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The park gardens cooordinator
Skylar Hill-Jackson started helping out with the park’s community-run gardens in 2012. In March 2020, when Premier Ford ordered the parks shut down to contain covid (even the benches were danger-taped off at first), Skylar joined with other gardening defenders citywide to lobby for access to the community gardens. At first they gardened against the law. Then the rules were changed. But somebody had to be found to do the considerable paperwork the city required to credential the volunteers at Dufferin Grove. So Skylar stepped up as the official coordinator. The loneliness of the lockdowns brought out more volunteer gardens than ever before, people who wanted to take their eyes off Netflix and put their hands in the dirt.
And there was plenty to do. With the rink renovation construction imminent, Skylar and her new crew dug up rosebushes and forsythia and perennials and herbs and spring bulbs from the community gardens that were about to be fenced off as part of the construction zone. They replanted them all over the park. The next year they filled the circle of raised planters that the Parks staff installed near the field house, with more plants, including vegetables. CELOS presented Skylar with a “Public Space Award,” and there was a big picnic. The following year Skylar and a garden friend applied for and got a pollinator grant from the city and filled in the extra spaces with native species that bees like. Pretty soon grad students from York University appeared with butterfly nets to count the bees. The grant paid for some school classes to come to park workshops. And so on.
The early batch of volunteers moved on, but new ones turned up. Everyone’s welcome: to get in touch, gardens@dufferinpark.ca.