a community garden. We have different day team leads that come in and help us out. So we encouraged gardeners of all levels, novices included to come out. So I learned every day that I was out here from what fertilizers to use for different plants, what plants go well, like companion planting, how to harvest things on time, pest control, all of that stuff. It was a little overwhelming to start with, but one of the ladies here, charity, she was my sort of first day team lead. We hit it off, became really good friends, and through her sort of guidance I learned, and then I felt confident enough to be a day team lead myself. The next year

I was very interested in a few things I'd read about pollinators and the whole larger picture of trying to rejuvenate lands like this that would've been treated and everything at one point and all got leveled and were not being used. So that got me a bit more interested in plants. I still don't have a really deep, deep knowledge of them, but I do caring for it and I feel very responsible for it, so

Well, there's certain techniques that we're employing to trim certain bits or to deal with certain varieties of even, for example, some of the garlic varieties that we have. There are some of the I've never seen before and they take a slightly different kind of treatment than I've seen before. So I'm just trying to absorb and broaden my gardening vocabulary a little bit.

Marigolds, the flour are excellent companion plants for tomatoes and peppers. They sort of help keep slugs away. So in a lot of places kind of around the perimeter where I've got a lot of marigold seeds that we're going to be planting to kind of help, I guess do passive pest control, but then also make things look lovely. The marigolds have really bright, dense orange flowers.

Well, like some others in this gardening community. I spent part of my life on a farm. My father was a horticulturalist, and so gardening was work for when I was a kid. I had to look after an asparagus patch and raspberries, and it was never exactly something where I said, geez, I think I'd like to do some gardening. It was kind of like, I guess I've got to get to work. So I've always been, I have a knack for it, let's put it that way.

Next bed is, what was this thing called again? Xavier? Which one? Collard greens. Collard greens. And they're giant, so if you put your hand on this one, they're kind of similar to the cabbages. Wow. All the way down. It's a big blue texture. That's enormous. It's similar. Yeah. So do you eat the leaves? Well, that's where we were just debating. Yeah, you can eat the leaves. Some people steam it or you can wrap it in a wrap like a burrito if you're eating it raw. I think I've only chopped it and made it in stir fry, but that's probably because I didn't know what to do with it. And then over here, keep going. Okay. We're going forward. We're almost at the end of the garden. There's a fence that's made out of wood, but if you reach forward, you feel strings. So those are for the beans. So if you go there, you can feel some big plants. Oh, lovely. And this is a whole, Dennis built this, so it's a little bean rack that I don't want you to get a paper wood cut, so don't rub your fingers. But here is the wooden frame. Okay. Yeah. So he built, it's like a triangle kind with strings, and then he built it the string. So everything here, Dennis builds the little extras to help. Yeah, exactly. I like how you said that. Like a teepee.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the beans are all sticky and clinging and twisting around

The string lower, you can feel the bean. It's cool.

Amazing, amazing.

The Hopewell garden has two components, the veggie garden and the pollinator garden. They're separate, but of course, they're also connected with a finger over my lips in a hushed voice, so the plants couldn't hear me. I asked the gardeners the virtues of each garden and which one are they most attached to? Don't tell the veggies, but hearts and minds seemed a little more oriented toward the pollinator garden in their answers. We really hear the satisfaction that comes not just from growing food and plants, but from taking action that is directly and concretely climate action.

I guess the most impactful example that I've been able to see is turning attention to less from the vegetable garden, but more to the pollinator garden that we have. There are days where I come out to walk my dog in the park and you can see a cloud of bees around some of the plants here. And when I first moved into this neighborhood, the pollinator wasn't there. So yeah, you'd see the occasional be around, but nothing like that. And so when you walk out early morning and you can't count the number of bees there are just buzzing around this pollinator garden. Yeah, it's really nice to see and kind of thinking this is something that this garden has built and grown and fostered, and now just look at the difference that it's made.

My heart is with the pollinator garden because I absolutely love the native plants and the idea of creating a little space here in the middle of Toronto that has a huge variety of native plants that used to exist all over this area, but don't anymore and provide habitat for all kinds of native species. So my nature loving heart is with the pollinator garden, but maybe my people loving heart or my community oriented heart is with the vegetable garden because it's here. Where I work is a loose term. I work with the other gardeners side by side, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, and sharing all kinds of stories at the same time.

But to me, the pollinator garden is the more significant one, just because A, it's more public. This garden is behind a fence, and that implicitly says it's only for those who are members of the garden, and that's partly for insurance purposes and city rules. And Lord knows the city of Toronto has rules, whereas the ponder garden is open to anybody. It's got little paths that go through it. It's got signage that dentists develop to identify the various plants, and I see people all the time walking through it and enjoying it. Kids, adults, older people. So it becomes a certain, and there's a certain wildness about it. There's a lot of birds that are in it. An extraordinary number of bees. I'm sure somebody's told you about the bee researcher last year. Rabbits, they're thick with rabbits. There's coyotes that go after the rabbits. So to me, it's the jewel of the garden.

Well, I see a lot of activity and I see a lot of variety, which is exciting for me. We're used to seeing diminished populations of various kinds of bees. And in the city, it's not really the first place you expect to see variety like this, but just wandering through our pollinator garden, I see all sorts of different species, all sorts of different sizes, and you can kind of tell that they're getting what they need. They've got all the right signs there of a happy, productive set of colonies. So it just makes me happy to see

Walter Saunders. Memorial Park isn't big when you're in either of the gardens, you're very much in the public space. And for the gardeners, that's kind of the point.

Anybody who walks past the park very in your face colorful, we're not hidden from you at all. We've got some benches around the garden, so people tend to sit and I do my best smile, ask them how their day is going. Just like little interactions, especially children, if children come around, they say, Hey, would you like to try a snack? And I'll a little cherry tomato where teenagers be like, Hey, you want to try and eat a spicy pepper? It's really great to engage with community as they're walking by. A lot of people are interested. A lot of people have questions every now and then someone's looking to join, which is always great. So point them to the website and get them to join in. But yeah, I guess it is kind of like you see people in the garden. Kids especially, I love it when the kids are around the pollinator, looking at all the bees and everything. It's really great to see.

And we also enjoy it. It's a beautiful place. The bench you're sitting on here, very often, there's people that are not part of the garden that are sitting in here. So I think people just enjoy it, whether they are part of the garden or not, they enjoy walking by. They enjoy asking questions and just looking at things or even giving us tips. And a lot of people are curious, and some people in our own group right here, I think they enjoy that part the most of actually just interacting with each other and with the people who walk by. One thing I think is relevant and important is because we live in a big city, it's a lot of people don't know where food comes from. And especially kids, they don't necessarily haven't had the chance. If you live in Toronto in a apartment or a condo or even in a house, you might not really realize how vegetables are grown and what they look like. Even some of the plants that we have here, I didn't even know how they're grown, the garlics that was talked about earlier. So I think that part is very important that we have spaces for people of all ages to learn together, and we just have safe spaces to be in community together.

But there's also a broader connection to the community. People walk by here every day. We recognize people as, oh, they're out for their evening walk. They're after dinner walk, and it's clear that a little tour around the periphery of the garden has been incorporated into their regular route. We see them come up the street, they come up the steps, they go around the outside of the fence of the garden and kind of stop and comment to each other on the progress of various plants or ask us questions about what kind of tomato was that, or why did you stake up the beans that way? That sort of thing. And it just kind of creates a very nice opportunity to converse with people who we don't even know. So that's great. People come by with their children, and we often will take the opportunity to show the children, this is how beans grow. Or we'll pull up a carrot and say, look, here's a carrot. You want a carrot? I mean, this is not something that these children have ever seen before

You find it. This little bed here we built, so this is sort of each year we had little projects to extend. What the city built us was this original 10 beds that are to code, and they're quite expensive. They're cedar and stuff. Then we had a little project each year to try to use up the space better because the spot we're on is a bocce ball pit. So the rocks being behind your feet, under your feet are the actual bocce ball pit rocks. Oh, it's still the same ground surface. Yeah, they just built it right on top. Oh, okay. So we have here a little bed that has two tiers, and we're at the southwest corner of the little plot, and then we're going to turn here. We have, there should be some climbing. Mr is coming. You can't feel them because they're down low. But this is another little thing that Dennis built. Okay. To have just don't get a wood cut. And then there's tap. And then below us, we have another one of these two tiered beds and number 11, and this is the berry patch, so we don't get tons. But this year actually, it looks like we're getting some, I think they take quite a few years to settle in.

By now. You've for sure gotten a sense of the relationships between the gardeners themselves. Of course, they're all involved because they're interested in growing things and supporting the natural world, but they themselves often express a bit of surprise at the extent to which human connections have grown as vigorously as any tomato plant.

How many people became close with each other through this? Not everyone has things in common, but just because of the garden, people became close.

The level of friendship that I've developed here, I'll often see gardeners outside of gardening now social engagements and go out of my way to hang out with my fellow gardeners in other social situations. And they're not typically in terms of age range or career wise. They're not people that I would normally intersect with. But I don't know, through our shared vision of a garden and wanting a positive community space, it's really fostered some really great friendships for me anyway, the kind of deep friendships you form, the expectation of it's just gardening. I'll come out here once a week and it'll be something to do versus No, I must volunteer more. I can't wait to get back out there. I want to see my friends. I will hang out after we're finished gardening and chat for 45 minutes.

So this is amazing. This is bed 12, this is arugula, and it just grows every year now, I think at least the third year where we just left, leave it and it comes back. So first thing in the spring, this is what's coming back and it's a whole bunch. You can reach out. It's not one plant. Oh, wow. It's like the whole, A third of this bed is all arugula. Oh, oh my. And it's like you snip off a bunch. I do. I come sometimes even during the week, I'll just get some for lunch, but it just keeps growing very much like in the weed type of a category of how it looks. Lot of it. Is this trying to seed or flower? Oh, okay. Exactly. In this bed, we have some clarets planted and some that chard. I think small one. There's some small, yeah, this one is, maybe it's chard. Okay. Sort of a sticky. Broadly it says beet, but there must be beets planted underneath. Oh, and then we have here go over one more. There's Spanish onions. So if you go down to the bottom, you can feel the little coming. And then there's kale. And then next to it here is carrots. Oh, carrots are so pretty. They're all fuzzy. Yeah. I hope this year they're good. They don't get very big, but they do look healthy this year. So maybe they'll,

Because I am a storyteller with an overactive imagination, I wanted to ask the gardeners how they envision this space looking ahead into the future. Answers ranged from short-term ideas on how to improve the garden as it exists now through the power that initiatives like this have to shape the social future by being a model for inclusion and access to the large scale future of food production and how the Hopewell garden might be a model that could be replicated throughout the city or the world.

I'd like to do, and I've been thinking of it, there's a couple more smaller areas adjoining this area right where we are right now that I think I'd like to try and see if I could extend the pollinator garden into, so I could maybe add another 30 or 40% to the volume and surrounded a bit more. I guess

I wish there were more workshops for children, for youth. That's where it starts. Okay. If they had a better understanding of how to eat properly and get away from all the violence and all the other things that youth may be experiencing, this can help them having a space like this to educate them, have a balance, feeling safe, doing something productive, and developing their intellect as well. So when they start from having a plot and having a seed for the first time in their hand and putting it into the soil and standing back and looking at it grow, they can tell their children the next generation of, wow, this is what papa did. This is what mama did. This is what our community collectively did. It doesn't matter the race, it doesn't matter the age, it doesn't matter what's happening. We can come together. Once that's instilled in a child or a youth's mind, it will help them to understand how to build genuine connections with nature, with humans, and having a balance. So I find me showing up as a brown man of mixed race. I can show other youth that are males that walk around the community here that it's okay for you to come. It's okay for you to start something here. We welcome everybody. So that's kind of also why I am also shoring up, because sometimes in these spaces we may not see representation of men being in a garden space.

I have to admit that while I try to be very hopeful about the future, at the same time I don't feel hugely hopeful. I cannot help but feel that climate change is upon us, and I'm not even convinced that it's reversible or even manageable. The best case scenario that I can imagine is that nature will have adapted as it always does, into a space where plants and animals, and that includes humans, can continue to thrive in some sort of world that is livable and enjoyable. I would love for there to be native plant gardens throughout the city, both distributed all across the city and in much larger areas to the point that they really no longer become gardens and become the norm. And maybe within that larger, broadly speaking garden, there would be so-called gardens of grass or other types of habitat. So I would like to see the balance shift so that there is a lot more, and not just more, but also in another sense that the idea of native plants is understood and socialized more broadly across the community so that people understand your sort of average citizen understands what native plants are, what benefits they offer us and why they're important.

What I really try to reinforce through my work is the idea that in the face of changing climate and catastrophic biodiversity and species loss in our country, that habitat protection is the number one action that people can take in order to reverse those global crises.

My gut says, and my speculative notion of this is that this imprint of this garden and the pollinator garden would tend to be replicated elsewhere in this park. And I could see, for instance, as the climate changes that parks like this would become less places of recreation and more places of agriculture intensive agriculture in some cases in order to feed people. One of my bug bears with the city of Toronto is that we own seven golf courses in this city. And I sort of say I get the utility of them. They're open to public and lots and lots of young people use them and older people, including myself, but I could see those places turned into really decent farmland. They've already got irrigation. They're more or less flat. They're more or less good drainage. You could do tiered farming, you could do some really good stuff there.

And I think the highest and best use of that property would be as farmland, as opposed to as recreation land. And I could see the same sort of thing here. To a certain degree. People need places to go. They need pathways and ways to get out of where they're living. I've seen that in Japan. I've seen it in Taiwan and other places that I've visited even in Germany. But I think the highest and best use as we go forward for areas like this will be some form of agriculture or some form of food production. So that's why I see if I'm looking ahead 20 years, I see a much hotter climate. I see a much more significant changes in terms of foliage and in terms of the plants where we move from sort of zone five into zone six, zone seven, we could be growing bananas in this thing.

I think I heard it in the talk a few weeks ago. Part of why it is in particular is the two pieces of the garden, the pollinator garden and the vegetable garden are completely connected. And we need pollinators to grow food and we need them for the planet to survive. And so hearing from experts in this field that this is a space for that is one way that it's climate action. We also had a project last year with university of, sorry, York University. One of the students did bee research here. So he set up his little stations and he was monitoring the bees with himself and his colleagues from York. And then this year in the spring, he came to our annual meeting and he presented the research and it was crazy interesting and funny to see that this garden of the projects he researched in Toronto was the number two for its be diversity and that the impact that we're having.

And I know I personally was surprised. One of the gardeners here who's the head of the site committee, she is maybe more competitive, and she put up her hand right away and was like, how do we be number one? So it's pretty amazing to think that you can take a very small piece of city land in between a bunch of sidewalks. That's just grass that's doing nothing. And within just a couple of years, you can create this whole diverse space for multiple kinds of bees to live that can then pollinate our garden and the whole neighborhood. I just think though, this is a very small project, and when I think about the global context that we're in, there is such a need for there to be multiple actions in every way possible. And this is a very modest initiative, so I wouldn't overstate what it is, but it is things like this that people all around the world are already doing, building resilient communities, and truly trying to make changes that are innovative to address climate realities in different parts of the world.

So I think we need hundreds and thousands of these kind of initiatives to have a real impact. And then let's go see that jalapeno. Can I eat this? Can I eat that collard green? Yeah, that one's spinach. You can eat it. This is spinach. Okay. Yeah, you can eat it. And then if you put your hand here, we have these poles. These are for the tomatoes. So they're metal. They're from Dollarama, and they're really good. You can wrap the tomato plant around it as it goes. So if you go forward and down, you feel some jalapenos there. There's like three of them so soon. Look at them. You're getting big too. Yeah. Yeah. Susan took one. Wow. Yeah, that's it. And then behind us, we have more of the same. We have lots of, this one has bacho. Green beans, green beans, kale. This is a different kind of kale. This is called dinosaur kale. Thank you. Oh, that one. Oh wow. That's very different. It's quite thick. And I like this one for smoothies.

Subscribe. To get notified of our next episode, we'll get an introduction to pollinators and pollinator species with renowned expert Lorraine Johnson. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/described Toronto. 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 grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council.