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posted October 16, 2006

Park Gardens Put to Bed

The wet summer and cool fall slowed down the park tomatoes, but the 31 new trees planted by City Forestry seemed very happy about all that moisture. Park staff Jenny Cook is the garden coordinator, and she’s now working with 8 high school students from Inglenook High School to get all the gardens ready for winter.

The Parks maintenance crew is helping too. This year they will convert three more garden sections back to lawn. These gardens are left over from the heyday of volunteer gardener Arie Kamp’s park gardening activities. Arie used to come to the park at four a.m. and work until dusk. He collected seeds from all the best flowerbeds in the city, and planted them at the park. Every time we turned around, he had added another flowerbed.


Arie's morning glories on the oven

Now that he’s eighty, Arie has cut back, doing mainly morning-glories at the park (yes, all those beautiful sky-blue flowers semi-hiding the bake-oven were planted by Arie), as well as some private gardens in the neighbourhood. He still rides his bike!

Although no one can keep the hours that Arie put into the park gardens, and therefore most of his gardens are being re-converted to lawn, Arie’s traces will be in the park for a long time. Many of the seeds he planted were self-seeding biennials, and now not only the other park flowerbeds but also every crack in the rinkhouse walkways sprouts Arie’s cosmos and black-eyed susans and morning glories. Arie gave the park a lot of gifts, and they’re gifts to last.

To replace the gardens that are about to be grassed over, the City Parks horticulture section is collaborating with Foodshare to create a youth garden at the southwest edge of the park near Dufferin Street. This is meant to be a teaching garden full of unusual vegetables and flowers reflecting other world cuisines. Such a garden will fulfil two of the recent mandates of Parks, Forestry and Recreation – to promote community gardens, and to promote youth activities. Beyond that, the unusual plantings should add a lively bit of interest to a corner of the park that is mainly just a thoroughfare for people going to and from the mall.

Foodshare workers had hoped to lay down some compost and straw in this 10 meter by 15 meter area before the winter. However, some park neighbours have protested the loss of green space (grass), as they see it. So no more work will be done until there is a public garden information meeting in March.


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