Hopewell Garden Audio Story - Part Three

Why is the pollinator part of the Hopewell Community Garden so important for the folk who garden there? In this episode, we speak with renowned pollinator specialist Lorraine Johnson about pollinators, pollinator species, and how they can be incorporated into the life of a thriving urban environment. When pressed to describe what unifies her work, Ms. Johnson has settled on the term "cultivation activist". The author of numerous books on growing native plants, gardening for pollinators, restoring habitat, and producing food in cities, Lorraine’s work focuses on people and communities growing plants, ecological health, and connection to nature, and to each other. Interspersed with our interview, are snippets from a walk through the Hopewell Pollinator Garden, which took place last June, on a  damp and stormy evening. Umbrella in one hand and amplification mic in the other, Ms. Johnson shared her knowledge about the plants in the garden, and who they attract.

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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.

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Transcript

If we walk on, there's a wood chip path right in front of me that I'm going to suggest that we all walk through. It's about two and a half or three feet wide, so I think we can all walk through it.

On a hot, rainy, early evening in late June on the summer solstice. In fact, a group of gardening and pollinator enthusiasts gathered in the Hopewell Community Garden in Walter Saunders Memorial Park, specifically in the pollinator garden for a guided walk by renowned specialist Lorraine Johnson.

And I just want to invite everyone to put their hands, and just gently touch the leaves of this stiff Golden Rod, which you can feel is it's almost furry and stiff. It's a beautiful, the feeling of this plant is so incredible and unique.

Rain fell, thunder rolled nature did what nature does at high summer and umbrellas in hand. We followed Lorraine as she guided us through the carefully cultivated magic that is a pollinator garden.

So as you walk by, and this is the Golden Rod that I mentioned is such an amazing plant for moths, moth species and for pollen specialist bees, and it's not blooming yet, it's just about two and a half or three feet tall right now, but it's going to get probably up to three or four feet tall and it's going to bloom with yellow flowers, a cluster of yellow flowers in the fall, walking past the sidewalk faster so everyone can get a chance. Then as we wander past this stiff Golden Rod, we're also wandering by more Pearly Everlasting, which I also suggest you touch because it's also got furry fuzzy leaves.

In this episode, we'll largely be hearing from Lorraine in her dry and comfortable home as she talks us through what pollinators are, why they're important, and how they can fit into the life of a thriving urban environment. Interspersed we'll hear damp snippets of Lorraine's guided walk, amplifier in hand. She walks us through some of the species that have helped make the Hopewell pollinator garden such a success. Lorraine is a writer, editor and community advocate who, when pressed to describe what unifies her work has settled on the term cultivation activist, the author of numerous books on growing native plants, gardening for pollinators, restoring habitat, and producing food in cities. Lorraine's work focuses on people and communities growing plants, ecological health and connection to nature and to each other. Through her books, articles, and community projects, she strives to advance the understanding that everything and everyone is connected and that through our actions, we all have a role to play in making this world a better place for all life. Lorraine, I'd like to really start with some basics for people who are new to the idea of pollinators and why they're important and even what they are and what they do. So can you go to basics for us and explain what pollination is and how pollinators do what they do?

So pollination is basically the main way that plants reproduce. So the pollen is transferred from either from, well, from one flower to another, from one plant to another, and that leads to reproduction of the plants, sexual reproduction, and it's basically the mechanism for plants to reproduce. So it's crucial. Most plants need some kind of animal vector to transfer the pollen. There are wind pollinated plants, so their pollen blows on the wind and will land on another flower, another plant in the same species, and that will lead to fertilization and the development of a seed and a new plant. But the majority of plants require some kind of creature to move the pollen and the main pollinators in most North American terrestrial ecosystems, the main pollinators are creatures like the native bees, for example, sometimes butterflies and moths and basically any little creature that moves between plants can move pollen, but because of a number of features of bees, they're hairy and so the pollen gets stuck to them. They intentionally visit plants to collect pollen for their young ones in their nests. So bees are very efficient and effective pollinators of plants.

Is there an analogy between pollen and sperm and egg?

Yeah, that is one way to think of it for sure. Plants, it's often called the female reproductive. Part of the plant is where the egg is and the seed forms and the pollen, yes, you can think of it as what's often called the male reproductive part of the plant, the pollen. Yeah, you can think of the analogy with sperm.

And could plants procreate or reproduce without this exchange? I assume it's like a DNA exchange the way sexual reproduction usually is, right?

That's right. Some plants will do what's called, well, it's sometimes called cloning or sending up suckers. These are plants that can reproduce that way. The plants that are reproduced clonally are pretty much identical to the parent plants, so they have the same genetics, whereas with sexual reproduction where the pollen and the egg, the egg is fertilized with the pollen in that kind of sexual reproduction, the offspring is genetically distinct. So that kind of, sometimes it's called open pollination and that leads to a genetically distinct plant and helps with biodiversity.

 So the genetic biodiversity within the plant population,
Could you give us a visual of, for someone who hasn't seen pollen, what does pollen look like on a plant and what does it look like when insects are sort of collecting it? And you referred to it being maybe stuck on to the pair of bees and stuff. Could you give us some visuals on what that would look like?

Sure. Pollen is just amazing as this tiny speck of dust, and some pollen can be, pollen is different. Plants produce different sorts of pollen. Sometimes it can be sticky and heavy like the pollen of Golden Rod, for example, and some pollen can be just a tiny speck, a tiny speck of dust and can be born on the wind. So it's blowing around and sometimes it catches light. So is bright, sometimes it's different colors. There's pollen that can be yellow. There's purple pollen. There's a diversity of colors of pollen as well, and it's incredible sometimes when the bees, some bees have actual pollen collecting structures on their bodies, and so the pollen is clumped together in something that appears to be like a ball, a small ball, and I'm trying to think of maybe under a centimeter, like a tiny little ball of pollen, and they can be bright orange, bright yellow or other colors.

I was walking through a field of sunflowers with a friend once, and when we got through, she said, oh, there's pollen all over your clothes. And so are some plants that prolific that they will sort of produce pollen that you just brush by and you're left with a coating even a human would carry with them?

Absolutely pollen. Some plants will release their pollen explosively. These are sort of the wind pollinated plants and the pollen will be floating on the breeze and land on your clothing. Some examples of plants that produce a lot of pollen and windborn pollen are plants like pussy willows, so that's a tree. And the pussy willow pollen bearing structures are like, well, they're actually kind of large, like a couple of centimeters large, and they can be these gray fuzzy balls that will release their yellow pollen dust in the wind and it will fly around and land on people. I've also, I'm aware of pollen like pine pollen that will actually land on water bodies and create this layer of yellowish pollen on the body on the surface of water bodies. But the bees are the ones that actually visit flowers intentionally to collect the pollen, which will, because of the hairiness of bees that I mentioned.
There's also an electrostatic charge, and I always get confused. I can't remember if it's a positive charge that the hair has and then a negative charge on the pollen or vice versa. But whichever way it is, the pollen will stick to their bodies and then the bee will go back to their nest and they're collecting it for their young too, and they're packing the chambers of their nest. These are bees like bumblebees, so they tend to be the bigger bees. Maybe bumblebees can be almost an inch, even some of the bigger ones, and they'll be covered in this pollen, these little dust specs, these colored dust spots on their body or in their pollen collecting structures. It can be on their legs or their abdomens, and then they'll deposit into their nests in a pollen bundle that are also packed with an egg for the young bee. And then as the bee develops, they'll be eating the pollen and the nectar that's mixed with it, and that will provide the bees with the energy to become adult bees and emerge from those nests. And the cycle starts all over again. And these can be nests that are in the ground or in plant stalks. That's how the native or even in holes in logs.

And so before though they get to the nest, they're landing on other flowers and that's how the pollen transfer is occurring. Is that right?

Yes, crucial point. Thank you for mentioning that. Yes, of course. That's how pollination happens. The bees are, they've got, they're collecting the pollen or it's stuck to their bodies, and then they are visiting another flower. And on some plants that flower will be on the same plant or it will be on a separate plant, but of the same species. And when the bee visits, they're depositing the pollen and that's how cross pollination happens. And bees, the native bees, they exhibit a feature, a characteristic called floral constancy. And what that means is that they tend on their foraging visits to collect pollen, they tend to visit plants of the same species. And that's a great adaptation because that means that they are depositing the pollen that they've collected or it's on their bodies. They're depositing it onto a flower of the same species, which will lead to effective pollination, which will lead to the development fertilization and the development of a seed, and which will be dropped or deposited on the ground as the seed matures. And then another plant will change.

There's a plant here in quite a large area, so maybe like five by six feet or so of Canada Anemone. It's a plant that has finished flowering, but oh, there's one flower left or a couple of flowers left. You can see that they're white flowers with yellow centers and the yellow centers are sticking up. There's pollen attached to them. So again, it's a plant that basically says pollinators. I am here. I'm for you. I've got food for you.

I'd like to focus on the Hopewell community garden, which I know you visited in June, and I'd like to ask about what kind of pollinators are likely to be at that spot, which is sort of northwest Toronto?

Well, the Hopewell garden is planted with so many great plants for pollinators developed as a pollinator habitat garden. And so it includes a lot of the sun loving meadow plants that produce a lot of flowers. And these flowers can be of all different shapes. Some of them are, the flowers are in the shape of tubes. They'll have almost like a musical instrument, like a trumpet where there's a tube and a hollow section. And the bee will travel down that tube, let's say, or send its probosciss. It's down into that chamber where the pollen and nectar are produced, or some of the flowers have very open shapes, like the pedals aren't a barrier to the bee accessing the nectar pollen, but the petals are very open and the pollen and nectar are available very easily to bees that have short tongues, let's say. Or there are flowers that are in bell shapes in the Hopewell garden and different sorts of bees.

There are more than 800 different species of native bees in Canada, and they all have different physical characteristics. Some have short tongues, some have long tongues, and so some are small the size of your baby fingernail and some are much larger and inch or more. And these different sorts of bees can access the pollen and nectar in these different shaped flowers. And at the Hopewell Garden where there's such a diversity of these different flower shapes, different colored flowers, it's just a field day for the different pollinators. So what I've observed there at the Hopewell Garden is a great diversity of bumblebees and other species of bees. And I've also seen some of the insects that might not be as, let's say efficient as pollinators, but can still move pollen around. And these are insects like beetles, which tend to be larger than be, well, actually beetles are all different sizes as well. Some are tiny, some are the size of let's say one knuckle in your finger. And so beetles, I've seen beetles at the Hopewell garden flies are also pollinators, so the diversity of flies that are buzzing around and they'll affect some pollination as well, but it's mainly the bees, a great diversity of bees attracted to the diversity of plants in this amazing pollinator garden.

One of the species that I heard mentioned, we talked about it in a previous podcast, a student at York U was doing some empirical research there and he mentioned the sweat bee. Could you give us a visual description of a sweat bee?
Well, actually a sweat bee, one of the sweat bees is actually the official bee of the city of Toronto, I think its name. I always get confused whether it's the green metallic sweatt bee or the metallic green sweatt bee. And that name gives you a visual clue about that bee. It's actually shiny, so its surface reflects the sun and looks almost like metal, very shiny and bright, and it's the color green. I know that, or at least speaking personally I know I was basically only taught and only aware of honeybees which are introduced bees. They're kind of an agricultural species really, that are used in agriculture to pollinate many food crops and their bees with bands of black and yellow coloring. So stripes, basically these thin bands of different colors, but the metallic green sweat beef for example, they tend to be smaller bees, just a fraction of an inch and small. Some people call them tickle bees because that also gives you a clue about what they do when they're so small that when they land on you, it can feel like a tickle.

There's more Purple Cone Flower farther along in development here, the petals, the purple flower is just about to open, and you can see there the brownish center of the purple cone flower, which projects up from the petals and is one of the most predominant features of the flower.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I know that there are honey bee hives on rooftops like the Royal York Hotel. And so where would those bees be going to get the nutrients, the nectar, the pollen, whatever it is that they're using to make honey? Where would they be going?

Yeah, well, I remember being very surprised when I learned that urban environments, cities can be very great, can be great for a great habitat for bees in that because people are planting a diversity of plants because there are gardens, because there are parks, because there are boulevards with plants, there are actually even, so there are lots of places in cities, lots of flowering plants for bees to go and forage for nectar and pollen. Even when there are hives on rooftops, there are lots of flowers in the neighborhood for bees to visit and collect pollen and enactor. So at a place like the rooftop beehives at the Royal York Hotel, the waterfront and all of the plantings on the waterfront, there are forging areas for bees in those areas. One of the things that ecologists are concerned about though with the growth in the number of honeybee hives within the city, so I mentioned that honeybees are an introduced kind of agricultural species and one hive, just one hive, one managed hive of honeybees.

So the hives can look like wooden boxes about maybe a foot and a half wide and a foot and a half high or so. That wooden box with the honeybees in there, those colonies, one honeybee colony can have 30,000 or 50,000 individual honeybees in it. So there are concerns about they're not being enough flowers, enough resources for all of the bees, the honeybees, and all of the native bees within the city. So that's definitely a concern. There's also a concern around honeybees transferring some diseases to native bees. So diseases that are caused by a colony of 30,000 or 50,000 bees. Those can be hotspots for various diseases that honeybee keepers are trying to manage, of course. But if those disease bees escape from the hive and transfer those diseases to native bees, which haven't co-evolved with the honeybees and don't have defenses against those diseases, it can lead to really catastrophic situations for native bees.

My gosh, that's a level of complexity I had not considered. We always think, oh, beehives awesome. It's a total feelgood story, but it's rarely I guess that simple. I'd like to talk about a veggie garden versus a pollinator garden because at the Hopewell Garden there's both, and in previous podcast episodes we've spoken with gardeners about their experiences with both, and I'm putting my finger to my lips so that the vegetables don't hear this, but the hearts off and minds of the gardeners are sort of more with the pollinators. They feel more of a sense of purpose and meaning about the pollinator garden. And I'm interested to know from a gardener's perspective, if someone is a moderately experienced gardener and they're thinking about pollinator species, what is the difference in the process of starting and maintaining a veggie garden versus a pollinator garden?

And I'm so glad that you're talking about the combination of food plants and pollinator plants because they go so well together. And when I say food plants, I mean like human food crops, having a pollinator garden, a garden that supports the bees who are foraging and collecting pollen, and then the bees, those same bees that are pollinating the food crops that are then producing the food that we eat as humans. That's a perfect, you mentioned like a symbiotic relationship. It's a wonderful example of a win-win. So having those types of plants together makes so much sense as happens in the Hopewell Garden. In terms of the different considerations when starting a pollinator garden and when starting a food garden, many of the food plants we grow, they do require or they'll do better in soil that has more nutrients available to them. I'm thinking of plants like tomatoes, for example.

When you grow tomatoes, they are what's called heavy feeders, which means they need a lot of nutrients in the soil or added with things like fish emulsion that you can purchase and add to the soil. So plants like tomatoes or eggplant or peppers, they tend to require a lot of nutrients in the soil, whereas many of the sun loving pollinator plants that you see growing in a garden like the Hopewell pollinator garden, so these are plants like Arda, Beal, black-eyed Susans, I could go on and on, but many of these sun loving meadow plants that are great for pollinators, they're adapted to soils that are low in nutrients. So you don't need to improve the nutrient content of the soil or take that into consideration in a way that you might want to take into consideration when growing food plants. Now I should say, I've mentioned the sun loving meadow plants that are great for pollinators. I do want to stress that even if you have shade, there are loads of shade loving woodland native plants that are great for pollinators as well. They tend to bloom in the spring, which is great because that's when the pollinators, the bees are emerging.
So the queen bumblebees, the mated queen bumblebees are emerging in the spring and they're looking for food that they find in flowers in order to start their nests and lay their eggs and produce the next generation of bees. So spring blooming native woodland plants and shade are also really great for pollinators.
I'd like to take a bit of a step back just so I'm clear. Okay, so say someone's a balcony garner and they've got a few tomato plants that they purchase as little seedlings or maybe they grow from seeds. Do pollinators play any role in making sure that those plants produce tomatoes?

Yes, they definitely do. And actually your tomato example is a great one because the pollen in tomatoes in order to be released. So I talked about flowers that have very open structures and pretty well any bee can access the pollen and nectar and that's great. But tomatoes, they have pollen that is either only or best released by native bees that do something called buzz pollination. And this is something that honeybees can't do. So the bees like the bumblebees, the native bumblebees that do something called buzz pollination, they land on the flower and they kind of grip it and they vibrate their flight muscles and they vibrate those flight muscles at a frequency that releases the pollen from the plant. Another great example of these mutualisms, these relationships between plants and insects, particularly our bees. So there are, well, hopefully there are bees, there are bumblebees buzzing around those balconies if there are any planted flowers anywhere close by, if there are any bees bumblebees in the area. And if we look around the city, if we pay attention, we're pretty likely to see bees and those bees will be pollinating food plants that are growing on balconies as well. Even if you are not also, even if you don't have room, for example, to plant some pollinator plants in containers on your balcony as well, and you just have room for some food plants and you're growing tomatoes, chances are there will be some bees in the area bumblebees and that can do that buzz pollination and pollinate your tomato plants.

So just to follow that through to its conclusion, if you have a tomato plant on your balcony and there's no pollinators to come, are you going to get tomatoes?
You might get, you certainly won't get a good crop. They do require pollination and these pollinators that can do buzz in order to produce a robust crop. But I wouldn't worry about it too much because most areas do have some native bees buzzing around to pollinate those crops and to pollinate them effectively. Because even if, let's say there aren't some of these buzz pollinated plants like tomatoes, if there aren't bumblebees around and there are for example honeybees around, they might produce a a small crop of tomatoes anyway

For red bud, you'll often find that there are little scallop, little scallop patterns on the edges of the leaves and what those are. Now, it's not happening here with this red bud, but as it ages, I think every year this will start to happen with this red bud leaf cutter. Bees often use the leaves of red bud, they cut out these little half circles or circular scallopy bits, and they take those bits of leaves that they have cut out of the leaf and they provision their nests with it. They're basically, that's how they make their nests with bits of foliage that they cut from certain plants that they favor. And red bud is one of the trees that they particularly use in order to build their nests.

So I'm making the connection that pollinators are important for conservation, but they're also incredibly important for the future of our food production as well. And so it leads me into a question about tension between people who want to plant local species and people who prefer a very manicured, cultivated green lawn and the imported species that people are sort of used to looking at as ornamental plants. And so what kind of shift do you think is the right approach to help people to appreciate a different aesthetic and to see pollinator species and local species as being beautiful?

That's such a big question and it's a passion of mine and something that I really try to spend a lot of time working on thinking about, because I think there's a lot of fear out there about bees, and I think there's a lot of, well, you mentioned the kind of maybe pollinator gardens aren't, there isn't widespread adoption of habitat gardens yet. It's changing and they're becoming more and more common. But I think one of the ways that we can help people fall in love with pollinators is really to allay the fear a little bit and talk about the fact that most bees or many species of bees aren't even capable of stinging and only female bees can sting. And the native bees, you really have to work hard to get many of them to even sting. You have to accidentally step on them or get them caught in your shirt or something like that.

So I think one of the ways to kind of build interest in pollinators is to allay fears. But then another way is actually to talk about, make clear that there are many different styles of pollinator gardening and some pollinator gardens can be very wild spaces, not the manicured gardens that we're used to and that are promoted in the gardening literature and that we're familiar with straight rows or just very manicured as you mentioned. But many habitat gardens are places where there might be leaving dead leaves on the ground is really important for pollinators. It's a really valuable practice. Well, how can we encourage people to see the beauty in dead leaves left on the ground and see the beauty of the way that they function within the whole ecosystem, providing habitat, improving the soil. So I think it's really a matter of the more of these gardens are in public places, the more familiar they will become to people, and the more people will start to not only accept them but also actually learn to love them when you know that they're providing habitat for pollinators that are crucial to all life on earth.

I mean, 80% or more, 90% of flowering plants depend on pollinators, and so many of our food crops depend on pollinators. So if we can start to see the beauty of that ecological functioning in the world and the beauty of the web of connections between insects and plants and our role as nurturers of those relationships, that we have a place as humans in nurturing these relationships, I think it can help us kind of see the beauty of the nature we're a part of and also see a place for the diversity of expressions of creativity. Do we all have to have the same kind of manicured garden? I would hope not. I hope there's room and we make room and we very deliberately celebrate the diversity of expressions that can exist in gardens and the way that we might garden.

You sort of said this is a passion of yours, so obviously you spend time and energy working toward that. Do you have at the top of your mind examples of success stories where that tension existed and it sort of landed on the result of let's make something more diverse and more native rather than more cultivated? Are there examples in the city that popped to your mind?

Yeah, one of the main things I'm immediately thinking of when you talk about that is the program that was launched by the city of Toronto a number of years ago called Pollinate to a program hosted by the city, developed by the city, encouraged by the city, supported by the city, led by the city to encourage community groups to plant pollinator gardens in public places across the city. And I think it's such a positive example of a success story where the city is providing grants to groups that let's say see a space like at a local school or a faith center of some sort, a mosque, a church, a synagogue, and decide to come together and apply for a grant to create a pollinator habitat garden there. So I think pollinate TO is a great success story.

Something I was thinking of as well when you asked for success s stories is I met a gardener recently who told me that in the past she had cleared up the dead leaves every fall she was scrupulous about removing every single dead leaf from the landscape where she lived and bagging them up and putting them out. And then when she learned that those dead leaves were habitat for pollinators, something switched in her mind. She started to see those dead leaves for all that they contributed to the world, all of the insects that they supported and extending from that, all of the birds that then visited because their food was there, the insects that the birds eat. And it led to a switch in her thinking that she told me was pretty much instant. She started to see the beauty of those dead leaves and she decided to start leaving them, and she shares that with her neighbors and she lets 'em know what she's up to and why she's doing it, and she's seen other people in her neighborhood start to leave the leaves.

So I see that as a real success as well. I think we can model what we want to see and what we want to have happen in our communities, which I hope is flourishing nature, flourishing, flourishing habitat and plants that are supporting pollinators. And we can do that by creating these gardens collectively, especially because so many of us don't have the luxury of a yard or a space where we can plant in individually, but we can always approach schools or community centers or even corporate landscapes where we work. If we work for a company that has a little bit of front space where public fronting on the sidewalk where we can say, look, hey fellow workers, let's spend some time creating a butterfly garden and we can look after it. We can engage with nature on lunch hours. We can see the pollinators and the birds who visit, and it can really lead to health and wellbeing for us as humans as well. Nature is so nurturing

Spectacularly in bloom right now. It's an Iris, so it has petals that kind of flop open that are bluey purpley, and each petal has markings on it, lines on the petal of the flower. And these are like landing directions for the visitors to this plant. Many of the flowers in here for the bees that can see colors and patterns that we can't see with our human eyes, but the bees can see and the other creatures can see the creatures that can see UV light, for example. But with the Blue Flag Iris, these directional, these directional signs for the visitors are also, it can be seen by humans as well. The leaves of the Blue Flag Iris are very ribbony and narrow and tall for an iris. So the Blue Flag Iris gets to be about two feet tall, and it's a plant that usually you will find growing in wetlands, but here it obviously gets enough water being lower on the slope. So we we've walked down from the highest point of the garden down to the lowest part of the garden, and all of the water will flow and provide moisture for the Blue Flag Iris which is what it requires.

Gosh, one of the things that is so persistent in the interviews that I did with gardeners from Hopewell is that they started out with this idea of the pollinator garden and maybe some community veggie gardens, but every single one of them referred so sweetly to the community that built up and the friendships, the genuine true lasting friendships that they made. And gosh, just warmed my heart, wiping away tear. It was very beautiful, unexpected part of my talking with the gardeners at Hopewell. So I love that you brought that part up too. I'd like to talk about pollinators and pollinator gardens as climate action, and it's something that some of the gardeners that I I've interviewed have spoken of too. And I will confess, I'm kind of apocalyptic about the future. I'm not very optimistic about where things are going, but I've come to believe more recently that the best most enduring mitigating thing we can do is to preserve habitat and native species. Is that somewhere the same place that you're coming from too in your work?
Yeah, I share both your sense of concern and perhaps even feeling very worried about the future. And at the same time also share your positivity around what we can do, what actions we can take to actually help create a better future, a better future for all. And I think one of the local and available and possible and really empowering things that we can do is to even just talk about this connection between habitat and climate action with our friends and neighbors and families. So even just making the connection by sharing that habitat and preserving habitat and nurturing habitat is a climate action, making that connection for people, even just through talk, if we don't have access to a space or we're so busy working, trying to put food on our tables that we can't engage in a project, just even talking about it is a climate action.

I truly believe this because the connection between habitat, preserving habitat, nurturing habitat as a climate action and as an action in response to biodiversity loss, those connections are not readily known, I would say in the general public. We're not taught this stuff in schools. It's not necessarily on everyone's radar. And so one of the easiest ways I find to talk with people about it is talking about a web of connection and that the more connections there are, the stronger the web is, and the web of connection between plants and insects needs to be strong. There need to be all sorts of different plants, a biodiversity of plants to support a biodiversity of insects. And that will create a strong web of connection that leads to resilience in the ecosystem And in the face of climate change, what we need is resilience. Climate change is all about stresses.

It's about floods and extended droughts and strong storms, all of those extremes. So the more resilient the landscape, the more able plants and animals and all of us as humans, the more able we will be to deal with the impacts of climate change. So I'm with you on preserving habitat and restoring habitat, being local climate actions that really make a difference. And one way to counter the understandable climate anxiety that so many of us are feeling right now is to actually take part in some way, even if it is just planting one native plant, a black-eyed Susan on our balconies, that is something that's one more plant than was there before. It's a local action that we can take and we have no idea what kind of ripples will flow out from that action. And maybe we'll see the pollinators visiting that black-eyed Susan. We'll see the birds visiting that black-eyed Susan on our balcony for seeds, and maybe a friend will be aware, hear that we are planting that black eyed Susan and why we're doing it.

And maybe that will lead them to get involved in a pollinator project somewhere. Or you just never know. You never know what ripples there will be. So yeah, local action on preserving, and I know it can take time and effort to engage in political action of, and when I say that, I'm talking about on the scale of boning your counselor and saying, Hey, biodiversity is important to me and I am glad that there's something called pollinate to, and I hope you're doing everything that you can as a counselor to support climate action. So it doesn't even have to be confrontational or negative, just letting people know that you care and then to the extent that you're able to do so and the avenues that are available to you individually to take action in whatever way you can, makes a difference.

The White Turtle Head is the perfect plant to end with. It's not in flower, but it's got the narrow leaves, and this is the plant, that's the medicine plant for the bees that are infected with a very common parasite. So this garden is very much a haven of health, health for pollinators, health for humans, health for all, health for all life.
I clinging to something that someone I barely know just sort of said, and it was that the worst thing, the worst choice we can make in the face of catastrophic climate change is to lose hope. And at first I thought, oh yeah, that's nice. But the more I thought about it, the more true it became. And so it leads me to a last little anecdote that I want to describe and see if you can fill in a few blanks for me. I was walking, and it relates to resilience too, which is so important. I live near St. Clair and Bathhurst and I'm blind. I was walking with a sighted friend and she said, oh, where they knocked down that building last spring. They haven't rebuilt anything and it's all seeded itself with wild flowers. And I got pretty excited. I was working on this project and I said, oh, do you see pollinators there? And she went, let me see 'em. We stopped and she appeared like, yep, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 15, 20. And so it spoke to the resilience of nature. If you just leave a spot, stuff will grow. So I know this is just wild speculation, but what do you think those wild flowers might've been that she was seeing given it was 2024, it was maybe July and around St. CLA and Bathurst, they just popped up in a vacant space that had been demolished, but nothing had been built there yet. What do you think might've been happening there?

Well, where I find hope with nature's resilience is in examples like that, and let's say in abandoned space or temporarily rarely disturbed space where something else is going to happen. There's probably going to be a big building at that space at some point. But in the meantime, the resilience of nature shines through. And what happens is that those what's called early successional plants, so the plants that are the first to grow in an area of where there's been some kind of disturbance, like a building knocked down the plants that will grow, there are plants, and I bet some of the plants that your friend pointed out where plants native, I bet they included some native plants like Golden Rod, a fantastic early appearing plant that will just show up on its own. There is seeds of Golden Rod all over the place blowing in to disturbed soil, poor nutrient, poor soil, sandy soil with very little organic matter, and then they're growing.

These Golden Rods are growing and they're creating their large plumes. So it's almost like feathery blooms that are yellow in color and attract loads of pollinators and those pollinators because Golden Rod has very sticky, heavy pollen, as I mentioned, and the pollen does not blow on the wind. It doesn't cause hay fever. It needs an insect to move it from one flower to another and pollinate. I bet that was Golden Rod growing. Some of the other plants that will appear are plants like evening primrose, which it will get about four feet tall. I don't know if your friend mentioned the height of the plants that were there, but evening primrose, a four or five foot tall plant with yellow blooms that are smallish and only so maybe an inch wide, and they last just for a day, each flower, but there are flowers all over that plant and attracting pollinators.

Now, some of the plants that also show up in these abandoned spaces are non-native plants. Maybe there was some garlic mustard showing up, or I'm trying to think of some of the other non-native plants, maybe creeping Charlie. These are ground covering plants, so low to the ground, mainly green leaves that would show up. But plants that are the early successional plants showing up in these sorts of spaces, they kind of prepare the ground for, they improve the soil, they build the soil, and so a whole new suite of species will move in over time. There are plants that some people call invasive plants that are non-native plants that kind of show up and spread really rapidly and will create monoculture. They kind of outcompete the diversity of native plants that might otherwise show up. So I want to stress that in the city and the joy of pollinator gardens is that they involve human maintenance.

They involve people making decisions around, okay, how can I help make this space as healthy as possible? How can I create the most ecological functioning in this space? How can I nurture this space and all of the creatures who might visit it? And it's not about just letting these space, just abandoning spaces or doing nothing. It's actually about the human role, our place as humans, as a part of nature, and the ways that we can see ourselves as a part of nature and see our role as healing and repairing damage and really making a local difference.
At the end of the guided walk, we huddled under some protecting trees from the rain, and Lorraine took a few questions. One in particular came from a young climate concerned gardener named Aryeh.

So we have pots and we don't have a garden. We just have those pots that have plants in them that are really starting to grow, grow. We're starting to wonder if we can fit more because some of them are empty. Can you give us some ideas?

One of the plants that we visited here today that was in Bloom, the black eyed, Susan, I mentioned as one of the plants that is incredibly supportive of the Pollen specialist beans. It's also a plant that grows very well in containers, and it's the flower we explored with the yellow flowers with the brown center that's quite low growing, sorry, it's quite low growing, and can tolerate drought, so it doesn't need the water that we are getting. You can tolerate drought and blooms throughout the summer as a really great one for pots.

Described Toronto as 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.