The Floriade Horticulture Expo put sustainability and biodiversity centre stage with the aim of inspiring a greener, healthier future.
BY KARINA SINCLAIR & SCOTT BARBERDemand for landscaping and horticultural services remained strong in 2022, but inflation and labour shortages caused challenges across Canada.
BY SCOTT BARBERCanada’s largest landscape trade show celebrates its golden 50th anniversary.
Business owners discover investing more into staff compensation pays dividends.
BY JORDAN WHITEHOUSEConverted from an old hockey arena, the Inuvik Community Greenhouse is one of the largest northern greenhouses in the world.
BY GAIL POPE
Everyone benefits when landscapers and arborists work closely together.
BY KYLE MCLOUGHLIN
An interview with authors Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla on the importance of creating habitats for native pollinators.
BY GAIL POPEGerald Boot CLM, Lindsay Drake Nightingale, Jeremy Feenstra, Mark Fisher, Hank Gelderman CHT, Bob Tubby CLM, Nick Winkelmolen
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BY KARINA SINCLAIR AND SCOTT BARBER PRESENTED BY
Alivable city is a green city. It’s a place where biodiversity and sustainability drives innovation. In search of inspiration forCanadian landscape and horticulture professionals, Landscape Trades journeyed across the ocean to uncover the creative solutions celebrated at Floriade Expo 2022.
Every 10 years, horticultural greats and experts from all over the world unite at the Floriade International Horticultural Exhibition to present green solutions that make our cities more enjoyable, beautiful and sustainable.
Between April and October 2022, the seventh Floriade Expo welcomed 685,189 visitors from 96 countries to Almere, a suburb about 20 km east of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Within the theme “Growing Green Cities,” more than 400 national and international participants showcased their latest green innovations, solutions and applications: from stateof-the-art solar roof tiles to mesmerizing vertical facade gardens and from the best ways to grow tomatoes to the latest pruning techniques.
“In a world where nature often has to make way for concrete, glass and steel, horticulture is the key to a liveable world,” Expo organizers explained. “In our view, those working in horticulture, from the gardener to the asparagus grower, to the technician in the greenhouse, are superheroes. During Floriade Expo 2022 we are giving these heroes the stage they deserve.”
Niek Roozen, the lead landscape architect responsible for the overall green structure of Floriade, explained the importance of this expo theme: “The theme is Growing Green Cities and I think it’s the best subject for this moment,” Roozen said. “How can we make our cities more livable?”
When Roozen and his green team of plant designers and tree
specialists began developing the expo design in 2015, their first goal was to keep any existing tree that was in good condition. By saving roughly 3,000 mature trees, not only did their size help balance the aesthetics of the large, nearly added buildings, but they also maintained the biodivesity and temperature control that might have otherwise taken 40 or 50 years to achieve.
During construction, roads and bridges were laid out to accommodate these existing trees, even if it created additional costs. The team also added 2,800 trees to the area and established an arboretum, organized alphabetically by botanical name.
Once the living library of trees was in place, next came the ground cover and garden beds. Throughout Floriade, Roozen’s team planted about 200,000 perennials and 90,000 shrubs. To preserve and enhance nature, the garden beds are up to four metres wide alongside roads and border 192 building plots. Roozen thinks landscape architects and urban planners should work together, right from the start of any new real estate development. When properly planned, a green structure is a structure which will most likely be used for the longest time.
“Houses will disappear; be reconstructed, demolished or rebuilt again. But mostly, green structures will stay for another 100 to 200 years,” Roozen said.
Almere is the youngest city in the Netherlands. Up until the late 1960s, the area was roughly five metres below the North Sea. After the land was reclaimed, the fast growing city has maintained large areas of nature, greenery, and waterways for residents. The Floriade Expo, which closed in October, was designed to transition into a future green city district called Hortus. Residents of this new neighbourhood will inherit the paths, gardens and other green infrastructure that have been purposefully designed to take centre stage.
The expo and its legacy beg the question, how much space does a community really need to have a sustainable ecosystem?
On the map of Floriade, you can see a large green footprint in the northeast corner. That footprint represents five hectares — the average carbon footprint of a Dutch citizen.
And as Roozen pointed out, the earth cannot accommodate its current population if everyone has a footprint that large. In fact, we’d need 4-5 more earths to sustain the current world population of eight billion people.
Floriade’s goal was to provide horticultural solutions to lead the way to a more sustainable future. The Landscape Trades team selected highlights from their visit to share with readers in Canada:
With the “The Voice of Urban Nature” pavilion, the cities of Almere and Amsterdam came together to spotlight the importance of biodiversity. Dagmar Keim, a project leader with the pavilion, explained that creating green cities requires a shift in perspective.
“We don’t say that in the city of Amsterdam, we have 850,000 inhabitants and in the city of Almere there are 250,000 inhabitants,” Keim said. “We have trillions of inhabitants because it’s not only the people that are important; nature is also key to a healthy city. We want to change this way of thinking.”
The pavilion challenged visitors to consider the question: How do you build a city with nature as your equal partner? For the pavilion designers, that meant using 100 per cent bio-based materials. The entire building was created from locally sourced reclaimed wood and was stained with linseed oil and carbon. The walls were clad in an insulating coating of hemp lime, which was coloured with madder. Crushed oyster shells lined the walkways. The garden areas, which created habitat and food sources for wildlife, were left to naturalize.
“A green, healthy and safe city for everyone requires a different relationship with all those others around us,” Keim said. “If we want to green the city in a way that’s for people and for animals, we have to change our perception of nature. We have to change our attitude but also our aesthetics.”
Floriade Expo provided the ideal backdrop for students at Aeres University of Applied Science. The school launched its state of the art “Green Lung” campus on the expo grounds. It will remain a permanent legacy of the event as the area transitions into a green community.
“This university of applied sciences is part of Flevo Campus, and together with the Food Forum pavilion of the province of Flevoland, is a physical place where education, research and science come together,” Expo organizers explained. “Not only for students and researchers, but also for residents of Almere and beyond to get to know and think about the urban life of the future. The Green Lung has been awarded the Circular Award 2022 and embodies the central theme of Floriade. It is a leader in the field of climate adaptation, circularity and health. As more and more people live in cities, more questions arise in the areas of nature,
livability, provision of food, water and energy. What is needed to keep growing cities livable worldwide, is knowledge. That is why Aeres University of Applied Sciences Almere trains students to become future-oriented green changemakers.”
Green Lung staff member Marije Harpe toured the Landscape Trades team through the facility, pointing out its key features.
“This building really portrays what our students here focus on: green cities, because this building itself is very green and sustainable,” Harpe said. “You can see all the plants on the rooftop. We have a beautiful green wall with places for insects, birds, bats even. It also collects rainwater. When the water falls on the solar panels, it goes underneath in an underground water tank and we can collect 20,000 litres of water there. That’s how we water our green wall automatically through a smart system.”
BDG Architects, the firm behind the innovative design, explained the facility features a triple solar energy roof and highquality insulation on the facade. The facades feature different qualities depending on the position and orientation. The west side has PV panels as solar shading and to generate energy. The east side has a dense green facade, which changes colours along with the seasons. The green roof is partly a ‘tropical roof’ to generate energy, with a number of trees and with water retention. The plants and other greenery on and around the building are watered with the rainwater collected on the roof. This rainwater also serves as a heat and cooling buffer. Many of the construction materials were reclaimed from around the Netherlands, such as wood planks from ships.
In the Green House, visitors were taken on a journey through greenhouse horticulture: from seed or cuttings to tasty fruits and vegetables to beautiful flowers and plants. The latest innovations and developments in the field of, among other things, circular agriculture, climate adaptation, biodiversity and food supply were also showcased.
The Green House was home to the High Tech greenhouse where demonstration crops of strawberry, pepper, gerbera and potted anthurium showed what innovative and sustainable cultivation looks like.
Greenhouse manager Maurice Wubben gave the Landscape Trades team a tour of the High Tech greenhouse, pointing out some of its most innovative features. Wubben showed off “PATS,” a small autonomous drone that works in tandem with a camera system to seek and destroy moths in the greenhouse without the use of insecticides.
“What happens is when (the cameras) detect a moth, mostly by night, they send the drone to it from the platform to the moth directly. They fly with the propellers, but at the same time, when they are in the neighbourhood of a moth, the moth is sucked into these propellers. It will die, protecting the crops.”
Wubben also highlighted small bags located in and around crops in the greenhouse. “Here we have an example of biological crop protection,” he explained. “In these small bags there are tiny insects. In nature, every insect has its natural enemy. And for these gerbera crops, there can be a lot of pests like aphids
and spider mites. And so we have brought their natural enemies here to provide protection.”
This enabled the Floriade greenhouse to grow crops using some 90 per cent less pesticides, Wubben explained.
The greenhouse will also likely contribute to the legacy of the expo. Wubben explained that many organizers and planners of Floriade were working to ensure the greenhouse remains to benefit members of the future community on the event grounds.
“This greenhouse is very special,” Wubben said. “It’s a really high tech greenhouse and I really hope that this greenhouse will stay for the people who are going to live here after Floriade because there are 600 houses and apartments being built here. And I hope that people can use the greenhouse to grow their own vegetables and plants.”
Healthy ecosystems for insects, bees, butterflies, birds and other animals are important to keep cities livable. At the Wild at Heart garden by Lageschaar Vaste Planten, visitors discovered what such an ecosystem looks like and what people and animals need. The best of both worlds is united in the garden: a combination of all kinds of plants, wildlife and native vegetation to increase biodiversity in a natural and colourful garden that remains beautiful all year round.
“We want to show a lot of possibilities with native plants,” designer Sipke Terpstra explained. “I think this is quite an innovative concept because we used native plants in combination with non-native. So you have structure and beauty for 12 months in the garden, and by doing so, people can see that you grow native plants in your garden and still be beautiful.”
Terpstra said the garden elicited strong reactions from visitors. And that was by design.
“There were some people who thought it was a little bit wild,” he said. “However, the positive reactions were many because a lot of people noticed how many different insects were present in the garden. They understand that wildness is something that we should go more into. That’s more or less our mission, to make the world more green.
With the theme “back to the future,” the French pavilion aimed to create the city of tomorrow by combining old knowledge and solutions with new innovations, in harmony with nature.
The pavilion was created by using traditional methods
paired with modern sustainability best practices. The goal was to create a space that fits perfectly into the city of tomorrow: green, inclusive and scalable, but drawing on three pillars: Bio-inspiration, Bio-economy and the Circular Economy. To accomplish this, the building incorporated solar panels and collected rain water, and was constructed in a way that it could be easily dismounted and reused for other purposes.
“The public in general still needs to learn a lot about climate change and especially the urgency which is involved with that change and the scale of the challenges that we are facing,” Simon Bos, an organizer with the France pavilion explained. “The only way to achieve this is to get people together to talk about the problems, but not only talk about problems, but we also have to talk about solutions. And what we also know is that in the coming days there is not just one person or group who is going to have the solution, but there are lots of people who are specialists in specific areas and they have to combine their knowledge and skills to make better solutions and to achieve real results in practice.”
Garden designer Jacqueline van der Kloet said the garden utilizes the French parterre style, with patterns including large borders with repetition of plants. She said one of her favourite parts of the garden were the canopy structures called corollas that provide a platform for climbing plants to create shady, tree-like structures.
“I think they’re very impressive and last year they were installed and the plants were planted in them and now already some of the climbers have gotten so far that they almost covered the whole structure,” van der Kloet said. “Instead of having actual trees, which take a very long time to grow, you could have structures which can be full in two seasons with fast-growing climbers.”
Bos said he hopes visitors to the French pavilion gained a new perspective that we need to challenge and build off our old ideas.
“I would like to challenge people to rethink every step that they take when they are creating a landscape,” Bos said. “At every step, they should think about what they are going to do, because we all tend to do what we have been doing for years, but we need to challenge all common practices.”
“It’s our duty to change where we have the possibility to improve,” Roozen said, adding that he hopes landscape professionals of the future will not only use flowers and trees for their aesthetics, but for their ability to improve working and living environments. “I hope that people will be inspired by what they see [at Floriade], and that they will believe in a beautiful future.” LT
FIND MORE PHOTOS AND VIDEOS AT landscapetrades.com/growing-green-cities
Marije Harpe
Simon Bos
Dagmar Kiem
Maurice Wubben
Sipke Terpstra
Jacqueline van der Kloet
The Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign was inspired by the Canadians who gave the highway its name: those who served in the Canadian Armed Forces, plus Silver Cross Mothers, families, and friends. We are delighted to announce that the world’s largest living legacy is now complete with the recent planting of our two millionth tree. A special thank-you goes to Landscape Ontario and its member nurseries, growers and planters; without their support this achievement would not have been possible.
With a genuine concern for climate change, we knew we had to continue this initiative to connect groups with shared values to plant trees. This led to the next chapter of our story, which we are now writing through Trees for Life (TFL).
Trees for Life’s primary objective is to mobilize and enhance the capacity of community-based tree and shrub planting initiatives in Canada’s more populated communities. We support like-minded organizations through partner outreach and advocacy, funding and fundraising
tools, and access to expertise, resources, and education. The importance of including private landowners in the urban green process cannot be overstated so Trees for Life works with several community-led organizations to achieve leafy canopy goals.
Environment Hamilton and the Hamilton Naturalists’ Club are recipients of funding from Trees for Life. These funds help them to provide trees at no cost to Hamilton residents through their Trees Please program. The program was created to improve Hamilton’s overall air quality and urban forest health. The trees will add shade throughout the city for the summer months and help them to achieve their leafy canopy coverage goal of 40 per cent. “Encouraging private landowners to plant trees on their property is integral to helping Hamilton achieve its canopy goal,” said Jen Baker, Land Trust Manager, Hamilton Naturalists’ Club.“ In 2022, the Trees Please program had another successful year, getting 700 trees in the ground, bringing the total number of trees to over 3,500 since the program’s inception.”
Another TFL partner doing great work in urban spaces by engaging private landowners is LEAF (Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests).
In 1996, Janet McKay founded LEAF and has planted tens of thousands of urban-based native trees and shrubs since then. The goal of LEAF is to work at the community level to improve the urban forest, both with homeowners and with larger plantings on municipal and private lands. Through their enthusiasm, leadership, intelligence and tireless energy, Janet and her LEAF staffers and volunteers have mobilized thousands of community members in Toronto and beyond to plant and care for their trees.
In partnership with several municipalities in York and Durham Regions, LEAF hosted a multitude of planting events in 2022. With the help of almost 700 volunteers and community members, well over 3,000 native trees and shrubs have been planted and mulched on public lands this year.
A stand-out quality of LEAF is their education and awareness programs, which turn homeowners into tree champions, volunteers, and community leaders who pay it forward with their knowledge and energy, and their robust commitment to the urban forest canopy.
Integral to the success of any tree-planting effort is good quality tree stock. We are fortunate to work with several growers and nursery partners who share our vision.
One such nursery partner is St. Williams Nursery and Ecology Centre. They specialize in growing source-identified Ontario native plants specifically to help support the conservation of Ontario’s natural biodiversity.
St. Williams sees a future where the health of our economies, cultures, and natural environments co-exist in a sustainable and mutually beneficial way. “People and nature thriving together has been and will always be a big inspiration for our business. That’s why we work with Trees for Life,” said Allan Arthur, President, and Sr. Ecologist. “They are making real and lasting change by supporting communityled tree planting groups to get trees in the ground while reinforcing the importance of native species to help them build back their local tree canopies and ecosystems. They are part of the solution, as habitat loss can only be reversed by many people collectively taking action.”
Pineneedle Farms, another Trees for Life partner, is run by a third-generation grower specializing in native deciduous and evergreen tree species seedling
stock. “We have always supported efforts to protect the environment and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves,” said Paul Richardson, owner. “We are pleased to be included in the 2 Billion Trees program through our partnership with Trees for Life. Working with David
workers, teachers, those we lost to COVID, and the people who make Canada a better place for all. The only thing better than planting a tree is planting a tree that is dedicated to someone special.
Our first Hero Grove planting was completed this fall at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, honouring frontline health workers who have bravely led us through the pandemic and who work tirelessly for our health and well-being. Located in the heart of Toronto, this event added 600 new trees to the health facility’s grounds to be enjoyed by patients and staff. We also provided trees in honour of some of those who lost their lives to COVID at a special memorial at Beechwood Cemetery, Canada’s National Cemetery in Ottawa.
[Turnbull] and the Trees for Life team has streamlined the process. We are pleased to be a leading supplier of seedlings to urban and near-urban project partners of TFL. We are looking forward to continuing to help green up municipalities throughout Ontario and beyond over the coming years.”
While the Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign is finished, we were inspired by the groundswell of support we saw for honouring heroes with living tributes. This motivated Trees for Life to launch a Trees for Heroes program. Through this campaign, we will continue to plant trees to honour many kinds of heroes in our lives: frontline, first responder and health
Trees are the lungs of the planet, so it is fitting that we are planting them to honour those who have fought against an illness that is known to attack our respiratory system.
Trees for Life facilitates planting native trees to fight climate change, support biodiversity for future generations, and help to restore nature in all its complexity and beauty. We have to work together to get this done for them. This is why we will continue asking our Landscape Ontario friends for help. If you are a horticultural trade professional that can spare a crew for a day or two to come out and help us or our partners plant trees, provide soil, compost, or a load of mulch, or if you can donate trees because you’re a grower or you have an of excess inventory, we would welcome your participation. Please visit TreesforLife.ca for more information.
What is the takeaway from the 2022 State of the Industry Report? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Demand for landscape and horticulture services and products remained strong. However, widespread labour shortages made meeting that demand challenging for business owners across many parts of the country. Disrupted supply chains also continued to cause headaches for operators seeking equipment, tools, and nursery stock. And those issues amplified the broader economic problem facing all sectors: rampant inflation.
Responses were mixed when it came to whether the industry is becoming a more attractive career path, with a slight majority believing that it is improving. Answers to the question “how optimistic do you feel about the overall success of the landscape profession?” were also varied, although they leaned positive (7.4 was the average response out of 10). Encouragingly, 56.2 per cent of respondents rated their business’s financial picture in 2022 as either “strong” or “record year,” with 37.8 per cent having had a moderate year and just 3.9
per cent reporting poor financial performance.
One striking trend in this year’s survey was the number of people who noted the increasing connection between growing, designing, building and maintaining green spaces, and environmental and climate solutions. There were dozens of comments that suggested public awareness and interest in green infrastructure and the ecological benefits of plants has increased. This was particularly evident in responses from individuals who felt that landscaping is becoming a more desirable profession. Many said they felt that younger generations are looking toward the green profession as a way to make a positive contribution to society.
The 2022 State of the Industry Report survey was conducted in October 2022 via a questionnaire sent to Landscape Trades subscribers. Our team would like to extend a sincere thank you to the 305 landscape professionals from across the country who took the time to share their insights and feedback. This year, we are providing more space to highlight your views, in your own words.
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“ How optimistic do you feel about the overall success of the landscape profession?” (1= Bleak | 5 = Neutral | 10= Very optimistic)
“The industry is getting stronger and stronger and more and more professional. I look forward to the ‘places of higher education’ putting more emphasis on landscaping and horticulture as a viable, strong career opportunity.
There are beginning to be more professionals within the industry driving home the important messages of quality, conservation, and environmentalism but this will take time.
*AVERAGE SCORE: 7.3
People want to work outdoors, doing something tangible, not stuck in an office. This is also a field that can have/must have a positive effect on the environment.
Since the Horticultural Journeyman course has become available it has helped to raise the bar and it is making clear the difference between the professionals.
“ How would you rate your business’s financial picture in 2022?”
Landscaping has many benefits, these include: creative thinking, being outside, using your hands and being physically active at work.
With increased interest in protecting the environment and growing interest in all things green, the benefits of green spaces are constantly being advertised to the public. It makes sense more people would develop an interest in landscape horticulture.
“ Do you believe landscaping is becoming a more desirable career path?”
A photo of a plug liner barely begins to summarize the hours of attention given to that plug’s success; the trials to decide on tray size, the careful evaluation of water, heat, and fertilizer requirements, and the diligent oversight of growers scouting for pests and daily needs. All of this so we can offer a consistent product rooted in customer success..
Premium Perennials. Rewarding Results. www.WaltersGardens.com
Skilled labour has been a shortcoming. We are internally training to help mitigate, but it is tough when everyone is so ‘green.’ When the one skilled person is sick, or needs a day off, it can derail a jobsite. As long as we can retain these employees, it will work out in the future.
We just don’t seem to get applications. We have changed our ads and added paid platforms to advertise on where we can select a demographic and we are getting less applicants than five years ago.
There was often just no telling when materials and equipment would be available or be delivered, making planning very difficult.
Many products were not in stock, available in other provinces, or produced ondemand only. Many elements were not even put back into production due to the demand for others; when you have a phased project and can no longer get the products you need to complete it, that is more than frustrating.
Not many people apply, most don’t show up for the interview or for their first day of work. Those that do often want higher wages than can be reasonably sustained and/ or do not stay for very long.
“ What were the biggest challenges your business faced in 2022?”
“ Looking ahead to 2023, what do you expect to be your biggest challenges?”
Platinum
Platinum
We raised wages to keep up with inflation. Our suppliers raised prices and we raised them, keeping our markup the same percentage as before.
We added a clause in our contracts that materials prices can not be guaranteed and may need to be adjusted once projects begin.
The price of fertilizer and seed increased dramatically as did the price of gas and staff wages.
When your operating and material costs increase, you have to increase your pricing to maintain a reasonable profit margin.
Prices are up due to increased costs of running the business (gas, labour, material, disposal, etc.). The pricing reflects quality of work and our target market isn’t looking for a deal, they are looking for the best.
Congress opens its doors Jan. 10-12, 2023 at the Toronto Congress Centre, marking the event’s golden anniversary
is proud to be the official media partner of Congress. Visit us at booth #2325.
In 1973, the first Congress was held at Toronto’s Skyline Hotel. At the time, (Pierre) Trudeau was Prime Minister and inflation was spiking. Maybe things weren’t all that different?
The event was a catalyst for uniting the Ontario Nursery Trades Association, the Ontario Landscape Contractors Association, and the Ontario Garden Maintenance Association to form Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association. LO — which also celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023 — has grown to become one of the strongest and most vibrant horticultural trade associations in the world.
That’s what Congress is all about: Joining together to learn, network, do business and have a lot of fun. By coming together, we make the profession stronger. There are countless reasons to come to Congress 2023. Here are some of my favourites:
The best part of Congress is connecting with old friends, colleagues and suppliers. Congress is an annual homecoming for landscape professionals. It’s a chance to catch up, share ideas about business challenges and opportunities, and yes, have a little fun, too. It’s the perfect way to kick off a new year.
The Congress Conference is back as an in-person event Jan. 10-12 at the Toronto Congress Centre. The program is absolutely stacked with fantastic speakers covering a wide range of business management, horticultural, and special interest topics. You can see the full list of sessions on pages 28 of this magazine. I recommend bringing key staff members along to show you care about their professional development and to get them energized for the new year.
With over 400 exhibitors covering more than eight acres, Congress is a one-stop-shop for the latest equipment, tools, materials and supplies; everything you need to take your business to the next level. New products have always been a show highlight. I can’t wait to see what 2023 has in store. Want to see who’s exhibiting at this year’s show? View the full exhibitor list and floor plan at LOcongress.com. The Congress floor plan software has been upgraded to include new features like company profiles with videos and product information. Another addition to the interactive digital floor plan is the”find a booth” function, that provides directions to booths to make finding your way around the show a breeze. And be sure to grab your complimentary Congress Show Guide when you arrive for exhibitor listings, the new product showcase and a map.
Don’t miss the free education LIVE on the trade show floor from leading hardscape, horticulture and vehicle safety experts. Sessions run daily through the show, so make time for this great chance to pick up tips and learn about new equipment and products.
Parking at the Toronto Congress Centre, 650 Dixon Rd. in Etobicoke, Ont., is 100 per cent free. And not to worry, there’s plenty of space available.
And last but not least, we are excited to announce the return of the popular Ale Trail. Enjoy free beer samples at select exhibitors throughout the show floor, including the Landscape Trades booth. Drop by booth #2325 to have some beer and say hello to the LT team.
On behalf of the Show Committee, Terry Childs, Chair
Industry experts provide information and demos on the LIVE Stage throughout each day of the show. There is no charge to attend these sessions, so bring out your key staff members to get them engaged and energized for the upcoming season. Here are some highlights from this year’s LIVE Stage program:
Back to the basics including:
• System components
• Job sequence
• Job planning and documentation (job layout, planning and material flow)
Speaker: Terry Childs Nature’s Way Landscaping
Grab a passport and souvenir glass for the annual Congress Ale Trail! Beverage stations with free craft beer samples will be located throughout the trade show floor. Try one or try them all — it’s included with your trade show pass!
Kress - Booth #328
Landscape Trades - Booth #2325
Rinox - Booth #2566
The Toro Company - Booth #1216
Experience a hands-on approach to learning how to apply the Daily Vehicle Inspection Rules to comply with Ontario regulations.
Speaker: Halton Regional Police Service and Tri-Shield Consulting
The ability to find places to plant trees and have them survive is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s intensified urban centres. This presentation will investigate the factors that affect tree establishment in hardscape environments, ranging from project planning, construction, and long-term operations and maintenance of green infrastructure. By gaining a better understanding of these factors and the challenges they present to the long-term viability of tree establishment in hardscape environments, the urban forest professional will be able to engage and collaborate with allied professionals to develop creative solutions that help ensure trees can be successfully established, but also integrate grey and green infrastructure into a cohesive system.
Speaker: Steve Robinson
Manager of Urban Forestry/City Arborist Roads, Parks and Forestry, City of Burlington
Find inspiration for 2023 at the Congress New Products Showcase, your “road map” of what’s new on the show floor. From new equipment, tools and technology, to new supplies and plant introductions, there’s no better place to get an overview of the latest and most creative product releases.
Meet with your peers and make valuable connections at Congress’ biggest networking event! Join fellow Congress delegates on Jan. 10, 2023, at the Delta Hotel for an evening of lively conversation, networking and entertainment. The fun begins at 8:30 p.m.
Need a break of somewhere quiet to chat? Put your feet up and enjoy free WIFI at the Patio Lounge, located in Hall A (south west corner of the tradeshow floor).
Register for Congress 2023 and all the partner events at LOCONGRESS.COM
The Snowrator never calls in sick. End your shoveling labor headaches!
See the Snowrator di erence at snowratorsaves.com.
JANUARY 5, 2023
A full-day, virtual event for lawn care professionals. The key to turf IPM is the use of cultural practices that optimize growth of grasses and minimize conditions favourable to pest insects, weeds, or pathogens. Landscape Ontario’s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Symposium has been a uniquely respected event since 1965. Attendees will earn six CECs from the IPM Council of Canada.
Randy Booker | Turf Evolution
CONTROLLING INVASIVE PHRAGMITES:
LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Janice M. Gilbert | Invasive Phragmites Control Centre
UPDATE FROM THE MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, CONSERVATION AND PARKS
Scott Olan | Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks
Sara Stricker | Guelph Turfgrass Institute
ENDOPHYTIC MICROBES THAT PROMOTE NITROGEN USE EFFICIENCY (NUE) AND DROUGHT TOLERANCE IN TURFGRASS
Dr. Manish Raizada | University of Guelph
TREE CARE IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT: AN IPM PERSPECTIVE
Kyle McLoughlin | Ironwood Arboriculture Solutions
HOW RETHINKING AGRICULTURAL SPRAY OILS HAS LED TO INNOVATIVE BREAKTHROUGHS FOR THE HORTICULTURAL AND LANDSCAPE INDUSTRIES
Reinie Drygala | HFSinclair (HFS)
MARRIOTT TORONTO AIRPORTAn initiative of Landscape Ontario’s Landscape Designers Sector Group, the 2023 Designers Conference is a full-day event with lunch and closing reception. Sessions will be recorded and made available to registered attendees for a limited time. Each conference session qualifies for one Landscape Horticulture Certification (LHCP) CEC.
LANDSCAPE DESIGNERS
SECTOR GROUP - AGM
Join your sector peers and learn about what this LO Sector Group is doing on your behalf, and help shape future initiatives and projects.
NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
MANAGEMENT STAGE OF DESIGN
Moderator: Haig Seferian Panellists: Danée Marie Lambourne
Eden Projects
James Garfield Thompson J. Garfield Thompson Landscape Cheryl Cichon ELP Environmental
NEW AND INNOVATIVE DESIGN SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY Mansoor Ma | LANDinc
SO YOU THINK YOU CAN’T DRAW!
Beth Edney | Designs By The Yard
BIG GARDEN IN A SMALL SPACE
Welwyn Wong | Welwyn Wong Landscape Design Glenn Curtis | Plantenance Landscape Group
STYLE BY DESIGN CHARRETTE
Moderators: Beth Edney | Designs By The Yard
Shawn Gallaugher
Shawn Gallaugher Design
ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION THROUGH EFFECTIVE DESIGN
Heather Schibli | Dougan & Associates Jim Dougan | Dougan & Associates
The Landscape Ontario Peer to Peer Network is a growing group of business owners and their key managers. Connected together by member-based social media groups, they support and help one another with real-time issues and answers. The network is open to all Landscape Ontario business owners.
LEADING TODAY’S WORKFORCERISE TO THE CHALLENGE!
Join professional facilitator Jacki Hart on a journey through who you need to be as a leader in your business. With the current challenges of acquiring, inspiring, growing and retaining a great team, you’ll leave this session with clarity on where you need to grow as the leader of tomorrow’s company, not yesterday’s. Inspired by 34-year LO veteran executive director Tony DiGiovanni’s ‘top 9 qualities of great leaders,’ this one-day interactive networking event will be discussion driven, collaborative and self-reflective.
Specific group discussions will focus on actionable strategies:
• How to demonstrate next-level leadership thinking and behaviour.
• How to more effectively connect with your diverse employee team.
• How to be the exceptional leader who elevates and engages the team.
• How to identify and coach your leadership team through ‘red flags.’
As the official media partner of Congress, Landscape Trades is proud to offer readers FREE TRADE SHOW PASSES. Enter the Promo Code 50YRLT when you register at LOCongress.com
When Scott Gardner started working at Toronto’s Vista Tree Management last year, he was making just under $24 an hour. Now the arborist apprentice is up to almost $25, and that will likely go up again soon. Compared to his last job, it’s a big boost to his income. Gardner says that increase has made a big difference in his quality of life.
“It’s just a lot less stress when I’m away from work,” says Gardner. “Having that living wage means that I can be confident that the bills are going to get paid, and that makes it a lot easier to come into work and enjoy my time when I’m not at work. And when you’re happier, I feel you’re a better employee.”
Gardner is one of an increasing number of Canadian workers earning what’s called a living wage*. It’s the minimum hourly wage a worker needs to cover the actual costs of living in their community. In Metro Vancouver, for instance, the living wage amount is $20.52, while in Kelowna, B.C., it’s $18.49. In Toronto, it’s $22.08, while in Kingston, Ont., it’s $17.75.
The numbers are calculated using a framework developed by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. They’re based on a two-parent family with two kids, and typically take into account food, clothing, rental housing, childcare, transportation, and a small savings. They don’t consider things like retirement savings, debt repayment, or home ownership, but they do reflect inflation.
There aren’t any official stats on the growth of living wage employers in Canada, let alone in the landscaping industry, but in recent years a few certifying bodies have popped up in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. They make sure certified employers continue to pay workers the living wage in their region.
At the time of writing, there were 17 gardening and landscaping companies listed with B.C.’s certifying body, Living Wage for Families BC, and 13 landscape contractors listed with the Ontario Living Wage Network.
Other companies are also stepping up their wages, even if not currently certified. Vista Tree Management is one (though they do expect to be certified soon). When co-owners and tree care industry vets Michal Kenins and James May launched their company in April 2021, they told themselves they wouldn’t enrich themselves at the expense of their employees.
Kenins says he started off in the industry being paid $18 an hour in Toronto, which was “so punishing and difficult.” Never again for themselves or someone else working for them, they pledged. “If [our employees] are working in the city of Toronto, they need to be able to live in the city of Toronto, and that includes raising families here,” says Kenins.
Like Vista Tree, Vancouver’s Craine Projects saw the logic in introducing living wages in one of the continent’s most expensive cities. But the choice also had a lot to do with living up to the values they tout to employees and the public.
Kelly-Ann Racich is Craine’s marketing and communications rep, and she says her bosses had never heard of living wages before they started bidding for landscaping contracts with the City of Vancouver a few years ago. One of the recommendations before applying is to be a living wage employer.
“So, when they looked into it, they thought, ‘You know, not only will this help us get City contracts, but it really is aligned with our values. We’re founded on integrity, and if we’re not taking care of and supporting the people who make our company what it is, then how can we claim that?’” says Racich.
For a similar reasons, Toronto’s Gardenzilla is going through the living wage certification process right now. During non-pandemic times, owner Michael Chudy usually takes all of his employees out for breakfast once a month to talk about what’s happening at the company and what might make it a better place for them to work. Ideas like health benefits and living wages have come out of those chats, and the company is now acting on both.
“Lots of people come into this industry, and lots of people leave, and I know how hard that is for companies,” says Chudy. “So, the goal here was to be a place where people want to stay and where when you work here, you feel like you can actually build a career and you can actually stay here and raise a family and do all these things that we all want to do to varying degrees.”
Chudy learned the importance of that lesson at his last job, where he was the director of operations at a landscaping company. Along with hosting big staff parties and other morale boosters, he helped increase staff wages. It didn’t take long for the company to see increases in profits and efficiency, he says. “It really supported this idea that by investing in the people who work with your company, both they and the company benefit.”
Other than ethics, recruitment and retention are two of the main reasons why the employers we spoke to for this story adopted living wage programs. Take Surrey, B.C.’s Atkinson Landscaping, which became living wage certified a couple of years ago. “We also have a few other things that help with the retainment of people — like profit-sharing programs — but for sure having a living wage being slightly above probably what competitors are paying is really helpful for retaining staff,” says co-owner and GM David Endacott.
At Vista Tree, Michal Kenins says they have more people applying to their company than they even anticipated. In other words, he’s not seeing the same skills shortages others are. “I’d say there’s not just a skills mismatch out there — there’s an expectation mismatch in terms of what workers are looking for and what’s actually being offered.”
Scott Gardner liked what he was offered from Vista Tree, and now has no reason to leave, he says. “That wage increase made a big difference, but it was also showing that they pay attention to the fact that their employees can have a life outside of work. They’re not just trying to make the biggest buck, but they’re trying to make the lives of their employees a little bit better — and that was a big selling point for me.”
As good as living wages are for recruitment and retention, it can’t just be about recruitment and retention, says Kenins. “If it’s just about that, you’re probably going to find that it’s very difficult for you to emotionally deal with the struggle that comes from changing your finances around to support it.”
And it can be a financial struggle, says Kenins. For Vista Tree, living wages have been in place since day one, so it’s all the company has known. But it has meant lower potential profits and higher end pricing. Both are okay with Kenins, but he knows that’s not true for every company.
Still, there can be a phased approach to this, he says. Maybe a company can’t offer the specific living wage in its area yet, but maybe it can introduce things like health benefits, paid sick days, or other perks. “These types of small changes can really help improve working conditions, and then you’re going to see hopefully a return in terms of your employees’ commitment, and the value that they see in the company,” says Kenins.
David Endacott agrees that even if it’s not possible to offer living wages right now, it’s a solid goal to work toward. He’s quick
to point out that even with living wages in place, it can still be a struggle for people to make ends meet in places with sky-high costs of living like the lower mainland of B.C. That’s why he isn’t always comfortable promoting Atkinson Landscaping as a living wage employer. “It’s a tough dynamic to manage, but I think it should always be the goal of any business to pay their staff an amount they can live off of.”
At Gardenzilla, where almost all staff are already earning what would qualify as a living wage, there isn’t really a financial challenge with becoming certified. Instead, the challenge will be making sure the entire team continues to feel valued and that they are properly rewarded for their work, says Chudy. “If you want to compete in this industry, and if you want to attract good people, you have to pay them a fair living wage in order for them to want to work with you. That just makes sense.”
Staying competitive means staying committed to your people, says Kenins. “The benefit of having the living wage is that we’ve been able to sort of pick and choose the people who have chosen us. And those we’ve chosen have stayed and allowed us to deliver the type of customer service and quality of care that meets the needs of clients who are paying the higher amounts that allow us to prosper.”
The reason Scott Gardner has stayed at Vista Tree and tried to provide that service is pretty simple. “When they want the best for you, you want the best for them right back.” LT
*The living wages listed are based on information as of November 2022. Contact Sales - o ce@hortico.com
Located on the Mackenzie River Delta, two degrees above the Arctic Circle, the Inuvik Community Greenhouse (ICG) is the largest northern greenhouse in North America and perhaps even the world. It’s also one of the most unique, with over 16,000 square feet of space in what was previously a hockey arena.
The facility, which belonged to Grollier Hall, the town’s former residential school, was saved from demolition when the Community Garden Society of Inuvik (CGSI) was formed in 1998 to raise funds and petition to transform the hockey arena into a community greenhouse.
The transformation and its impact on the Inuvik community was examined in a Carleton University study titled: Community Healing through Gardening: the Inuvik Community Greenhouse and reuse of the Grollier Hall Hockey Arena
“The Inuvik Community Greenhouse stands as an unusual example of adaptive reuse that demonstrates how to provide an alternative way for food security through a socio-cultural and economic model,” the study says. “Committed to ‘building a strong sense of community through recreational gardening, food production, knowledge sharing, and volunteer support’ (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2009), the efforts exerted by the CGSI led to inspiring outcomes. Based upon the success to date, CGSI believes the Inuvik Community Greenhouse serves as an effective model for other northern communities.”
Inuvik is known as the land of the midnight sun because it has 56 days with 24 hours of daylight in the summer and 30 days of darkness in the winter. The constant summer sun
makes for a great — albeit relatively short and extreme — growing season. The controlled greenhouse system allows for plants to grow from May to October, whereas the hydroponic unit grows crops all year round.
Hydroponic systems grow plants without using soil. Instead, growers use nutrient-rich water-based formulas that provide the plant with its exact environmental needs. This includes using devices that monitor pH levels and sun exposure, which are adjusted accordingly.
In the northern regions of Canada exorbitant food costs continue to be a major problem. Adi Scott, greenhouse coordinator, says food production and community are the most important roles of the ICG.
“On the first Thursday of each month, while we’re growing, we aim to add fresh greens and produce to the food bank’s non-perishable hampers. We also provide recipe cards so people can learn how to use the veggies that we’re providing,” Scott said. “We provide this all for free, which we would never be able to do without all the generous funding from people and organizations.”
Scott explained how the greenhouse is supported by donors and the money raised by their various fundraisers throughout the year.
“We also have a cafe that sells tea and things made from the garden,” Scott said. “We try to teach people about the medicinal qualities that they have, but the real focus is trying to promote well-being and community gathering.”
Families and individuals can become members of the greenhouse to gain access to workshops, food programs, plot
rentals, and more. To rent a plot, there is also a small community requirement.
“Each plot is five volunteer hours and that could be helping us around the greenhouse, helping to run events or to run workshops,” Scott explained. “Really, the idea of those volunteer hours is to get more community involvement.”
The greenhouse is not only a valuable source of food for the community, but also a place where everyone can come together to build relationships.
“We have so many different age groups, and then we also have families. I believe
there are more than 50 visible minorities. It’s a high number for such a small community,” Scott said.
Inuvik is home to just over 3,200 people, and has a large Indigenous population. Scott explained how important it is for people in the North to have spaces where they can connect and facilitate learning more about their culture through plants and growing. To encourage learning, the greenhouse offers workshops to youth and adults on all sorts of topics, including how different plants can be used for medicine.
Scott said, “We also aim to facilitate
workshops and events, focusing on how to make and dehydrate products for the winter or for sale. We also explain the medical uses and healing properties of plants, which is an important aspect in Indigenous culture too. We try to make it as relevant as possible to all cultures in our community.”
As the Carleton University study says, this unique community greenhouse demonstrates “that the dark symbol of the Indian Residential School in Inuvik’s history can be transformed into an emblem of hope to boost food security in the Town of Inuvik.”
LT
The landscape trade will inevitably involve working around trees. No tree can ever be deemed to be 100 per cent safe. A knowledge of potential hazards associated with trees is necessary to manage the risk of injury as well as property and equipment damage. Such risk is relatively easily managed by property owners through routine tree inspection and maintenance performed by certified arborists. It is the hidden parts of the tree that most influence the likelihood of major hazard events. Unobserved injured root systems, from whatever cause, can result in an entire tree failing, potentially
causing catastrophic injury and property damage. And while risk can never be totally eliminated, it must be managed, reduced, and mitigated.
Root damage often leads back to construction. Root damage can occur where roots are smothered through soil compaction (caused by the operation of equipment and vehicles in a tree’s drip line), addition of soil or fill, and installing hard surfaces over soil, as well as excavation. A majority of cases of complete tree failure happen due to excavation within the Critical Root Zone (CRZ) of the tree,
leading to structural failure. This includes walkway and driveway installations that cut within the CRZ. A safe estimate is to consider the CRZ to be three to five times the diameter of the tree.
Time can also conceal injury because recent construction is more apparent than old. Timing on failure is highly unpredictable as a tree may take a few years to fail after roots have been severed. Complicating matters further, severed roots, especially when injured carelessly (such as being torn by a backhoe rather than cleanly severed with a sharp tree saw), can be infected with various fungal diseases and decay, which can fatally weaken a tree while remaining relatively undetected.
Aside from avoiding risk, root damage can lead to the loss of a valued asset, the costly expense of tree removal for which a contractor may be held legally responsible, and in some cases, fines via municipal by-laws. It’s useful to get an idea to get an idea of the client’s risk tolerance, and your own, when it comes to projects working around the roots of a tree. In most cases, it’s cheaper to prevent the damage to the roots, as root damage will eventually affect the health and structure above ground, and impact the rest of the tree.
Certified arborists can assess your work site for potential hazards such as branches that are about to fall, poor branch architecture and potential diseases. They can provide guidance to help prevent construction damage leading to unnecessary risks. If hazards are identified before a project begins, they can be mitigated prior to anyone being injured or damage to property (or landscaping equipment) occurring. On jobs where hardscaping may involve covering tree roots, involving an arborist at the planning stage will help to ensure maximum tree protection within the parameters of the project.
Expert tree assessment can help keep property owners, their trees and landscape crews safe from injury as well as prevent property damage associated with tree or branch failure. Timely assessment and mitigation can also help preserve trees as the valuable landscape asset that they are. In addition to the practical reasons for protecting a tree, many municipalities have begun adopting tree by-laws in their communities. Although tree by-laws are meant to protect trees (and they do), they are also incredibly variable and change regularly, making it a challenge to navigate without experience.
Tree by-laws are enacted for two purposes. First, to protect trees as valued assets (publicly or privately owned) of environmental and health-related benefits. Second, to regulate tree condition, damage and removal because of their involvement in the potential for immediate or future risk to life and property.
The landscape trades often brush against these by-laws for construction, sodding, rototilling or operating machinery to name just a few examples. Remember, it’s safer, easier and often faster to have a plan and a permit. This aligns with the mandate of the landscape industry to create and preserve the green urban environment while ensuring the safety of life and property in that environment.
Almost all major Canadian cities have tree by-laws of one kind or another. Since by-laws are local municipal matters, they can and do vary (sometimes widely) from place to place, making compliance planning quite complex.
Even where dealing with a single project, several by-laws with differing requirements may be involved. Public trees (located in parks and along street allowances) are perhaps the most heavily regulated. Many municipalities have also enacted private tree protection, and natural areas like woodlands and ravines may also be regulated. While the set of by-laws in play may have a common framework, they often have differing requirements and regulated activities.
Compounding this complexity, by-laws and regulations generally allow for varying interpretations, requirements and levels of enforcement. They all include some wording which authorizes the administrating official to use their own judgement in determining requirements. For example, when listing requirements that officials require under the by-law,
This large tree fell onto a school during a windstorm as a result of root damage from the installation of fence post holes as well as soil compaction from the construction of a jungle gym.
the term “may” rather than “shall” or “will” is often used. It’s amazing that changing just one of these words has an impact on the whole by-law.
The point is that administration can be variable depending on the by-laws themselves. Just in case you wanted to complicate things further, this variation may be by administrative district in larger municipalities; by administrative officer (a.k.a. Tree Protection Officer, or Forest Protection Officer) where several are in place; by perceived circumstance; or by elected official involvement and political factors.
With all this said, the best of intentions will not guarantee compliance in such a complex by-law web. In addition, base by-law requirements often include tree condition and hazard assessment (known as a tree inventory), tree protection plans, and conducting necessary root and branch pruning — all specialized activities that have practical benefit for the client, the tree and the job. It therefore makes sense to partner with those who have the expertise: consulting arborists who know how to develop and supervise tree protection plans, as well as operational arborists to conduct the work. Partnering can be
mutually beneficial with arborists referring landscaping work back.
An effective consultant will have a thorough knowledge of the tree by-laws of the jurisdiction involved and ideally will have established good working relationships with local officials, such that through their experience and communication, compliance conditions are clear and predictable prior to permit application (where required) and project start. In other words, the consultant will be able to develop a tree protection plan that will have a high probability of approval. Such predictability is valued by all: the landscape company, the client and municipal officials.
Generally, tree preservation and avoiding the unnecessary damage and removal of trees is the goal of the administration of most tree bylaws. This goal is shared by the urban landscaping and arboricultural industries. Most irreparable tree damage that leads to tree decline, loss and unseen hazard is the result of root damage: both root severance and soil compaction that injures and destroys roots through limiting the movement of water and oxygen in the root zone (yes, tree roots breathe). To both preserve trees and avoid unnecessary legal problems, first avoid root damage caused by digging or operating heavy equipment (including work trucks) in a tree’s drip line. Second, comply with local by-laws, and partner with arboricultural experts as needed. Both the landscaping company and the client will benefit.
It is much easier and less expensive to plan and implement tree protection measures in advance of any project rather than dealing with the consequences of tree damage and failure. Contractors involved in hard landscaping such as the installation of driveways and walkways, decorative or retaining walls, patios and even fences and decks are well-advised to plan for protection.
Aside from causing risk, root damage can lead to the loss of a valued (by the client) asset and the costly expense of tree removal for which a contractor may be held legally responsible. It has been said that the loss of a forty-year-old tree can be remedied by replanting. After all, in forty years one will have recovered the equivalent. But had the original tree not been lost, one would have had an 80-year-old tree in that same time period. It has been calculated that one eightyyear-old tree provides at least twice the economic and environmental benefits of two forty-year-old trees. Preserving trees into their mature age and size is very worthwhile. LT
AGarden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla provides all the information gardeners need to take action to support and protect pollinators, by creating habitat in yards and community spaces, on balconies and boulevards, everywhere. With more than 300 native plants of Ontario and the Great Lakes region profiled in detail, along with sample garden designs, ideas for beautiful plant pairings and numerous tips for success, this fully-illustrated guide helps gardeners discover the crucial connections between native plants and native pollinators, and learn how to cultivate patches of pollinator paradise.
Johnson: Sheila and I originally wrote a shorter brochure (54 pages) called A Flower Patch for a Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and later created this book. The message is that we can do this work of creating habitat and it can be quite joyous and positive and life enhancing and we can do it anywhere: pots of native plants on a balcony, or a boulevard, a school ground, a community centre, it doesn’t matter. We didn’t want it to be about so-called private spaces and we wanted to acknowledge in the book that not everyone has access to a yard.
Colla: The rusty-patched bumblebee in the 70s and 80s was one of our most common bumblebee species and it was a generalist so we have records from hundreds of different plant species that it foraged off. I’ve been looking for it since 2004 and I saw it once in 2005 and then once in 2009 and those are the last two Canadian records and it hasn’t been
It is a warning sign, that this species that was so common and such a generalist could decline under our watch so rapidly, it is time to pay attention to supporting wildlife through bees’ different relationships
Johnson: We make the point in the book that one of the factors that contributes to the decline of some wildlife species is habitat loss, but also habitat fragmentation. We are hoping to inspire people to create these ribbons of connected habitat across the landscape to help
We profile more than 300 plants native to Ontario: trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials — all types of native plants. It’s a very practical book that has a lot of photos and inspirations; we even have design
Colla: Any managed animal has a ton of diseases associated with it but they can live with these disease levels because they have someone like a beekeeper available to give them medicine or to feed them extra food to eat if they are too sick to forage. Our wild bees don’t have that and we have evidence that many managed bee diseases do transmit to wild insects. There’s no way of knowing how hard they’re hit until those insects disappear, which then makes it too late to really save them. It’s important to separate the threats to native pollinators vs what’s impacting the European honeybee or other common livestock species.
Johnson: My hope for the book is that we help people understand some very complicated issues in a very straightforward, basic, and engaging way. I hope it also inspires people to action: planting a pollinator patch (even a tiny one!), or adding a few native plants to a nonnative garden, which is mainly what people have. If we inspire people to add a few native plants to their garden then they will see all of the butterflies, bees, and birds that the native plants support.
However, individuals can do all this but if we are in a place that doesn’t value the natural greenspace and just paves it over, we’ll still be in trouble. We can create habitat until we are blue in the face but the losses are going to be greater than the gains without political and policy changes as well.
Lorraine Johnson lives in Toronto, Ont., and has been researching and writing about environmental issues for three decades. She is a community activist and advocate for protecting, supporting and growing the urban forest. Johnson is the author or editor of 14 books, including 100 Easy-toGrow Native Plants for Canadian Gardens.
Sheila Colla is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Ont. She works closely with environmental nongovernmental organizations and government agencies to implement the best available science in policy and land management. She co-authored The Bumblebees of North America: An Identification Guide and helps run the citizen science program Bumble Bee Watch.
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IT’S A GREAT TIME to be a landscape business owner. The opportunities for growth are greater than they’ve ever been in my memory.
I am seeing a lot of owners expand by purchasing contracts from other contractors who are changing their focus or retiring. Some are instead building by focusing on their existing customer base. And then there are others who are going the route of mergers and acquisitions.
Virtually every business owner I talk to
says growing is their primary goal. But it’s important to determine how you want to grow the company, as well as if you’re set up for successful growth before making the decision. Here are a few questions to ask yourself.
The first question is: Why do you want to grow? Is it for your ego? If so, you’re not alone! There is often great peer pressure among business owners (not to mention friends, family and acquaintances) to grow simply for the sake of becoming bigger. If you’re just
looking to increase the list of companies you own, you may want to reconsider.
Is it to grow your top-line revenue number? It’s not uncommon to see large national providers focus on top-line revenue rather than profit. However, I’d argue this is not a game most contractors can afford to play.
Is it to increase profit? This should be the primary reason for growing your business. Being profitable — and increasing that profit margin, should be the goal of every company.
It is the best way to ensure your company is strong and sustainable.
Is it to provide opportunities for your team? Many of our clients have attracted employees with their great culture and vision. But A-players want to be continually challenged within their roles and given opportunities for growth, which means you need to be thinking ahead and planning to grow the company in order to allow for those opportunities.
Is it because you’re bored and looking for a new challenge? Business owners are usually builders, creators, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. It makes sense that you would be intrigued by something new to build. And as long as your current company is running smoothly and is profitable — mostly without you — then this might be a great time to consider a new challenge.
Once you’ve identified why you want to grow, some additional questions should be considered.
1. Have you maximize your services within your current customer base?
We see contractors not upselling to their existing clients, which means leaving lots of high-margin work on the table, especially when it comes to selling enhancements to existing maintenance clients. In our consulting work, we want to see clients sell at least 50 per cent of revenue in enhancements for commercial clients and closer to 100 per cent for residential clients. Instead, what we see is most contractors selling 10-20 per cent. What about offering your current clients more services, such as landscape lighting, seasonal decorations, turf care, or holiday lighting? All these services require low equipment and material costs, but offer high margins.
2. When considering expanding your business, especially in today’s labour market, the most critical question you need to ask your existing team is: Are we ready to take on more work with our current squad? So often owners think the team is more prepared than they are to take on new challenges. You have to be an optimist to be a small business owner, but being too optimistic about the ability of your team to handle more work can create huge issues.
3. Are you financially ready to grow? Growth eats cash like nothing else. Therefore, you need to have cash reserves to fund the growth. It’s also important to be profitable for at least two years before you consider taking on another company or expanding your current company.
4. The final question I would encourage you to ask is, if you say “yes” to this growth, what are you saying “no” to? Will you be saying “no” to investing in your current team and business? Time with family? Greater cash flow? Peace of mind?
So often, owners want to grow their business for all the wrong reasons. For growth to be effective and sustainable, you need to grow with a plan, not simply because an opportunity fell in your lap. If you have answered the questions above and want to move ahead, here are some things you need in place:
• Someone to challenge your assumptions.
• A business plan for growth, including: a budget; marketing strategy; staff requirements to do the work; roles and responsibilities for the team; cash; and great KPIs in the business.
Growing too quickly can be exciting, but it can also be deadly. Some signs that you’ve grown too quickly are higher turnover with clients and staff, increased expenses around equipment damage, warranty work, and low client satisfaction scores. Companies that grow too quickly often receive feedback like, “they used to do such great work,” or “it was a great place to work before the owner got distracted.”
Finally, the systems, processes and people you have in place will often determine the sustainability of your growth. Companies revert to the competency level of the team, systems and processes they have in place. If you want to grow and to maintain that growth, you will need to ensure these things are in place, or you’ll need to make changes to them in order to handle the growth. Otherwise, you will likely revert back to the level of revenue and profitability you were at prior to the new business venture.
I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to grow their business. But it’s important to be cautious about growth and about timing. As hard as it is, sometimes the wisest thing is to say, “no, not right now.” It could save you a lot of pain and hardship. If you’re looking to grow, talk to someone who has been through these growth cycles. They will likely be able to help you identify if the timing is right for you.
operates Nextra Consulting with his wife Marla in Ingersoll, Ont. He has previously held management positions with Clintar, and Gelderman Landscape Services, and owned and operated Escapes Outdoor Living.
ONE OF MY MENTORS, renowned tree biologist Dr. Andrew Hirons, once said to me, “Don’t tell me how many trees you planted today, tell me how many will still be there in 50 years.” His advice, in part, ignited my fascination for the preservation of old trees. I am unable to pass by a mammoth of a trunk without stopping to beam, or walk by an enormous crown without admiring its far-reaching branches. My favourite trees are those you can’t wrap your arms around all the way.
Old trees that have their roots close to human settlements are even more fascinating to me. The joys they’ve seen. The atrocities they’ve lived through. The generations of people they’ve witnessed come and go. Old trees are living bridges from the past to the future. They were here before we were born and, hopefully, they will still be there when we pass on.
The number of old trees in the Netherlands, however, is growing alarmingly low. Compared to the rest of Europe, and contrary to popular belief, the Netherlands doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to protecting older trees. Some blame it on previously lax tree ordinances, others on the country’s density — a so-called lack of space (or priorities). And others yet again on the “innovative spirit” of the Dutch, a culture that prides itself on revamping and uprooting its infrastructure so frequently that trees inevitably get “in the way.”
The oldest trees in the Netherlands are between 300 to 400 years old, but only a handful remain. The oldest is assessed to be a 400-year-old lime tree located in the southeastern corner of the country in a small town called Sambeek. Not only is it the titleholder for the oldest, but also
for the thickest: its trunk has a stunning circumference of 7.9 metres! My back-ofthe-envelope calculation estimates that you’d need around five hand-in-hand adults to give the tree a proper hug.
In the face of more frequent storms, droughts and heatwaves, the need to protect older trees has never been greater.
That is why, six months ago, I was thrilled to get a call from Dirk Doornendaal, managing director of De Nationale Bomenbank (National Tree Bank), a leading tree care company in the Netherlands, and Henry Kuppen, managing director of Terra Nostra, a knowledge centre for trees and soil. Dirk and Henry had teamed up to celebrate De Nationale Bomenbank’s 50th anniversary in a unique way: by asking the public to nominate their favourite trees.
These nominations (ultimately 98 were submitted) would be narrowed down to the top 50. Dirk and Henry wanted me, along with three other “professional treehugger” jury members, to select the top five. I was honoured. These top five gentle giants would not only get the attention they so deserved, but, more importantly, lifelong tree care to ensure they would be there for generations to come.
This project was deeply personal for De Nationale Bomenbank. The organization has made its name in the competitive tree care space due to their talent and skill in preserving, transplanting, and, often, saving very large, very old trees. They, like no other, understand the critical importance of preserving what we have, rather than focusing primarily on planting new trees.
In September, we selected the top five,
and each jury member was able to choose one of the trees to act as its “ambassador.” I chose “Lucky Charm,” a 150-year-old lime tree which stands on a backyard property line, now shared by two neighbours who are proud to discuss its heritage. According to the tree’s “owner,” Ton Rotteveel, a woman in hiding during the Second World War used to climb out of her attic window under the cloak of the tree’s crown, finding peace in the chaos. Ton insists the tree continues to bring him and his family luck to this day.
What big, old trees can do for you It’s not only luck that “Lucky Charm” is providing, but many other hidden benefits. For over two decades, we’ve known — academically, that is — that the bigger the tree, the bigger the benefits. The obvious reason is that there’s simply more tree to go around!
Bigger trees have bigger crowns. Bigger crowns expel more oxygen, add more value to your home, provide more shade, filter more air and offer more habitat to wildlife. Human health and well-being are comparatively affected more too. A recent study by KU Leuven concluded that larger crown volume was associated with lower medication usage. Even more surprising: larger crown volume across fewer stems was more beneficial for cardiovascular and mental health than similar crown volume across more stems. In simple terms: a street with fewer trees but larger crowns is better for your health.
Ecologically, it adds up. Health and wellbeing-wise, it checks out. But the economics make sense too. Since 2004, we’ve known bigger trees also mean bigger savings. The USFS Center for Urban Forest Research found that the benefits of large-statured trees far outweigh the costs of caring for them, sometimes as much as eight to one.
Sure, large species like London planes, beech, and oak need expensive, carefullyengineered tree pits to help them grow safely, particularly when surrounded by pavement. Such costs are more than offset, though, when we properly value the benefits these trees provide.
Since 2005, thousands of communities, non-profits, consultants, volunteers, and students from around the world have used
i-Tree, a state-of-the-art, peer-reviewed software suite from the USDA Forest Service, to calculate the benefits of trees. i-Tree has undoubtedly changed the face of urban forestry for the better, but it remains a model, and like any model, its output is only as good as its input. And, right now, in too many cities, tree input data is too out-ofdate or inaccurate to properly calculate tree benefits.
So, tree benefits get lost, and the focus turns simply to planting trees, because more trees is better than fewer trees, right? Wrong.
What if, instead of “stems planted,” we built urban forestry programs around maximizing crown volume, inherently optimizing for older, bigger trees? What would such a community look like? And most importantly, how would we map, monitor, and incentivize crown volume growth?
Such a community might look like Woerden, a small city of 50,000 people south of Amsterdam, which mapped its 30,000 trees in just four days, a process that took two years before Dirk van Riel from Treetracker came along.
Treetracker uses LiDAR sensors on top of cars (or backpacks if on foot) to map its surroundings and developed a deep learning algorithm to filter out everything except trees. When the programme is finished, a data set of each tree’s location, trunk diameter, height, and crown volume remains. With that kind of up-to-date input, i-Tree gets a lot more exciting.
Last summer, I sat down with Ronald van den Brink, leader of the “Green Engine” pilot project in Woerden and four other municipalities, to learn more about the city’s
approach to measuring the success of its urban forest. Ronald sees the urban forest as a city’s “green engine” — an engine which only operates at peak performance when trees are healthy, large and old.
“With Treetracker, we’ve built up a huge database of half a million trees in recent years,” Ronald said. “This allows us to analyze how growth progresses under good growing conditions for different tree species: what trunk diameter, tree height or crown diameter does such a ‘model tree’ have after 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and so on?” That data is now allowing him to compare existing trees with these ‘model trees,’ so city councils can more easily calculate the tree benefits they’re missing out on — and take action before we lose more old trees.
As for the City of Woerden, they said goodbye to rigid mandates to plant a certain number of trees each year. Instead of the number of trees, each tree’s crown volume and the future value of that tree is the city forest’s new key indicator of success.
In an era of million, billion, and even trillion tree-planting campaigns, I think it’s a lesson we can all learn from.
Nadina spotlights Internet of Nature (IoN) technologies and practitioners making a difference in how we can optimize soil health, manage urban forests, create liveable cities, and everything in between. To learn more about the IoN and to catch episodes of the Internet of Nature Podcast, visit: nadinagalle.com.
What started as an efficient method of cleaning large surface areas during the warmer months, has proven itself an invaluable tool.
If you need a broom for seasonal applications, then you will appreciate the added benefits an HLA broom can provide all year. Contact your local dealer to get a clean sweep all year long.
GARDEN CENTRES have been around in Canada for close to 100 years. In fact, there are several that can say they are more than a century old. I am proud that I was given the opportunity to work for one of those businesses for much of my career. What does it take to thrive for a generation or more in the garden centre business, or any other business? To be frank, it takes profit. Profit allows a business to survive, expand, and stay ahead of, and on top of changing business trends. Profit enables a business to provide well paying jobs for people where they can raise a family.
Without profit, no growth in your business can occur. What is profit? By definition it is the difference between the revenue a retailer makes through direct sales and the costs incurred through managing the inventory of the goods sold, as well as the other costs of running a business. Quite simply, you need to make sure there is a healthy sum of money left after you have paid for your inventory, paid all of your labour and related expenses, plus other operating costs.
Inventory management is probably the biggest opportunity for cost savings in the garden centre business. Factors such as how much inventory you have, how much you paid for it, how well you maintain it, how accurate your sales are tracked (often through a POS or Point of Sale system), how you manage theft and cashier accuracy, and how much spoilage and surplus you have after a season, is crucial to your profitability. In a seasonal business like ours, the temptation to never sell out creates a
strong desire to order too much product. I have witnessed over the years, during the peak season, where nurseries have pushed a bit too hard to get that last order in from suppliers and then (not surprisingly) the demand drops off significantly and they’re left with more than they can sell.
Labour is generally considered to be the most controllable expense a retail business has. Trust me, I am not preaching to you to cut your labour. Investing in quality staff is critical to providing great service to your customers. And quality really is more important than quantity. I recommend prioritizing better hiring and training, as well as investing in quality equipment and tools to enable your staff to do their jobs well.
When speaking about labour, we also need to talk about health and safety. Employee safety is one of the critical foundations that every business should be built on. I do not like to consider health and safety as an additional business expense. Health and safety fits within good human resources practices as well as business operations. Cleanliness, proper use of appropriate equipment, safe lifting, and hazard reporting, all need to be deeply rooted in your business culture.
Operating expenses are another bucket where miscellaneous costs can be lumped together. This will include: utilities, communication and technology expenses, building and property expenses, and banking and credit card fees. Many of these expenses may seem
somewhat fixed, however, there are some savings to be found with focused attention. Look to reduce fuel costs, rental fees for payment devices, rental fees for seasonal equipment, and establish a preventive maintenance program for your trucks, equipment, heaters, and cooling units.
Successful businesses know how well they are performing in real time. In the garden centre business, it is common to track sales, customer count, average basket, gross profit margins, and labour expenses as a percentage of sales to name a few. Knowing your controllable KPIs is critical to being able to forecast where your business is heading. Some KPIs can be shared with staff, while others should be used as a management tool. If an employee can impact a KPI based on their performance, it is generally okay to communicate this with them. In fact, it could also be seen as critical information to ensure employees are aware of your goals and expectations.
DAILY
Total sales, category sales, average sale, labour hours used, customer transaction count, gross profit dollars generated.
Total sales, category sales, average sale, labour hours used, labour ratio to sales, customer transaction count, gross profit dollars generated, Gross profit margin percentage, scrap and waste reporting.
Total sales, category sales, average sale, labour hours used, labour ratio to sales, customer transaction count, gross profit dollars generated, gross profit margin percentage, scrap and waste reporting, operating expenses in dollars and percentage.
Everything I’ve touched on comes back to reducing waste. While I would not profess to have all of the answers in waste reduction, I can confidently say I never cease to be impressed with how wasteful practices and processes can sneak into a business. There are generally seven different types of business waste: Transportation; Inventory; Motion; Waiting; Overproduction; Over processing; and Defects
An easy way to remember these different types of waste is the acronym TIMWOOD, or LEAN Management. Every business needs to evaluate waste and develop plans to mitigate it. Unfortunately, many businesses wait until it is too late to go through the exercise. You should not wait for a recession or realize you are losing money only to finally reduce your expenses. In fact, a great business will focus on it every day of the year. It becomes a business mantra to eliminate waste.
Art loved every minute of his 44-year garden centre career with Weall and Cullen and Sheridan Nurseries. In retirement, Art enjoys giving back to the profession with Landscape Ontario’s Garden Centre Sector Group, and sharing his experience with Landscape Trades readers..
The International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) announced the winners of the 2022 Green City Awards at the International Union for Conservation of Nature Leaders Forum in Jeju, Republic of Korea on Oct. 14, 2022. The most prestigious award of the Inaugural 2022 edition, the Grand Winner, was presented to the city who was voted by the jury to demonstrate the highest capacity for influence, replicability, and scope to inspire change in their entry.
In making their decision, members of the jury were invited to consider the following question:
“The AIPH World Green City Awards 2022 enables winning cities to achieve greater recognition for their inspiring initiatives – in light of this, which entry do you feel may have the biggest transformational impact?”
The 2022 Grand Winner is the City of Hyderabad, India for their entry: Green Garland to the State of Telangana.
“AIPH celebrates this fantastic achievement for the City of Hyderabad,” Tim Briercliffe, Secretary General, AIPH, said. “We are proud to showcase their inspiring urban greening work. With this global recognition, we can confidently say that Hyderabad is a world leader in nature-oriented approaches to city design, form, and function. The innovation, ambition, and inspiring action demonstrated in the city’s entry leaves a powerful legacy for other cities from around the world to aspire to.”
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The Grand Winner was selected from the list of six Category Winners, who each took home trophies in recognition of their achievement. The six Category Winners are:
LIVING GREEN FOR HEALTH AND WELLBEING: Transforming degraded land into Urban Micro Parks, City of Fortaleza, Brazil
LIVING GREEN FOR BIODIVERSITY: Reverdecer Bogota, Bogota D.C., Colombia
LIVING GREEN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: Mexico City’s Environmental and Climate Change Program, Mexico City, Mexico
LIVING GREEN FOR WATER: The Phytotechnology Stations at the Montreal Botanical Garden / Space for Life, City of Montreal, Canada
LIVING GREEN FOR SOCIAL COHESION: OASIS Schoolyard Project, City of Paris, France
LIVING GREEN FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH: Green Garland to the State of Telangana, City of Hyderabad, India
Case studies from all finalist cities, including the category winners, are available in the AIPH Green City Case Study Library at aiph.org.
All-America Selections (AAS) named an additional six winners that are set to arrive on the market in 2023. All AAS Winners are trialed throughout North America by professional, independent, volunteer judges who grow new, never-before-sold entries next to comparisons that are considered best in class. Only those entries that have
superior garden performance, better than the comparisons, are granted the AAS award designation.
The newest AAS Winners for 2023 are: Coleus Premium Sun Coral Candy; Colocasia Royal Hawaiian Waikiki; Pepper jalapeno San Joaquin; Snapdragon DoubleShot Orange Bicolor; Squash kabocha Sweet
Jade; Tomato Zenzei.
The previously announced AAS Winners for 2023 are: Echinacea Artisan Yellow Ombre; Leucanthemum Carpet Angel Daisy; Pepper cayenne Wildcat; Salvia Blue by You; Watermelon Rubyfirm.
Find more information and view photos of each AAS winner at all-americaselections.org.
Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association (LO) announced plans to launch Reconciliation Grove in 2023. Through its members, LO will connect with every school in Ontario to plant a grove of three trees — one for truth, one for memory and one for hope.
Reconciliation is about working together to achieve a fundamental shift in the way we perceive and interact with each other for the benefit of everyone in Canada. Bridging a pathway of closure to the legacy of residential schools lies at the heart of reconciliation between First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples who attended these schools, their families and communities, and all Canadians.
Landscape Ontario’s Reconciliation Grove Project puts reconciliation into action. Through these symbolic trees, our goal is to provide students with a
space to recognize the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation on September 30 each year.
Reconciliation Grove will feature:
Trees for truth: An evergreen, honouring survivors of the Indian Residential School system, ensures their stories are never forgotten.
Trees for memory: Deciduous, with fall colour. Planted in memory of children who were victims of the Indian Residential School system, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis people.
Trees for hope: A wildlife-friendly tree, spring blooming, representing hope for a better, brighter future of reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
LO plans to launch the Reconciliation Grove campaign in 2023. More information will be available at landscapeontario.com.
The International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) elected Leonardo Capitanio as its new president. As an ornamental plant grower in Monopoli, Italy, with a past role as president of the Italian Nursery Stock Exporters Association (ANVE), and more recently working as a vice-president at AIPH, Capitanio has been involved in international cooperation across the horticulture industry for many years.
“Horticulture is my life,” Capitanio said. “My father was a nurseryman, and I was eight when I began to follow in his footsteps. Now, I aim to help the industry to pass through this challenging season gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic and crazy energy costs. I have a vision of a more developed horticulture industry supported by strong technology solutions that can help the entire supply chain.”
Amongst his aims for AIPH are to make it a global resource for promoting Green Cities, promoting international horticultural exhibitions, collating and disseminating data and information on the international ornamental horticultural industry, and further developing the association’s network.
Capitanio succeeds Bernard Oosterom from the Netherlands, who has served as president since 2015. Bill Hardy was elected as the second AIPH vice-president alongside Jianping Zhou from China. Hardy is first vice-president of the Canadian Nursery Landscape Association and the owner of Grow and Gather in Maple Ridge, B.C.
AIPH in association with Union Fleurs, the International Flower Trade Association, recently launched the 70th version of the International Statistics – Flowers and Plants 2022. The International Statistics Flowers and Plants Yearbook has the most comprehensive production and trade data collection for the ornamental plants and flower industry. It is now available to purchase and instantly download from aiph.org.
In May of 2022 the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) produced a Workshop Agreement on Assessing the need for a Snow and Ice National Standard of Canada. Four key issues were identified: Liability, Training and Competency, Environmental Impacts and Regulatory Framework. However, CSA indicated that they could not lead the initiative at that time. In the meantime, Landscape Ontario’s Snow and Ice Management Sector Group continued to work towards that initiative. This past summer it developed a curriculum and an accreditation system for training employees in the snow and ice industry.
The intent is to improve safety, establish industry practices and ensure that environmental concerns are a component of the training. A person starting out in the industry will establish a career path to achieve a level of knowledge and competency equivalent to someone who has operated in the industry for many years. The program includes:
Safety: This course is the start position for snow workers who are not required to drive or operate heavy equipment. They will learn about potential career paths in the snow and ice industry.
Snow Apprentice: This course will be provide basic entry level training and include a practical component. The practical component is to be confirmed by an individual holding an assistant supervisor accreditation.
Assistant Supervisor: This course is taken after someone has developed some experience and now seeks a leadership role. Record keeping and safety are emphasized in this course.
Area Supervisor/ Dispatcher: This course will develop the theoretical knowledge of a working dispatcher to fulfill the following roles: call for mobilization; supervise and document activity or personnel; determine the salt dispense rate of low, medium, and high in response to the site and weather conditions; weather system analysis; documenting site observations; dew point; wind; forecasting; ground temperature; weather reports; radar; proper use of daily journals; event and patrol documenting; as well as site and equipment inspections.
Manager/ Owner: This course will provide the legal framework in which a snow business operates. This includes the growing complexity of employment law, important aspects of contractual law, key obligations in the insurance contract, understanding insurance certificates, and a review of the litigation environment.
Pre-season Inspection: This course will expand in detail how a pre-season inspection will be carried out and provide a step-by-step process. It will also introduce tools that can and will be used to conduct and document a pre-season inspection by the owner, site manager or consultant.
In collaboration with the Guelph Turfgrass Institute at the University of Guelph, the Canadian Nursery Landscape Association’s Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) Committee published the paper: Development of an Urban Turfgrass and Tree Carbon Calculator for Northern Temperate Climates.
The paper was published by Sustainability in September 2022. The journal is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly, peer-reviewed and open-access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. It provides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development and is published semi-monthly online by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI).
Alan White, CCA Committee Chair, reached out to Dr. Eric Lyons, a professor at the Department of Plant Agriculture in the Ontario Agricultural College, for assistance in developing a tool to discern the carbon sequestration rates and the hidden carbon costs of maintaining trees and turfgrasses. The tool tracks the carbon dioxide sequestered by plants, the number of people who benefitted and the kilometers worth of car emissions that selection offsets.
This paper is an important milestone in developing the Clean Air Calculator because its research is the foundation of the tool. The CCA Committee wanted the right metric for the calculator so that when the public uses it, they can confidently say ‘this makes sense in my backyard, in my community.’
The objective of this study is to assess the ability of urban plants to sequester carbon under a number of available management practices through the development and refinement of an accessible carbon calculator. Using available data, the
calculator was used to analyze the carbon sequestration of various types of plants. The hidden carbon costs of those plants were also considered.
The researchers found little public information about how trees sequester carbon and their carbon costs but lots of
data on turfgrasses, and little to none was available for shrubs and bedding plants. The team concluded turfgrasses and trees have similar positive carbon balances – meaning they each sequester more carbon than they emit – with the benefits outweighing the costs.
We received numerous emails and calls from readers regarding the October 2022 issue’s Green Pencil column: Lawn haters can kiss my grass. It clearly struck a chord with people on all sides of the issue. The Landscape Trades team always welcomes feedback. You can reach the magazine publisher and editor Scott Barber at sbarber@landscapetrades.com or 647-478-3171.
Opinions are always debatable to start off with. Your “lawn hater” piece is no different and begged for a response. Instead of romanticizing this white picket fence with a lawn and foundation planting we could have a garden that is so much more. Can a garden be more than an extension of the home and if so how do we fill this in? Our surrounding nature gives us plenty of clues. If lawn is your major focus you will miss out.
It is unfortunate that you do not point out that there are options besides lawn. As a landscape contractor and designer, I convert lawn to other plant material if the option is there. Good luck with your magazine, but no thanks for the one sided picture. You’re behind the times.
Owner,
I want to commend you on your great article, Lawn haters can kiss my grass. You are correct, turfgrass is not the problem, it is people’s behavior of how they maintain the turfgrass that is the problem. With an accurate and automated water management system coupled with better turf maintenance processes, turfgrass is the solution. The Turfgrass Water Alliance has great information on the benefits of turfgrass, drought tolerant turfgrass, and carbon sequestration, but it rarely gets mentioned because it goes against the narrative that some environmentalists are preaching. Unfortunately, with manufactured municipal landscapes, there are a couple of hurdles that need to be resolved: Most irrigation systems operate on simple timers; and municipal landscapes are constructed with inadequate topsoil (both quality and depth).
Fortunately, these could easily be overcome with education. If an irrigation control system uses high quality ET weather information, measured rainfall (not just a simple rain sensor; although a rain sensor is better than nothing), and operates on the principle of Managed Allowed Depletion, the true value of turfgrass can be achieved (the irrigation should only operate when the soil moisture is depleted and it hasn’t rained, not because it is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday; or whatever other timer-based schedule has been programmed into the controller).
Implementing relatively cost-effect irrigation technology combined with deeper, better-quality topsoil can further enhance water savings and greatly improve the health of the landscape. By example, with the water management system we employ and based on the 2022 weather in Calgary (with the typical Sandy/ Clay/Loam soil), increasing the soil depth from four to eight inches reduced the annual irrigation frequency from 41 irrigation events all summer (May to October) down to just 19.
Deeper soil has a greater soil moisture holding capacity resulting in a much greater chance of getting to the next rain event without having to irrigate. The highest level of water savings is achieved by not watering at all when not necessary.
An additional environmental benefit when the irrigation system is not over-watering is the prevention of nutrient leaching. This reduces fertilization requirements and the detrimental pollution of our river systems. To counter any negativity from landscapers regarding lost revenue from fertilization, we have encouraged them to focus on topdressing landscapes with high quality organic soil rather than applying fertilizer (compost is readily available in our market because of the city’s composting program). This is much more profitable, does the right thing for the environment, and slowly improves the soil moisture holding capacity of the landscape leading to even further water savings.
, JAN. 10-12, 2023 AT THE TORONTO CONGRESS CENTRE.
Huntington is a classic series large format slab packaged in a three-sized mixed bundle. Available in three vibrant colour blends, Huntington slabs provide a modern touch to a hardscape design.
Best Way Stone | Booth #1772 bestwaystone.com
The lightweight Echo CS-4010 chain saw is equipped with a 41.6 cm3 professional grade, stratified two-stroke engine that produces significantly less emissions than equivalent conventional engines. The chain saw also comes with momentary switch (always on) for quick and easy engine restart, and ES-start for easier starting.
Echo | Booth #1808 echo.ca
New for 2023, the Gravely Pro-Stance EV stand-on mower is powered by the FusionCore battery system and offers commercial-grade cutting power from an electric stand-on mower.
Gravely | Booth #618 gravely.com
Exmark has redesigned its Radius zero-turn mower family for 2023. Each new Radius model features Exmark’s exclusive UltraCut deck technology. Decks are fabricated and welded from high strength steel and feature the company’s exclusive flow-control baffles for consistent cut quality in a wider range of cutting conditions.
Exmark | Booth #1808 exmark.com
The FenceSource Black Series Aluminum Frame with Horizontal Vinyl Fencing is built for the Canadian winter. The modern fence is available in heights of three to eight feet in horizontal tongue and groove wood grain vinyl or horizontal black aluminum.
FenceSource | Booth #1650 fencesource.ca
The Bobcat E10e compact excavator offers a compact footprint, quiet operation and zero emissions. The electrical motors deliver full torque, regardless of rpm, providing top productivity, smooth hydraulic control and on-demand multifunctioning performance with no noticeable power drop.
Bobcat | Booth #700 bobcat.com
The WBX 80 and WBX 100 walk behind spreaders from Boss Snowplow are built with smooth hopper walls to keep material flowing, and feature grippy 13-in pneumatic snow tires and a rugged stainless steel frame.
Boss Snowplow | Booth #1708 bossplow.com
The Greenworks Tools 82V 30” self-propelled mower runs up to 110 minutes on three 82V 8Ah batteries. The mower has a top cutting speed of 3.8 mph and an EHS Drive System with two independent controlled hub wheel motors.
Greenworks Tools Canada | Booth #1266 greenworktools.ca
The Makita max XGT Brushless Cordless 14” Power Cutter is ideal for prolonged wet or dry cutting applications. The saw features an electric brake, electronic current limiter, and anti-restart.
Makita Canada | Booth #1672 makita.ca
The Dewalt 20V MAX 3x360 Green Line Laser provides users 11 hours of runtime and delivers optimal visibility in bright environments. The laser provides accuracy of up to inch at 30 feet with a 130-ft visible distance, and on average, a 330-ft max range when used with the DW0982G green line laser detector.
Dewalt | Booth #1728 dewalt.ca
The Hiab Loglift 18S articulating crane has a longer upreach (11.2 metres), and its modular design enables fast crane installation with forestry accessories. The Space X4 operating system is customized for forestry cranes to give operators important feedback about crane conditions and personalized output.
Hiab Available from Atlas Polar | Booth #2729 hiab.com atlaspolar.com
Miska’s new Low Hauler Dump Trailer nests the dump box inside the frame, which reduces the deck height by four inches and ramp angle by three degrees to provide the lowest deck height in the industry. The standard 81-in width provides additional room for equipment and the welds for the floor are lengthwise making it easier to load and unload material.
Miska Trailers | Booth #910 miskatrailers.com
The RC series forms part of the Rototilt Control concept, along with a new control system, joysticks and an app for remote assistance, designed to deliver a better operating experience, energy efficiency and results.
Rototilt | Booth #1749 rototilt.com
NextBase is a new panel base system for pedestrian paver installations from Techniseal. Each panel replaces up to 300 pounds of base aggregates and eight inch excavation depth, and the interlocking system makes for easier installation and superior stability.
Techniseal | Booth #2534 techniseal.com
The Toro GrandStand HDX provides ground speeds up to 12 mph and is available in 52, 60 or 72” mower decks with the option of either a 31 hp Kawasaki or 37 hp Vanguard engine.
Toro | Booth #1216 toro.com
The redesigned Vermeer HG4000 horizontal grinder is equipped with a 536 hp CAT C13B T4F/Stage V diesel engine, a Series III duplex drum and an aggressive infeed to accommodate a variety of materials.
Vermeer Canada | Booth #1760 vermeercanada.com
Bobcat has launched nine light compaction machines in North America. The full range of Bobcat light compaction products includes rammers, forward plates compactors, reversible plates compactors and trench rollers.
Bobcat | Booth #700 bobcat.com
The 60V 35 N commercial backpack blower from Kress provides 155 mph air speed and 876 CFM, equating to 35 N of air force. Kress says the new battery powered blower features silent technology, a charging system that provides a full charge in eight minutes, and an IPX4 waterproof design.
Kress | Booth #328 kress.com
The RotoRake features a floating rotor design with roadgrade mini carbide teeth, side shields, and optional side cutters. The RotoRake features 25° angle and 28° tilt making it simply the best power box rake on the market.
www.reistindustries.com
A.M.A. Horticulture Ltd amahort.com 79
AVK Nursery Holdings Inc avknursery.com 64
AccuSalt Systems accusaltsystems.com 38
ApprenticeSearch.com apprenticesearch.com 69
Ariens Company ariens.com 27
Avant Tecno USA Inc avanttecnousa.com 71
Banas Stones Inc banasstones.com 33
Bannerman Ltd sportsturfmagic.com 80
Bauman Manufacturing Ltd baumanmfg.com 68
Beaver Valley Stone Ltd beavervalleystone.com 20
Best Way Stone Ltd bestwaystone.com 39
Bobcat Company bobcat.com 15
Boss Snowplow bossplow.com 25
Coivic Contracting Ltd coivic.com 73
Cub Cadet cubcadet.ca 49
Durham Artificial Grass durhamartificialgrass.ca 65
Dutchmaster Nurseries Ltd dutchmasternurseries.com 62
Echo Power Equipment echo.ca 5
FenceSource fencesource.ca 76
FibraMulch fibramulch.com 66
G&L Group gandlgroup.com 46
GoGPS gogps.com 79
Greenworks Tools Canada Inc greenworkstools.com 55
Gro-Bark gro-bark.com 43
Horst Welding horstwelding.com 56, 80
Hortico Inc hotico.com 34
Islington Nurseries Ltd islingtonnurseries.com 74
Killaloe Wood Products killaloewoodproducts.ca 78
Limestone Trail Co Inc limestonetrail.com 78
M-K Power Products Corp m-k.com 50
MQuip Group Inc mquip.com 70
Miller Compost – The Miller Group millercompost.ca 48
Miska Trailers miskatrailers.com 84
Neudorff North America neudorffpro.org 21
Oaks Landscape Products oakspavers.com 2
PRO Landscape by Drafix Software prolandscape.com 60
Platinum Natural Stone platinumnaturalstone.com 19
Prima Pack Inc prima-pack.com 72
Pro-Power Canada Inc propowercanada.ca 67
Rinox Inc rinox.ca 47
Sid’s Ponds and Gardenscapes Inc sids-ponds.com 57
Spring Meadow Nursery Inc springmeadownursery.com 11
Station Grill Outdoor Kitchen stationgrill.ca 45
Stihl Ltd stihl.ca 83
Techniseal techniseal.com 53
The Salt Depot saltdepot.ca 77
The Toro Company toro.com 35, 51
Tradewinds International Sales Co Inc tradewindsinternational.ca 63
Turf Care Products Canada Ltd turfcare.ca 61
Uniforce Distribution uniforcedistribution.com 42
WPE Landscape Equipment wpeequipment.ca 52
Walters Gardens Inc waltersgardens.com 17
WEEDERASE — UBA Inc uba.ca 77
Windy Ridge Corporation stonehook.com 59
Zander Sod Co Ltd zandersod.com 75
FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS , Landscape Trades readers have benefited from the experience and wisdom of Marty Lamers. A member of the Landscape Ontario Communications Committee since the early 90s, Lamers has served on the Landscape Trades advisory committee. His impact has been immense.
During his five-decade career in the landscape industry, Lamers saw it all. He entered the horticulture profession in the early 70s with a sales role at a lawn and garden equipment supplier. He spent the 80s in sales with Unilock before moving to a position with Atlas Block (Allan Block) in the 90s. In each of these roles, Lamers also worked on the sales and marketing management side. Finally, he completed his career with Oaks Landscape Products, focusing on dealer development. Now retired, Lamers lives in Ontario’s Durham Region where he enjoys spending time with family, especially his grandkids.
Why did you get involved with Landscape Ontario’s publishing committee?
It was back in the early 90s when the committee chair Hank Gelderman called me and asked if I would be interested. I had known Hank for a number of years, going back to the early 80s when I sold him mowers for his business. I believe he felt I could bring a solid perspective from the supplier side of the industry to the group.
I was interested because I believed in Landscape Ontario’s mission of advancing the industry. Having been in the profession since the association was created in 1973, I had seen the impact it was having. In my opinion, LO played an important role in making the industry what it is, making it a credible, respected profession. I really respected the way a small group of members, including Hank, had come together with
a vision of working together for the betterment of the entire industry. I was honoured to join that group and to be able to make a contribution.
I really believe trade magazines like Landscape Trades play an important role in an industry. It keeps people informed with important issues and up to date with the latest equipment and products, and it builds a sense of community. I feel fortunate to have been able to play a role by providing guidance and input over the years.
What advice do you have for people in the early stages of their careers?
Having been around as long as I have, I think at times I’ve probably been accused of being resistant to change. But, if I wasn’t able to adapt, how could I have survived in the industry for 50 years? I have seen a lot of evolution in the trade over my career. The 50th anniversary of LO Congress is coming up. I’m proud to say I was at that first event back in 1973. And, believe it or not, I have been to every single Congress except for one, which I missed to be at my son’s wedding.
I think the key for me was building strong relationships. This is a great industry with so many good people. You’ve got to be somebody people can trust and rely on. When you say you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it. Those relationships with colleagues, customers, and suppliers are key. I’ve been fortunate to have built many great relationships over the years. It has been very rewarding to see businesses, especially smaller, family-run companies, grow over the years.
I am enjoying retirement, spending more time with my wife and family, especially the grandkids. I love to watch their hockey games and other events. We are also looking forward to spending lots of time at the cottage, as well as doing some travelling. And I hope to stay in touch with friends and colleagues from LO and the wider community. I can be reached by email at martylamers@hotmail.com. LT
The KMA 135 R battery-powered KombiEngine is a versatile tool that can efficiently loosen soil, blow debris, trim grass and hedges, prune trees, manicure paths and gardens. The use of one powerhead with 14 separate attachments welcomes more storage space and less maintenance of multiple tools. The KMA 135 R is lightweight, emission-free and quiet in operation. The effortless KMA 135 R features a brushless motor and provides the performance that landscapers and groundskeepers require to complete their work in a timely manner. The ergonomic loop handle provides greater comfort and less user fatigue. Built with three power settings to offer the momentum required for a task, while conserving battery energy and longer battery runtimes.
Battery Power. Made by STIHL.
