Ground 59 – Fall 2022 – Food

Editor Glyn Bowerman

Photo Editor

Jasper Flores

OALA Editorial Board

Saira Abdulrehman

Chris Canning

Tracy Cook

Everett DeJong

Eric Gordon

Mark Hillmer

Helene Iardas

Eric Klaver

Sarah Manteuffel

Nadja Pausch (Chair)

Dalia Todary-Michael

Web Editor

Jennifer Foden

Social Media Manager

Jennifer Foden

Art Direction/Design

Noël Nanton/typotherapy www.typotherapy.com

Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181

Cover Urban chicken farm in Toronto. Courtesy of Chickens in the Six / Michael T. Photography & Design Inc. See page 08.

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published four times a year by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.

Ontario Association of Landscape Architects 3 Church Street, Suite 506 Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2 416.231.4181 www.oala.ca oala@oala.ca

Copyright © 2022 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Contributors retain copyright of their work. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0847-3080

Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106

See www.groundmag.ca to download articles and share content on social media.

See www.groundmag.ca for a digital, searchable, archival data base, listing all articles, authors, subjects, key words, etc. published in Ground over the years.

2022-2023 OALA Governing Council

President Steve Barnhart Vice President Stefan Fediuk

Treasurer Cameron Smith Secretary Justin Whalen

Past President Jane Welsh

Councillors Matthew Campbell Aaron Hirota Shawn Watters

Associate Councillor—Senior Jenny Trinh

Associate Councillor—Junior Layal Bitar

Lay Councillor Karen Liu

Appointed Educator University of Guelph Nadia Amoroso

Appointed Educator University of Toronto Elise Shelley

University of Guelph Student Representative Allison Neuhauser

University of Toronto Student Representative Emiley Switzer-Martell

OALA Staff

Executive Director Aina Budrevics

Registrar Ingrid Little

Coordinator Sherry Bagnato

Membership Services Administrator Angie Anselmo

About

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and provides an open forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to the profession of landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca. Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions. The views expressed in the magazine are those of the writers and not necessarily the views of the OALA and its Governing Council.

Upcoming Issues of Ground Ground 60 (Winter)

Neighbours

Ground 61 (Spring) Stayin’ Alive

Deadline for advertising space reservations: January, 2023

About the OALA

The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects works to promote and advance the profession of landscape architecture and maintain standards of professional practice consistent with the public interest. The OALA promotes public understanding of the profession and the advance ment of the practice of landscape architecture. In support of the improvement and/or conservation of the natural, cultural, social and built environments, the OALA undertakes activities including promotion to governments, professionals and developers of the standards and benefits of landscape architecture.

Advisory Panel

Advisory Panel Message and a Call to All for Contributions

In an effort to streamline the editorial process for Ground, and after much deliberation, the Editorial Board has decided to dissolve the Advisory Panel.

Ground would like to express heartfelt thanks to Panel members, past and present, for their contributions to over 50 issues of the magazine.

This was a difficult decision, but one we are confident will maintain the energy and imagination necessary for future issues.

What is needed most, at this time, is a robust and diverse Editorial Board and contributing writers. Anyone interested in joining is encouraged to email magazine@oala.ca, Subject Line: Volunteering.

You do not need to be an OALA member or landscape architect to contribute to either the Editorial Board or the magazine, and anyone who expresses interest will be seriously considered.

MODERATED BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

TEXT BY NATALIE ARMSTRONG, ALISON LUMBY, OALA, CSLA, AND ANDRIA SALLESE

TEXT

BY EVERETT DEJONG

TEXT

BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

BY MILLIE KNAPP

TEXT

TEXT

BY MARK HILLMER, OALA, CSLA

President’s Message

For many of us these final months of 2022 will mark the beginning of the first holiday season where we are able to physically gather around the dinner table and share a meal with our families and loved ones.

However, with the increased pressures of inflation, the cost of food is rising. “Eating local” is no longer affordable for many families, and the need to invest in local agricultural infrastructure has never been clearer. As landscape architects, we need to pay closer attention to how public spaces can be better designed for local food production. For example, farmers markets can bring a sense of wellness and community to urban areas—as well as ensure Ontarians have access to affordable and local produce.

A successful conference in London

One of the Association’s highlights this year is the success of the 2GETHER conference, in partnership with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute, which took place in London, Ontario this past September. I had the opportunity to meet with NDP Economic Development Critic Terence Kernaghan, MPP (London North Centre), and London Mayor Ed Holder, who both engaged in a number of discussions with OALA representatives about building more equitable, accessible and sustainable communities.

Looking forward, I am also particularly proud of three initiatives OALA is working hard on:

1. PROFESSIONAL RELATIONS: We continue to raise our profile with our allies such as architects, engineers, planners, and landscape designers to build interprofessional relationships.

2. GOVERNMENT RELATIONS: We continue to engage with both municipal and provincial public office holders to promote a Landscape Architect Practice Act.

3. MEDIA COVERAGE: We are raising the profile of the profession with amazing coverage in specialized media including Canadian Architect Magazine, Building Magazine, Canadian Consulting Engineer, Daily Commercial News, and Municipal World

Municipal elections

This October, local municipal elections were held in 444 cities, towns, and villages across Ontario. I want to congratulate OALA members who took the time to engage in the election process and make their voices heard, as it is estimated only a third of residents actually take the time to vote in local elections.

STEVE BARNHART, OALA, CSLA OALA PRESIDENT PRESIDENT@OALA.CA

Editorial Board Message

Throughout human history, the growth, harvest, preparation, and eating of food has been an intrinsically communal activity. It is an act of coming together, distributed labour, storytelling, shared abundance, fostering tradition, culture, and knowledge, of feeding both the body and the soul. This theme felt perfectly suited for the Fall issue—after all, autumn is the season of harvest and plenty before the winter months ahead. It is a season of gratitude and thanks for the abundance of Mother Earth.

As Melana Roberts mentions in the Round Table, our role as landscape architects in the larger food system can be that of co-designer and facilitator. Farming and food production are not specializations which most landscape architects are well versed in. It’s critical we partner with farmers, Indigenous communities and knowledge keepers, and community members with a history and culture of food production throughout the design process. This requires food and access to food be at the forefront of our design thinking. How can we increase the productivity of our landscapes? This shift in perception can then lead to the codification and protection of these landscapes with policies such as Hamilton’s urban agricultural zoning designation.

Everett DeJong interviews University of Guelph’s Mike Dixon on growing food in space—and while at first glance it might not appear to pertain to us landscape architects working here on Earth, there are parallels to food production in harsh conditions such as the far North, in periods of excessive drought, or areas with contaminated soils. As the effects of climate change are predicted to make many of our landscapes much less predictable and hospitable, there is much to glean from these technologies as we design for the future.

Because food production is such an inherently communal activity, fostering food production is also fostering community care. Not only is it a way to nourish and feed our physical bodies, but it is a key part of nourishing the health of our mental, emotional, social, and spiritual selves. As Millie Knapp reminds us, food is also medicine. It also puts us in direct relationship with Nature and our more-than-human kin, as we are, of course, not the only creatures which require food. Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla’s latest book, A Garden for the Rusty-Patch Bumblebee, provides valuable knowledge and resources on how we can design spaces which provide, among other things, food to our valuable and vulnerable native pollinators.

On behalf of the Editorial Board, we hope you are well nourished—both in food and in community.

NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD MAGAZINE@OALA.CA

Up Front: Information on the Ground

POLICY tree strategy

Trees are priceless, life-giving public assets that provide the air we breathe. While local counties and townships across southern Ontario have been empowered to enact tree-cutting bylaws since the Trees Conservation Act of 1946, the power to protect natural assets is discretionary and typically falls to local champions who have the time and resources to coordinate, depute, and speak up for trees.

In the County of Prince Edward, located along Lake Ontario between Toronto and Ottawa, tree protection is a slow story of local citizen action and the determination to affect change. In this rural municipality, zoned predominantly as agricultural, the right to clear land is a mindset embedded in the ethic of a colonial farming economy.

03/ Learning to use the Merritt Hypsometer, a tool for measuring tree crown height.

Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022.

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

04/ Neighbourwoods© Field Manual and other training materials.

Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

05/ Working through the Neighbourwoods© Field Manual. Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022.

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

06/ Neighbourwoods© volunteer calculating % of hard surface under the tree dripline, one of 21 tree inventory protocol criteria.

Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

07/ The distinctive pyramidal canopy form of Tilia americana. Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022.

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

In 2001, then-Deputy Engineer Ernie Margetson (now Councilor of Hillier Ward), was reviewing the plans for the rebuilding of Picton’s historic King Street and noticed that more than 60 mature trees were slated for removal in the road work. Having been raised with an ethic for the value of trees, Margetson was concerned by the lack of tree protection and tree replacement measures to guide the work. He hired an arborist to assess the health of the trees and was able to save a portion of them. His efforts led to a two-page policy in 2002, directing the Public Works Department to maintain and enhance the roadside tree stock and associated canopy for the enjoyment of present and future generations. Without his foresight and perseverance, King Street would look very different today.

In March 2017, Susan Banks and Gerry Jenkison, on behalf of Tree the County, addressed Council to seek “a forwardlooking tree policy for the County which sees trees as a valuable community asset and integrates green infrastructure into the asset management and financial planning of the municipality.”

Lise Bois, past president of the PEC Horticultural Society, became aware of the plight and joined Tree the County. “This group was instrumental in getting the municipality to revise its existing tree policy.” After a number of deputations and meetings with the County’s Chief Administrative Officer, in 2017 Council established the Ad Hoc Tree Policy Advisory Committee composed of community volunteers, staff, and a developer to advise on a policy. As chair, Susan Banks remembers, “We had to maintain a constant pressure to get something going. It was the energy of the group that kept pushing to find an open door.”

08/

Neighbourwoods© data collection sheet, Neighbourwoods© volunteer refresher meeting, Bloomfield, Ontario. June 2022.

IMAGE/ Victoria Taylor

More than a decade later, new residents of the County expect better tree protection standards, and are speaking up about the frequent removal of trees during roadside clearing without community consent, care, or municipal measures to replace. In 2016, Tree the County was launched by Susan Banks and PEC Field Naturalists members, who invited representatives from The Master Gardeners and the Horticultural Society to join them in advocating for more formalized political discussion around tree protection, and to raise awareness of the value of trees as public assets and their role in reducing the impacts of climate crises.

“We looked at many other tree policies/ bylaws from similar communities,” Bois says. “After more than two years a tree policy was finally adopted. We also proposed an “Adopt a Tree” program [adopted in Spring 2022] to engage residents in the care for newly planted trees. We are now in the process of trying to get this policy to become bylaw.”

Knowing that Council and staff did not have the resources or political interest at the time to conduct a comprehensive tree inventory, in 2018 Tree the County began their own public awareness and stewardship activities. They began their own inventory using Neighbourwoods©, a communitybased tree inventory protocol developed in 1995 by the University of Toronto’s Dr. Danijela Puric-Mladenovic and Dr. Andy Kenney. Led by volunteer project leader Patrick Howe and volunteer coordinator Gerry Jenkison, the group secured a local grant to further build a network of tree champions and, trunk by trunk, began to physically document trees using the Neighbourwoods 21 criteria. Starting in the village of Bloomfield, they trained dozens of volunteers and inventoried over 2,000 trees on private property. They also obtained grants, in coordination with the County, to plant trees in public spaces.

Thanks to the persistent efforts of a smallbut-mighty group of tree champions, the County’s “no net loss” Tree Management and Protection Policy (adopted January 2021) now guides tree management in the urban settlement areas (Picton, Bloomfield, Wellington, and Consecon), in all public land (parks and roadside right-of-ways), and for all new commercial development proposals. While neither enforceable by law or requiring permits to apply, now, with a staff person to oversee the policy and begin a County-wide tree inventory, the County is committed to planting trees on public lands, reviewing and assessing tree removals along roads prior to work proceeding, and upholding a new consciousness around the value of trees as public assets and the need to constantly regenerate the

09/ Jurisdictions with forest conservation or tree protection bylaws (August 2010).

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the Ministry of Natural Resources

tree canopy. In April 2022, one of the first comprehensive Tree Assessment and Protection Plans, prepared by certified arborist Jennifer Gagné of Cohen & Master Tree & Shrub Services, was provided to the Planning Department as part of The Wellington Hotel’s Site Plan Application.

Says Banks, “Now there is a much better attitude toward tree protection and enthusiasm, a better attitude toward the community that wasn’t there before. Staff have approved a version of a policy that we can live with but, while there are no enforcement measures, change is coming slowly. I think it’s moving in the right direction.“

TEXT BY VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, CSLA, PRINCIPAL/ FOUNDER OF VTLA STUDIO | VTLA.CA

PUBLIC REALM sustainable sidewalks

Although only a short stretch of enhanced public realm in front of a new development, the potential impact of the Lake Shore Sustainable Sidewalk Pilot Project is much bigger than its size.

Perched on the north side of a new condo, next to the traffic of Lake Shore Boulevard, this little pilot project has transformed a concrete-clad sidewalk along the east of the Boulevard and the elevated Gardiner Expressway to a more pedestrian-friendly frontage with curbside planting that attracts pollinators, permeable paving that absorbs stormwater, and a sign telling pedestrians there is more than meets the eye below the surface.

Managed by Waterfront Toronto from 2017-19, Dillon Consulting and West 8 Landscape Architecture prepared a vision, schematic design and costing, and an implementation strategy for the

transformation of the corridor. A series of small-scale, early-implementation projects were planned to signal change in the rapidly urbanizing corridor and set the example for development frontages to follow suit. This pilot is the first of these projects—the outcome of over two years of design, difficult approvals, and coordination. Now constructed, it is monitored to test innovative elements of the design and help inform the future vision for the Lake Shore Blvd. East corridor.

The project is a good case study of the many barriers keeping green infrastructure from being implemented more broadly on urban streets. Adjacent to a high speed road, next to an elevated highway and an elevated rail corridor, few sites are more urban and challenging than this one. Underground concrete duct banks and oil-filled steel hydro conduits snake around each other, with standards for offset distances making it impossible to plant trees, and leaving little room for

10/ Bees on newly planted Coreopsis verticillata, July 2022.

IMAGE/ Sonja Vangjeli

roots to establish. Fluctuating groundwater can rise up not far from the surface, and stormwater runoff from the overhead Gardiner often inundates the ground plane. Shade and wind are prevalent next to a tower, and noise, pollution, and winter salt abound from the roads. Beyond physical site challenges, there are also regulatory barriers, such as the need to have a concrete base under unit pavers, and the constraint of minimal gaps between pavers negating any potential for permeability. Even if planting and permeable pavers could be implemented, who would take care of them, and would they survive left to their own devices? This is the purpose of this pilot: to assess if a vegetated bioretention curbside planter and permeable pavers on the sidewalk can mitigate stormwater runoff while sustaining a durable, low-maintenance, yet enhanced public realm.

The design process saw many iterations evolving constantly per site investigations, negotiations with utilities, City approvals, and construction constraints. This led to creative solutions to the challenges of the site and regulatory standards. For example, the unit pavers selected, called Hydropavers, are sponge-like and permeable throughout, requiring almost no gaps between them, and not relying on

gaps for permeability. Under the pavers, an alternative sub-base solution called Permavoid provides a solid foundation to distribute loads evenly, avoiding differential settlement, while allowing water to flow through and providing void space for any excess water or ice formation in winter without causing heaving. The passive irrigation system sustains the plantings by drawing water from a nearby shallow catch basin and directing it to the planting soil through a perforated pipe. A lid and overflow to an adjacent catch basin allow for a way to shut down the system in the winter if the salt impacts are deemed too damaging for the plants. A sub-drain diverts excess water to the sewer to ensure plantings don’t get inundated.

The plant palette selected had to be extremely tough and resilient to wind, shade, flood, drought, salt, and pollutants. Halophytic plant species such as sea thrift (Armeria maritima) were included to extract salt from the soil to help the plant community survive.

The pilot is continuously monitored by Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) Sustainable Technologies Evaluation Program (STEP) as part of the City of Toronto’s Green Streets pilot projects monitoring program. A series of monitoring wells, drain basins with weirs, and sensors connected to the monitoring station were integrated in the design to

ensure system performance could be monitored and adjustments made based on actual observations.

A lot of thought and effort has gone into this humble pilot, and its potential impact on sidewalk standards is significant. The monitoring will provide useful information on the stormwater performance, durability, and maintenance requirements of the bioretention system and permeable paving assembly. These findings will feed into the Green Streets standards currently under development by the City of Toronto, making it easier for future green infrastructure projects to get approved. It will contribute to a culture shift from engineered grey infrastructure systems toward naturebased, ecologically performative green infrastructure. The way we build urban infrastructure needs to change to integrate with ecological processes, rather than obstruct nature. This shift could be led by landscape architects.

On a mild winter day, the little Lake Shore pilot is still covered by a thin layer of white snow. It looks like the permeable pavement is working to drain puddles away from the surface and make it more accessible for pedestrians. It is a tiny change within a metropolis of aging infrastructure, but its impact is mighty.

TEXT BY SONJA VANGJELI, OALA, CSLA, SENIOR URBAN DESIGNER, CITY OF TORONTO, PREVIOUSLY DESIGN PROJECT MANAGER, PUBLIC REALM AT WATERFRONT TORONTO.

11-13/ Newly replanted bioretention pilot project at Lake Shore Blvd. East and Bonnycastle with TRCA STEP monitoring equipment, July 2022.

IMAGES/ Sonja Vangjeli

from gardenscommunity agriburbsto

MODERATED BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

BIOS/ KAREN LANDMAN HAD A PASSION FOR GARDENING FROM A YOUNG AGE, WHICH LED TO HER ACADEMIC INTERESTS AND A CAREER IN HORTICULTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, AND EVENTUALLY TO GRADUATE WORK IN PLANNING AND GEOGRAPHY. SHE BECAME A FULLTIME LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FACULTY MEMBER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH IN 2002; SHE CONDUCTS RESEARCH ON GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE WHICH INCLUDES URBAN AGRICULTURE. WITH BRYAN MCPHERSON, KAREN RECENTLY PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE ON URBAN AGRICULTURE DESIGN GUIDELINES IN THE AFRICAN JOURNAL OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: WWW.AJLAJOURNAL.ORG/ ISSUE/EDIBLE-LANDSCAPES. IN 2021 KAREN RECEIVED THE OALA HONORARY MEMBER AWARD.

RON KOUDYS, OALA, FCSLA, IS PRESIDENT OF RON KOUDYS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS INC. WITH ONTARIO OFFICES IN LONDON AND WINDSOR. AFTER A 31-YEAR CAREER AS A PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN AT FANSHAWE COLLEGE RON RETIRED TO CONTINUE HIS FOCUS ON PRIVATE PRACTICE AND COMMUNITY SERVICE. A SON OF DUTCH IMMIGRANTS, HE GREW UP ON A FARM AND STARTED WORKING IN THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE BUSINESS WHEN HE WAS NINE YEARS OLD MELANA ROBERTS IS A FEDERAL AND MUNICIPAL FOOD POLICY STRATEGIST AND FOOD JUSTICE ADVOCATE BASED IN TORONTO, WITH EXPERIENCE IN LOCAL PROCUREMENT, STUDENT NUTRITION, URBAN AGRICULTURE AND EMERGENCY FOOD PLANNING. SHE HAS BEEN A MEMBER OF THE TORONTO FOOD POLICY COUNCIL, FORMER CHAIR OF THE TORONTO YOUTH FOOD POLICY COUNCIL, AND SERVES AS CHAIR OF FOOD SECURE CANADA. MELANA IS A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE BLACK FOOD SOVEREIGNTY ALLIANCE, HAS PARTICIPATED ON THE FARMERS FOR CLIMATE SOLUTIONS’ TASK FORCE, AND SITS ON THE LEADERS TABLE OF THE NATIONAL FOOD COMMUNITIES NETWORK.

03 04

01/ Urban food production in Havana, Cuba.

IMAGE/ Karen Landman

02/ Urban chicken farm in Toronto.

IMAGE/ Chickens in the Six / Michael T. Photography & Design Inc.

03/ Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming, University of Guelph.

IMAGE/ Karen Landman

04/ Urban chicken farm in Toronto.

IMAGE/ Chickens in the Six / Michael T. Photography & Design Inc.

Nadja Pausch: Our guiding topic is the role urban areas have to produce food. Design skills, analytical land-based experience, and spatial knowledge should position landscape architects for pivotal roles in urban agriculture. What is the current role of landscape architects in urban food production, how should it evolve, and what would it take to get us there?

Melana Roberts: The first thing that strikes me is the idea urban spaces themselves have agency. We should start with the people in the context, versus the idea urban settings should be or look a certain way. In most places landscape architects are developing, there are people. Understanding the relationship between people and their current environment, their needs, how food plays into that, those are important questions in rural contexts as well, and understanding the interplay between rural and urban is one of the

greatest opportunities when thinking about roles of landscape architects. Because that’s often the scope of what needs to be considered when developing a place from a food systems perspective. It’s often a challenge because you’re only thinking about that immediate environment and the interplay between the rural and urban context as it relates to food.

One of the biggest opportunities to create more climate informed, integrated, and sustainable environments, is building that connection, understanding how we’re creating procurement flows, how people are moving, what job markets look like in those spaces, and how food can be a driver and facilitator. The opportunity for landscape architects is about how we create landscapes for humans, for employment, and for all those other good things people are going to do in spaces. Connecting people in an immediate environment, but also ensuring the places we’re building are responsive and sustainable.

When you create environments like that, you’re setting up the tools for people to have access to food, information, and resources, and allowing them to be adaptive over time and respond to the frequently shifting food needs of a particular place.

Karen Landman: Landscape architects can think about landscapes at different

NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA, IS A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER AND CHAIR. NADJA WORKS AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT A MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN OFFICE IN TORONTO.

scales and imagine the connections between, say, the Greenbelt, or Holland Marsh and the food production there, to the City of Toronto. As Melana says, stepping away from the peri-urban into the urban and what is appropriate in those landscapes for food production.

Of course, whether you’re an urban, periurban, or rural farmer, you’ve got to make a living, so is the farmer being supported as well as the food production? That’s a critical piece. Peri-urban landscapes can really alter the work environment for a farmer, to the point where it’s difficult to produce food—whether it’s crazy traffic coming through the Holland Marsh when the 400 highway shuts down, the loss of suppliers, veterinarians, whatever it might be.

That’s at a bigger scale. At the local scale, think about the resources we have, but also what should be conserved for the purpose of food. Don’t make food production an afterthought, patching it in wherever you can. Think of it as one of the amenities of an urban environment, and design it so it’s a positive, productive, culturally appropriate space that makes good use of soil resources, and understand the microclimate and the cultural context, because that can vary immensely from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

Ron Koudys: Landscape architects work at a whole variety of scales. I think about some of the community gardens we developed as a part of parkland, or a residential development high-rise apartment building. We do a lot of rooftop work, a lot of seniors care work—using growing food as part of therapy, especially for those with dementia, is an important thing. We do a lot of work in resorts looking at food sustainability and tourism, and developing gardens that grow crops to be used for the resort.

One of the interesting things I’ve been working on at a larger scale, which deals with zoning issues and how we define our cities today, is the agriburb. A friend of mine is working on one in North Carolina right now, where smaller, rural communities with infrastructure in place, that are failing because people have migrated to the city, start looking at developing land as new, sustainable, off-grid type housing, and marrying it with the agricultural community.

You end up with contracts with homeowners where food is delivered to them that has been grown in their backyard. Rather than expecting people to have the skills necessary to grow food, it can be done around them. But when you look at zoning permits, when we design our communities we say, ‘where will the roads go, the sewers, the high-rise, high-density housing?’ The

06/

bits and pieces of green space left aren’t integrated into our thinking. The green world should have as much priority as the other colours on the zoning map, and has to be integrated early on. The CSLA conference in Cuba was interesting because they were converting their parks to market gardens, because of proximity to the market, getting away from mowed lawns and beginning to integrate more productive types of land use. That’s what the agriburbs are envisioning: where you’re living in your food source.

MR: The increased capacity to have more local resilience in food production is something landscape architects can play a role in, in terms of how we plan neighborhoods. Also, having urban agriculture zoning as a standard and landscape architects championing how it can benefit different planning initiatives is key.

I lived in a Toronto neighbourhood called Regent Park: this huge social housing neighborhood which is still under

05/ Vegetable gardens near Juan Gualberto Gómez Airport, Cuba.

IMAGE/ Ron Koudys

Fresh City Farms, Downsview Park, Toronto. IMAGE/ Karen Landman

redevelopment. One of the changes was the integration of fruit trees throughout the large park space there. Every summer, you would see local communities in that area of various ethnicities accessing culturallyappropriate fruits growing on those trees and harvesting them. Whether that was directly responding to food insecurity, or just a community initiative, it’s an important way to get people out in their environment, connecting with local parks and amenities.

RK: If we’re going to feed the world, we’ve got to think at a bigger scale. Little backyard gardens have a role to play, but you have to remember we’re a winter environment and people have to eat all year round. In Montreal, the world’s largest greenhouse is on the roof of an industrial building. These are the kinds of things we’ve got to think about when we’re adding three billion people to the world soon, with all of us living on two per cent of the Earth’s land area.

I grew up on a farm and we grew most of our food. I had a chicken coop, we raised rabbits, had a huge vegetable garden, my mother was always canning and freezing, but it was part of our culture. People today, especially in urban sites, are not culturally adept, they don’t know how to grow food. Community gardens tend to be more about community than gardening, and if we’re going to really be serious about feeding the world, we have to work at scale.

NP: Whether urban agriculture is a corporate, individual, or collective enterprise, what is the policy framework and planning required to support local food production?

KL: It’s important to have policy at the municipal level that not only enables but mandates space for urban food production. I had a project helping a neighbourhood in Hamilton envision what kind of urban farm they wanted on a seven-acre plot of land that was a runway during the Second World War for training pilots. For over sixty years, the only person on it was the guy on the lawn mower. The people around that space were new immigrants: they came from rural areas and knew how to farm. They weren’t familiar with the climate or soil, but they wanted an opportunity to grow food there.

We ran a workshop, brought in staff from the City and a team from Guelph who knew a lot about food production. One of the outcomes was the Director of Planning at the time saying they needed to establish policy for the entire city, not just for this site, to enable and mandate urban agriculture production. It doesn’t mean urban agriculture is going to happen, but there’s no roadblock at City Hall. Also, thinking about real food production, as Ron said, it’s not just some cool hobby where you produce a few scruffy carrots, you want people who have the skills and knowledge to really produce food. So we suggested

to the City they needed a Chief Farmer, just like a Chief of Police. They invested in someone who was very skilled at growing food, who was there on a part-time basis and also had a farm outside of town. The food production there is phenomenal, and farmers come from outside the city to learn what they’re doing there. They have a wonderful microclimate and it was an excellent pocket of soil with no issues in terms of contamination.

MR: The idea that scale is what’s going to solve food insecurity is a common misconception. Canada is one of the largest agricultural economies, we are a net importer/exporter, and predominantly made up of small-scale farmers. The amount of production from small-scale is enough to respond to local needs, but one of the largest challenges for farmers today is our infrastructure is not set up to allow them to serve local markets. That’s because, at a provincial level, we don’t have the right infrastructure to support that: whether that’s mass storage and distribution centers, or processing plants, we haven’t made those types of investments. It’s actually a lot easier to export for these smaller farmers than it is to serve local populations.

07/ McQuesten Urban Farm, Hamilton. IMAGE/ Karen Landman

RK: One of the most efficient ways to convert organic material to protein is through chickens, and yet so many of our municipalities ban chickens in your backyard.

MR: I was actually part of developing the backyard hen pilot in Toronto, and I think it’s an incredible opportunity: it’s supporting soil production, and reconnecting people with their food.

KL: Guelph has had a chicken bylaw since its founding. They have a bylaw about the care of chickens. But if I had 10 chickens I wanted to slaughter to eat, it’s difficult because it’s illegal for me to slaughter them myself in my backyard. So where can I take my chickens? Are there people able to handle that? There’s an abattior in Guelph, but you’re not going to take 10 chickens to a big place like that. There’s a difference in scale there.

NP: One of the opportunities within urban areas is the ability to increase diversity and layer food systems. Farming doesn’t have to be a monoculture: how much diversity of produce can we bring to these spaces? How do we start to weave in reconciliation and decolonization, diversity, equity, accessibility, and climate resilience into the food conversation, especially in the urban realm?

RK: The issue of equity is about affordability: who can afford to eat well. Right now, when you look at the diet of people living marginal lifestyles, it’s not healthy. In order to eat fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, what’s a loaf of bread cost? Whole grain bread is like five times the amount of white. How do we provide access to quality foods for everybody?

I’m working with a client who’s exploring freeze drying as a way of preservation. Freeze dryers are inexpensive, and you can preserve the taste, nutrients, vitamins, and such. Governments could collaborate with communities and provide the resources necessary to preserve food so it can then be distributed to people when they need it, especially in winter.

KL: I used to can something like 100 jars of tomatoes every fall, and if I had access to a community kitchen, I could probably

get it done in half the time, and potentially train other people on how, so that knowledge base is shared and quadrupled. It’s very difficult to maintain community kitchens because of all the public health requirements. It can put it out of reach in terms of affordability. But I think it’s important to come together to do these things.

MR: Often the simplest approaches are not centered in how we integrate some of the important concepts and commitments around reconciliation, equity, decolonization, and affordability. It’s really about bringing those principles and values in at the beginning, centering them instead of adding them as an afterthought, and co-design is an important way to do that. One of the challenges in working in communities that are marginalized or disenfranchised is we have a deficit approach of ‘what’s missing, what needs to be fixed, what are the challenges?’ But asking ‘what are the strengths, what’s working here, what have you built, what do we want to preserve,’ to build a common vision is important.

Also, particularly when we’re thinking about food and how we center those issues, 100 per cent, the main cause of food insecurity is a lack of access to income. Community gardens, where we build grocery stores, land access, capacity... all those things are important. But, really, it’s about access to income and improving affordability. Food in Canada is not that expensive. People aren’t earning adequate incomes to support themselves and live with dignity.

RK: I was just at the Chelsea Flower Show in London and met a group there whose focus was on green cities and sustainability. One of the feature gardens they had was produced by an agency that deals with homelessness in London, and they would provide shelter for homeless people on the condition they would get up in the morning and work in the garden. They could do as much or little as they were able, they just had to show up. They were taught about soil, growth, insects, disease, management, and growing food. It built a bridge between their life today and the life they might have. At the same time, they’re getting counseling, and healthcare advice.

I was amazed at the results, because a lot of the people who got up in the morning had purpose, their lives began to turn around, and they found jobs in the landscape industry because they loved being outside. It infused them with purpose. At the same time, it was a nurturing and caring environment that respected them.

NP: So many of the problems we see— especially issues like mental health and addiction—really come from a lack of community care and connection to the land. If we’re divorced from nature, we forget we’re natural beings, that we have evolved within community, we’ve evolved with the land.

MR: Having had the privilege of working with many urban Indigenous peoples, that’s something I’ve heard time and again: how integral land is to their culture and how they practice their traditions and teachings, and the divorce from that being a deficit contributing to the deterioration of their mental health or wellbeing. I don’t believe that’s unique to Indigenous peoples.

KL: Years ago, I did an urban agriculture road tour of Canada. At large-scale community gardens, I repeatedly saw gardeners had their own plots, but also grew food in communal plots that would go to food banks. Food banks are not a solution to hunger, but when you need food, they’re necessary. I also saw programming that dealt with, for example, at-risk youth. Bringing programming to community gardens is one way of dealing with the issue of access, diversity, and equity. Often that’s a stepping stone. Community gardens provide an opportunity to connect with services, or help people looking for culturally appropriate foods most people don’t know how to grow, let alone find in the store.

NP: Urban agriculture can be daunting for someone who doesn’t already understand what’s necessary to design these spaces. How much knowledge is required for landscape architects to design these spaces, or is it more about co-design with people who are already experts?

RK: I can’t think of a single university program at a school of landscape architecture that talks about this. I know people are graduating from university, never taking a plant ID course, let alone understanding botany or biology.

KL: At Guelph, we still do plant ID. It’s limited to the campus. We’re not studying the plants of Singapore, for example. You’re learning how to do plant ID, not learning a list of plants you’ll use forever. We do have on-campus connections. Landscape architecture at Guelph is within the Ontario Agricultural College because it was historically connected to horticulture, so there’s opportunity for students to learn. With my master’s students’ thesis projects, we brought in people from different departments with expertise. We have people studying how to grow food on Mars; it’s a closed-systems production, which can be beneficial in the urban environment, the Northern environment, or places without proper soil for in-ground production.

There are students who are really driven in this area of design. It’s important for landscape architects to have humility, and align themselves with soil scientists, microclimatologists or meteorologists who work in crop science. We can learn a lot from them. It’s important to connect with people who can give you help, advise, and critique your work.

MR: The idea of humility is spot on. You don’t need to have all the answers. It’s also the people who inhabit a place, or will, or are in need, who are also experts. Many Indigenous peoples, Black people, immigrants in those areas, are at the front line of those issues, so they truly understand them.

RK: I sat on the federal board of Sustainable Development Technology of Canada for eight years, and we invested a little over $2 billion on emerging clean technologies. One of the areas I encouraged focus on was carbon sequestration and sustainable practices in agriculture, and came across an interesting statistic: if we increase the carbon in the soil through tilling practices and putting organic material back, and the soil increased in organic content by one per cent, we would meet all of our Paris and Kyoto protocol requirements. Forget electric cars and everything else. We’re such a small population on such a huge land base that if we just focus on the 93 million square acres of agriculture we have, we could have a huge impact on global systems, just through the way we manage our agriculture.

THANKS TO NADJA PAUSCH FOR COORDINATING THIS ROUND TABLE.

08-09/ Urban chicken farm in Toronto.

IMAGES/ Chickens in the Six / Michael T. Photography & Design Inc.

Promoting Equitable Access to Food Policythrough Design&

SALLESE

There is an increasing awareness of the widespread socio-economic challenges of food deserts and food insecurity in our communities. As an industry, those of us involved in the planning and design of communities are seeing the rise of grassroots movements taking action to secure their own sources of local, fresh, culturally appropriate, healthy, and affordable food. From guerilla gardening and community allotment gardens to organizations such as FoodShare, African Food Basket, and Greenest City, groups around the world are seeking the means and social supports to bring local, fresh, and culturally appropriate foods to their own communities.

We believe, however, the question we should be asking ourselves as an industry is what role can planners, urban designers, and landscape architects play in planning and designing food insecurity and food deserts ‘out’ of our communities? How do we address this issue systemically through planning policy, master planning, and design?

02

The 2017 study “Food Deserts in Winnipeg” defines food deserts as geographic spaces, typically in urban settings, where residents have limited or no access to healthy food options with sufficient variety, at an affordable cost. In Canada, neighbourhoods which do not have access to good quality and affordable food (defined as being located in excess of one kilometre to the nearest supermarket) are often considered socially-distressed, and characterized by low average household incomes.

TEXT BY NATALIE ARMSTRONG, ALISON LUMBY, OALA, CSLA, AND ANDRIA

In large urban centres, food deserts are most common in the city’s inner suburbs. In Toronto, the inner suburbs include the former municipalities of North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke. Today these areas are home to a majority of the city’s Priority Investment Neighbourhoods (PINs) and immigrant and ethnic communities who rely on public transit or walking. In the post-war period, these areas were primarily planned for middle class families, and designed around an assumption of access to personal vehicles.

A 2010 study by the Martin Prosperity Institute found that in PINs, fresh food was often located a considerable distance away from where people lived, making it difficult, time consuming, and costly to access without a car. As seen in the map below, in these lower income neighbourhoods, grocery retailers are typically located at the edges of

these communities, leaving the majority of residents in a food desert. According to the Martin Prosperity Institute, unable to easily access good quality food, those living in many inner suburbs are served instead by an army of corner, convenience, and fast food outlets that offer an assortment of unhealthy foods high in fats, sugars, and salts.

Similarly, a study by Canadian researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that not only did low-income residents of London’s inner-city neighbourhoods have poorer access to supermarkets than middle- and high-income residents, but the inequalities in accessing supermarkets had increased over time. A study of the United States (Mississippi, North Carolina, Maryland, and Minnesota) found a large proportion of grocery stores were located in wealthier neighbourhoods compared to poorer neighbourhoods.

similar socio-economic challenges. With the recent pandemic, supply chain challenges, and rising food costs, these factors have likely exacerbated the disparity between income and access to food.

Food disparity is not exclusive to urban environments. Rural residents often have to travel greater distances than their urban counterparts for food. Rural food deserts have been defined as places located farther than approximately 16 kilometres (10 miles) from a supermarket. However, the lack of transportation infrastructure in rural areas is a compounding challenge. With limited public or active transportation options, the distance to grocery stores can leave rural residents who do not own vehicles and who face financial or mobility challenges reliant on family members, friends, and others for their transportation or shopping.

03/

04/

IMAGE/

The results of the study highlighted that the locations of food stores and food service places are associated with the wealth and racial population in a neighbourhood. Food desert mapping in Toronto also illustrates that the distribution of grocery stores in Toronto is lower in PINs, where there are comparatively higher proportions of ethnic communities, than in neighbourhoods with a higher median yearly income.

Increasing food disparity is prevalent across a wide breadth of our communities facing

In an American context, these rural food deserts occur most commonly in lowresource, low-income, ethnic minority communities and are associated with disproportionate rates of poor health outcomes and chronic disease. The factors that determine where supermarkets are located in Canada are similar to our American neighbours. It is important to recognize today that in planning and building communities, market forces, planning policy and zoning, in addition to demographics and income, are often greater drivers in the location of supermarkets than the needs of a community.

Access to public transportation systems and community supports are more often available in urban neighbourhoods than in

Martin Prosperity Institute map of food deserts in Toronto by median household income, 2010.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of WSP

Toronto Food Policy Council “Food by Ward” asset mapping.

Courtesy of WSP

rural areas and can help ease the burden of food insecurity. The Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC), a subcommittee of the Board of Health which advises Toronto City Council on food policy issues, is one such support organization. The TFPC works with the farming and community sectors, and actively promotes food system innovation and food policies. Using an interactive food asset tool, ‘Food by Ward,’ the TFPC has mapped the distribution of food assets across the City of Toronto. This tool allows residents and policy makers to not only easily locate the closest retail grocery store, but also food banks, community gardens, farmers markets, and other alternative food sources. Mapping the food network in this way can help inform evidence-based decisions related to food access and equitable distribution in a geographic area.

Much of the literature and community efforts focusing on food deserts and addressing food insecurity and disparity has been focused on more urbanized areas. This can be attributed in no small part to those grass roots community organizations who have developed means to provide their own access to local food, as well as organizations such as the TFPC who advocate on their behalf. These organizations have built access to political support and influence, and as a corollary,

influence on planning policy, zoning, and design guidelines. In rural areas, having a smaller and more spread-out population, advocacy, and the ability to influence is often not as well established.

Policy & Design Solutions in Rural and Urban areas

A stable agricultural industry is an essential part of Ontario’s long-term economic health and prosperity and a source for the provision of healthy, fresh local food for urban and rural areas. Provincial policies are key to maintaining and enhancing the geographic continuity of the agricultural land base in Ontario, and for promoting access to local, healthy food. Approximately one third of the province’s agri-food industry is based in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH), with 42 per cent of Ontario’s best quality farmland located in the region. Provincial

Agricultural System policies support the functional and economic connections to the agri-food network and protect Ontario’s prime agricultural areas—the province’s most fertile areas for agricultural production—for long-term agricultural use, while enabling the agri-food sector to thrive.

Underscoring the prime agriculture area provincial policies is ensuring these lands are protected for future generations, supporting farmers and growers in the area, as well as increasing family farm revenue by encouraging local farms to diversify or have value-added products and facilities.

Local municipalities and policy-makers play a pivotal role in protecting finite prime agricultural lands, and also in identifying the best food-related policies and practices for local communities in their official plans and in area planning.

An evidenced-based approach, similar to the TFPC’s ‘Food by Ward’ asset mapping and the Martin Prosperity Institute’s food desert

mapping, can help policymakers proactively identify areas in need, as well as identify transportation gaps in the food system, especially in priority communities, and promote partnerships to address food gaps.

Similar to the planning processes and studies which assess adequate access to community services and facilities (e.g., libraries, day care centres, and parks), access to healthy, fresh, and culturally appropriate food needs to be assessed, mandated, and even incentivized in the same way and incorporated into our planning processes, policies, and lexicon.

As urban designers, planners, and landscape architects, we need to promote creative and inexpensive solutions that empower communities to increase access to fresh food. Take for example the 19th Avenue Farmers’ Market in Markham. Seasonal fresh food is grown in abundance, not in the ground but in large plastic crates. Those same ‘garden crates’ act as landscape medians and landscape buffers in the

market’s parking lot. The produce is then sold along with locally grown and/or sourced fruit and vegetables. In food deserts, could similar ‘quick build’ solutions be promoted to encourage seasonal access to affordable healthy food, and build community demand and ownership, without requiring extensive and costly infrastructure upgrades? Over time, could these measures become fundamental components of the design of our public and private spaces—enforced through policy and guidelines the way tree compensation, green spaces, and biodiversity are being mandated by many municipalities when considering planning applications?

Critical to our thinking as planners, urban designers, and landscape architects is understanding the food conditions we create when undertaking a land use and master planning exercise, and in drafting long term policies, zoning, and design guidelines for infill and new communities, and the effects it may have now and in the future.

BIO/ ALISON LUMBY, OALA, AALA, APALA, SALA, CSLA, CMLI, HAS BEEN DELIVERING INTEGRATED LANDSCAPE AND URBAN DESIGN SOLUTIONS FOR OVER 18 YEARS. AS DESIGN LEAD FOR WSP’S LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN PRACTICE ALISON WORKS TO ADVANCE PERFORMANCE BASED ECOLOGICAL SITE INITIATIVES, AND IS PASSIONATE ABOUT CREATING GENEROUS PLACES THAT IMPROVE WELLBEING THROUGH CONTEXT SENSITIVE, INCLUSIVE, ACCESSIBLE, AND TIMELESS DESIGN.

ANDRIA SALLESE, RPP, MCIP, BES, MPA, IS A PROJECT MANAGER AND SENIOR POLICY PLANNER WITH WSP CANADA’S URBAN & COMMUNITY PLANNING PRACTICE WITH OVER 17 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE IN LAND DEVELOPMENT, POLICY PLANNING, PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND FACILITATION, AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT. HER WORK HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN FEATURED IN Y MAGAZINE AND ACCENTI MAGAZINE.

NATALIE ARMSTRONG IS A PLANNER WITH PROJECT PLANNER WITH WSP’S URBAN & COMMUNITY PLANNING PRACTICE WITH OVER THREE YEARS EXPERIENCE IN POLICY PLANNING AND PUBLIC EN-GAGEMENT AND FACILITATION, INCLUDING THE CREATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COMMUNITY EN-GAGEMENT STRATEGIES AND PROGRAMS.

07-09/ Crate-grown produce at the 19th Avenue Farmer’s Market, Markham.

IMAGES/ Andria Sallese

Q&A with

03

Mike Dixon: Well, we’re aiming for that. If you think about it, food determines how far from the Earth we can go and how long we can stay. It’s the fundamental topof-the-heap in life support requirements for human space exploration, and plants for food are a logical option because they give us oxygen, clean up the water, scrub our CO2, and we can eat them.

EDJ: So what are you doing at the University of Guelph?

02 01/ Lettuce growing under red LEDs.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak 02/ Rendering of explorers on a Mars landscape.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak 03/ Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer on the outside of the International Space Station.

IMAGE/ NASA

TEXT BY EVERETT DEJONG

What would it take to grow food on a space station, the surface of the moon, or even Mars? What are the technological and biological challenges to providing future generations of off-world explorers with a reliable source of nutrition? Will there be extra-terrestrial landscape architects? Maybe that’s getting ahead of ourselves, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. In some part, thanks to the work of Professor Mike Dixon, Director of the University of Guelph’s Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility. Ground’s Everett DeJong sat down to ask him about that work.

Everett DeJong: I understand from what you’re doing that you are attempting to grow food in outer space. Do I have that right?

MD: The program started in 1994/1995, when we got the first grant funding for projects that had space in the subtitle. We were looking at how to develop environment control requirements for harsh environments like space. The vacuum pressure and gravity are issues we can’t investigate easily on Earth. The radiation challenge is another one that needs the real thing—beyond our atmosphere—to truly investigate the reaction of plant genetics, human genetics, and even the radiation challenges. We couldn’t do some of those, but the pressure piqued our interest way back, and we got major funding from the federal and provincial governments to answer a pretty simple question: how low can you take the pressure and still have plants providing all the functions of human life support—food, oxygen, water, CO2 scrubbing, et cetera? If the answer was you need full atmosphere (21 kilopascals of oxygen, 78 of nitrogen, and a whole bunch of other things), when you go to the vacuum of the moon or the almost vacuum of Mars, it wouldn’t work. Human space exploration, as we can currently conceive of, would have been impossible. The mass and energy cost of going into space with a structure that will contain full Earth atmosphere in a

within almost an order of magnitude range of variability of most of those environment variables, except temperature.

EDJ: When you say plants, are you talking strictly vegetables?

MD: Edibles, food plants. I attempted many years ago to have roses selected as a candidate crop plant and it was rejected because the mass and energy cost of growing a plant you can’t eat is not worth it. We can’t afford that. So roses are out for now.

EDJ: This research is not just happening at the University of Guelph, you collaborate with several international organizations or countries.

MD: We have long-term collaborations with NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and the German Space Agency. I have a student there now on an internship, and we’ve had personnel exchanges with NASA. I spent a sabbatical year there. My colleague Tom Graham spent three years there on a fellowship. So, we have a lot of collaborations and interchange. But the program in Guelph,

05

EDJ: And you’re replicating that in a lab?

MD: Yeah. We have some pretty unique controlled environment facilities here with sealed chambers where we can monitor how plants respond physiologically.

EDJ: What is the number one thing you have learned over those 20 years?

04 vacuum outside is just prohibitive. So, we built hypobaric chambers that allowed us to drop the pressure incrementally, change the atmosphere composition, and answer that question. Happily for us, and for human space exploration, plants can handle down to a 10th of Earth’s atmospheric pressure and a third of the oxygen. Oxygen is the main limiting variable pressure. Plants are relatively impervious to dramatic changes in atmospheric pressure, and they deal with hydrostatic pressures internally.

EDJ: We can grow plants in space.

MD: If you have the right controlled environment. And that’s what our program is all about. What is the recipe for light quality and quantity, CO2, temperature, humidity, nutrients, water, and pressure.

MD: We never expected plants would be as tough as they are under the hypobaric conditions we were imposing on them. It’s a great relief and a bit of a surprise that plants can handle down to as low as one tenth of Earth’s atmosphere. Humans and insects (which we need for pollination) can’t, and we’ve done some work on that. They’re going to be far more limiting on the environment control recipe than plants. Plants will acclimatize to almost anything

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak 09/ Pepper plant growing under blue LEDs.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak

and conventional growing media, but they tend to mess things up because they fall apart and get stuck in the pumps—they’re not the most successful in a recirculating system. Remember, when you go into space, you have to understand you can’t throw anything away. There’s no such thing as “garbage” anymore. You must make a valiant effort at recycling everything. We can’t do that very well here on Earth yet. And one of the big challenges is recycling the nutrient solution. You can’t throw water away. It’s a valuable resource in space. So, just developing the technologies to recycle everything, the sensors that reliably help you recycle all of the carbon, oxygen, and water, is an enormous technical challenge. But the benefits that creates for us in what we’ll call terrestrial agrifood are equally as enormous.

EDJ: When we say “space,” I’m assuming space stations?

07

by virtue of the unique infrastructure of the chamber technology we developed here, has risen to the top. And we are among the world’s leading research venues now in developing technologies and doing research to grow plants in harsh environments.

EDJ: Typically, when we think of vegetables or plants, there’s soil, sunlight, and many natural occurrences taking place. I’m assuming there is no soil in the lab, so maybe describe what’s happening in the lab. What’s physically happening in there?

MD: In our program, we generally use a hydroponic nutrient film technique with very small amounts of rooting medium. We sometimes have a little plug of rock wool or something. But the plants are generally in a nutrient film technique (NFT), an approach where you wash water over the roots on a continuous, recirculating basis. Developing the sensors and the technology to do this reliably is one of our big challenges. We have used various substrates such as glass beads, rock wool, and even peat

MD: Well, microgravity is a technical challenge we’re actually ignoring. We’ve done some work with NASA: we collaborated and sent seeds to the space station in our Tomatosphere project and distributed them to primary and secondary schools across Canada for the last 22 years. But the microgravity technical challenge is one I don’t really care about much

because, when you think about it, and looking at the prospect of human space exploration, we have low-Earth orbit where the station is, we have the moon, and Mars. But at least there’s an up and down when you’re on a terrestrial, lunar, or Martian surface. The applications of microgravity requirements is just lowEarth orbit, a few hundred kilometres away, or possibly a transit mission—six or seven months on the way to Mars. That’s with current propulsion technology. We’ll get better. We’ll get faster. So those are the only applications where food production might be considered. And you don’t need to do it in low-Earth orbit because you can resupply it from Florida at infinitum. For a six or seven-month trip to Mars, I can carry enough bacon and Kraft Dinner to handle that, so that’s not a big challenge either. It’s when you get on the surface of especially Mars and propose long-term exploration agendas where you’re searching for life.

And, by the way, we’re going to find life, or at least the fossils of some microbial

life on Mars. You heard it here first. We will absolutely find some vestiges of a life form on that planet, because it was very much like Earth in its early stages. It cooled off, lost its molten core, lost its atmosphere, and got kind of chilly but, for a time there, there was liquid water on the surface. All the conditions, all the chemistry, were exactly the same as it was on Earth when life evolved here. So I’m pretty confident we’ll find, in the rock bottom of a frozen Martian lake, some form of life.

EDJ: I understand some researchers have taken some... I’m not sure if you use the term “soil” on the moon?

Mike Dixon: It’s called lunar regolith, because it’s not earth. Those are close colleagues of ours at the University of Florida, and they’re seasoned veterans in space exploration, plant science. They’ve done a lot of experiments on the space station. We’re currently collaborating with them in a very huge proposal to NASA for a lander experiment on the moon that will include a system we designed

here in Canada in collaboration with the Canadensys Aerospace. We’ve designed a miniature lunar greenhouse, a controlled environment that will grow barley. And you, you of all people, know why.

EDJ: Single malts are appreciated.

MD: We’ll learn about the fate of that multimillion-dollar proposal to put a lander on the surface of the moon and then investigate the challenge of growing food under those conditions which are really cold or really hot, depending on if you’re in the sun or not. And the radiation challenge is one of the first questions we’ll ask of the plant, and the plant genetics. What do we have to do, if anything, to mitigate that as we go forward?

EDJ: “How extreme and to what extent can we grow food?” Is that the lesson learned to be brought back to Earth?

MD: Well, I’ve been talking like everything is going into space. We don’t very often get a mission to go to space. Canada doesn’t have a launch facility. That being the case, even though a lot of the research is directly or indirectly related to solving a problem dealing with the challenge of growing plants in the harsh environment of outer space, or lunar or Martian surface, when you apply this to Earth, we find some very significant harsh environments here on Earth. And this is Canada. If you’re going to grow a plant in Canada for six or seven months of the year, you’d have to use a very sophisticated, controlled environment. I

10/ CESRF small hypobaric chambers

IMAGE/ Per Aage Lysaa 11/ A gold leaf designed to evaluate heat transfer under microgravity.

IMAGE/ Jamie Lawson 12/ Hoop houses in the Kuwait desert.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak 13/ Red leaf lettuce grown under white, red, and blue LEDs.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak 14/ Rendering of a greenhouse on the moon.

IMAGES/ Michael Stasiak 15/ Mohammed Albaho from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research inspecting lettuce growing in a modular plant production system.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak

submit that the challenge of a snowbank in Yellowknife in February is not much worse or better than the surface of the moon or Mars. And the technical solution is almost identical. So, all the technical solutions to growing plants under strange conditions for lunar and Martian applications have equal application here on Earth, in harsh environments like Canada’s North, where we have a food security issue, or the deserts of the Middle East. We’ve collaborated with Middle Eastern countries, Kuwait in particular, on developing adaptations of these technologies for the desert climate where they have a food security issues, too.

EDJ: Have you done any studies in Canada’s far North?

MD: We’ve collaborated with the government of the Northwest Territories, FedNor, ComDev (Canadian aerospace company), and the Aurora Research Institute. We published a feasibility study a number of years ago, it’s on the Aurora Research Institute website, called “AgNorth.” In that study, we assessed the technical and economic feasibility of growing a select handful of high-end crops like strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and other perishables that are routinely shipped from Mexico, offsetting the import requirement. We learned with the five or six different high-end commodities we chose to evaluate that you can actually do it and make a buck in the harsh Canadian north. Now, you can’t do that with things like potatoes and staple crops, as the mass-energy cost would be excessive. But we could certainly make an effort to offset the nutritional food requirements for our cousins in the North and offset their requirements for subsidy.

EDJ: How healthy will humans be eating vegetables in a controlled environment such as the ones you’re describing? Have you done tests on humans eating food grown in those environments?

MD: I’m not allowed to test humans without special permission. But we evaluate the effect of our environment control recipes. We test the results on plant physiology, and their nutritional composition. So our objective has been to produce a predictable and systematic profile of nutritional compounds in all of the 30 or 40 different crops that have currently been selected for human space exploration. We don’t work on all of them, but we take a cross-section of a few of them, and the objective is to generate a standardized profile of nutritional compounds. We’re taking exactly the same lessons learned in trying to achieve that in food crops for the last 30 years in Guelph and exploiting the same technology in the phytopharmaceutical industry sector. With recent changes to legislation in Canada related to cannabis, that’s an obvious candidate for standardizing the profile of

EDJ: Knowing the food security issues we have, and climate change, it sounds like, based on your research, there is some hope in this.

MD: Absolutely. And the advent of the more recent upbeat in vertical farming technology, really high density controlled environment food production technologies in all the research projects we’ve attempted and proposed over the 30 years. The rationale for deploying these solutions in harsh environments in our North has always been at the back of our minds, and is now more front-ofmind because of federal and provincial programs requiring specifically those kinds of solutions. The whole vertical farming industry now has created a technological boom in LED lighting and environmental control technology that is adaptable to small, tight, highly controlled spaces. We’ve got to get away from growing lettuce, though. Lettuce isn’t going to save anybody, and it’s not even food until you add the ranch dressing. So we’re working on more protein-based crops.

16/ A prototype high-powered and water-cooled LED array developed by Intravision Canada.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak

17/ Large scale plant production system concept.

IMAGE/ Intravision Canada

18/ Soybeans growing in a hypobaric chamber.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak

19/ Astronaut David Saint-Jacques holding tomato seeds for the Tomatosphere™ school outreach program.

IMAGE/ NASA

16 17

20/ Astronaut Chris Hadfield with a batch of tomato seeds destined for the Tomatosphere™ school outreach program.

IMAGE/ NASA

21/ Cannabis plant

IMAGE/ Vivo Cannabis Inc.

22/ Dr. Cara Wehkamp preparing tomato plants for hypobaric plant research.

IMAGE/ CESRF

23/ Prototype LED system for small plant testing.

IMAGE/ Michael Stasiak

medicinal compounds and possibly propel it to be accepted as a relatively conventional pharmaceutical commodity. It can’t be now, because it’s so variable. We’re just scratching the surface of the requirements needed to produce a standardized medicine from that plant.

EDJ: Are there any benefits or liabilities to controlled environments when it comes to climate change?

MD: You eliminate climate as an obstacle if you go into a fully controlled environment. The challenge there, of course, is economic. And there’s a lot of energy going into food productioncontrolled environments. So recycling is at the fundamental core of all of the research activity. You just can’t throw anything away. You can’t say that enough to our students.

EDJ: How do we take your research and apply it to the landscape architecture profession?

MD: Landscape architecture is encroaching on interior spaces more and more. You can’t go to a shopping mall without seeing some deployment of plant systems that require horticultural maintenance. The province of

landscape architects and horticultural managers. Many years ago, among the first projects in our program was the biological filter of a vertical wall. You suck all the air through the wall, dissolve the volatile organic compounds that we associate with poor quality indoor air, and present them to the microbes in the root zone in order to convert to CO2 and water in a conventional way. This isn’t exactly revolutionary science, since it’s how the planet works. The biofilter consumes the volatiles we associate with polluted air, indoor spaces, sick building syndrome, etc. And that project evolved and became commercialized locally at Nedlaw Living Walls. So I still collaborate with the proponents of, shall we say, interior landscape architecture.

EDJ: How did you get into this?

MD: I got lucky and established a network of collaborators, friends, and drinking partners over the years. That pulls and pushes you with bright ideas. And I work with a very talented team. We’re internationally renowned for our expertise in high fidelity controlled environment and are deferred to by space agencies.

I was always interested in automating data acquisition because I’m basically lazy. The technical side, the computer automation and increasing the fidelity and robustness of sensor technology for measuring plant environment-interaction became my focus. That attracted the attention of the space agency when it was formed here in Canada. And it grew from there.

I’m a Trekkie, like most of us of my age, and the interest in space is an undeniable hook. I talked to a group of ten-year-olds in an auditorium in Alberta and I said the Canadian horticultural mission specialist on the first trip to Mars is in grade three today. You could hear a pin drop. It is a shameless recruiting approach. And that’s our Tomatosphere™ outreach project, where we send these seeds into space, bring them back, and ship them out to students. I think we’ve gone past 4 million student engagements in that project now since the year 2000, when Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau took our first bag of seeds up to space. I keep in fairly close contact with Tomatosphere co-founder and retired Canadian astronaut Dr. Bob Thirsk. And I’ve continued to work with Chris Hadfield on a number of other things: innovations and initiatives he’s engaged with still to do with going to the moon and growing food for humans.

BIO/ EVERETT DEJONG IS AN ENTREPRENEUR, MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH, AND GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER. HE’S FASCINATED BY GROWTH.

TEXT BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

Equal parts horticultural resource and call to action, A Garden for the Rusty-Patch Bumblebee frames gardening as a practice which extends beyond the act itself and implores us to consider our gardens and planted spaces as manifestations of our personal responsibility to the land, climate change, ecological resilience, species loss, complexity, wonder, messiness, growth, and hope. We are challenged to think beyond the butterflies and bees which are palatable to us and recognize and encourage all forms of insect life in the garden (including flies, moths, spiders, beetles, and yes, even wasps). This is relevant to our work as landscape architects and stewards of land, and also our personal lives—a way of thinking and viewing the world around us and our place within it.

The book begins with a primer on native bees, beneficial insects, and the kinds of habitat required to foster these critically important species in our gardens. The process of pollinating flowering plants is

also described—and why native pollinators pollinate more efficiently and effectively due to factors such as their hairiness, electrostatic charges, and their tendency toward floral constancy (repeat visits to a species on any given foraging trip, aiding in cross-pollination). The book is dotted throughout with info boxes on specific topics: buzz pollination, wasps, lighting, and bee hotels, to name a few.

No book on pollination would be complete without mention of honeybees, but here their less-often discussed negative impacts are acknowledged. While highlighting the importance of research into colony collapse disorder, we are reminded honeybees are not native to Canada, nor are they an endangered species at risk of extinction. Indeed, their presence in our gardens and green spaces can discourage native bee foraging, may negatively impact the reproductive success of native bees, and may spread diseases and pests to wild bees.

Also discussed is the value of native plants in supporting native pollinators. Native plants are those which “have evolved in an area over thousands of years with other plants, animals, climate, geological features, etc of the region,” meaning that native plants have developed inter-relationships with native wild bees and other insects which function together in crucial ways. The book discusses the importance of these

02

co-evolved relationships on the health of pollinators—perhaps the most prolific example being Monarch butterflies and their relationship with milkweed.

There is much discussion and, sometimes, confusion around whether non-native plants can offer benefits for native pollinators. A Garden for the Rusty-Patch Bumblebee presents research which demonstrates the value of native plants to insects (when compared with non-native plants), including cultivars and hybrids—an understudied and often elusive topic on which to find reliable information. Beyond just pollen, the book helps the reader understand the intricacies of pollen, nectar, oils, and other resources provided by plants for pollinator health.

The book then moves into practical, handson notes on site preparation (for example, the elimination of turf grass). There are tips for design, including bloom times, flower shape and colour, and plant spacing.

02/ Rusty-patched bumblebee (bombus affinis) and common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)

IMAGE/ Ann Sanderson

03/ A garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators, book cover.

IMAGE/ Douglas & McIntyre

04/ More than 90 per cent of herbivorous insects are specialists on native plants.

IMAGE/ Dorte Windmuller

05/ From the text: “Pollinators need Habitat...” IMAGE/ Shawna McKnight, Return the Landscape

01/ Planting gardens full of diverse range of native plants helps to support pollinators throughout their lifecycle.

03 04

Particularly useful for urban gardeners is a list of plants which will thrive in container gardens—ideal for patios, balconies, and other small outdoor spaces. More than just a list of plants however, Johnson and Colla help to transition our design thinking away from individual plants, toward plant communities (important for home gardeners and landscape architects alike).

05

includes a list of specialist relationships between the plant and relevant pollinator. And, as with other books authored by Lorraine Johnson, each plant includes a few good companions which can be planted together. There are lists for specific conditions, such as rain gardens, pond and bog gardens, and combinations for different bloom times, exposure, and soil conditions. The result is a comprehensive and thoughtful inventory of plants which is refreshingly accessible to both professionals and home gardeners alike. Taking the practicality of this information even further, the book closes out with sample garden designs, an extensive list of resources including native plant nurseries, non-profit organizations, selected books, and a comprehensive index.

It can occasionally be tricky with botanical research to find reliable information about a plant or how it performs in your particular region. Will it actually grow and perform well? Are the common pests or disease problems both prevalent and detrimental enough to discourage the selection of a particular plant? Internet resources claim it can tolerate shady conditions, but is that consistently true? Most of this knowledge is acquired through years of hands-on experience with plants, observing their performance, year after year. As many of us are designing planting plans from inside our offices and not out in the field, wisdom from trusted sources is indispensable. As a result, I consistently rely on books when devising plant lists, and I already know this volume will be a staple in my collection that I’ll reach for time and again. All in all, A Garden for the Rusty-Patch Bumblebee is an immensely valuable resource for landscape architects, garden designers, and pollinator fanatics living or working in Ontario.

BIO/ NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA, IS A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER AND CHAIR. NADJA WORKS AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT A MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN OFFICE IN TORONTO.

Illustration: Downy Phlox (Phlox Pilosa) IMAGE/ Ann Sanderson

IMAGE/ Mathis Natvik

06/

01/ Lettuce pops up among the petunias.

The lettuce grows all over in patches where there’s rich dark soil.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of Millie Knapp

02/ Catherine Cayer sets tobacco down by the thimbleberries to give thanks to the Creator.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of Millie Knapp

03/ Catherine Cayer taste tests sugar plums.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of Millie Knapp

TEXT BY MILLIE KNAPP

Catherine Cayer takes me to a small flower bed near her mother’s porch on Kichi Mikan in Kitigan Zibi. She pulls a lettuce leaf from between the petunias. I eat it. “I don’t plant it there. It just grows,” says Cayer.

The mosquitos remind us to keep moving. She wears a ribbon skirt and carries tobacco in her left hand. We put tobacco down by the thimbleberries to give thanks to the Creator.

While Cayer knows plenty about edible plants, her specialty leans toward medicinal plant properties. “I’m more of a make-medicines-for-peoplewith-cancer—for people when they need cleansing and detox. That’s my concentration when I pick these plants,” she says about people’s requests for her to make medicines from plants.

She points out clover flowers she remembers eating as a child. “They’re sweet when they’re pink. They’re white right now but they’re not sweet. They’re not ready but you could eat them if you had to survive,” she says.

She mentions how honey can be made from clover. “They would boil it down until it was just a little bit of water left and that would be your honey from the flowers.”

Dandelions grow from the spring to the fall “so people can make salads with that if they had to survive, or they can just eat it because it’s healthy.”

She mentions how sorrel, dandelion, and yarrow combine well in salads. “This [sorrel] is vinegary just like the wild lettuce. That’s why it would go good in a salad with dandelion and yarrow.”

As we come to a patch of blooming milkweed, she remarks, “They’re going to turn to pods. When they’re between half an inch to one inch, they’re edible. They boil the pods just like corn on the cob. They look like little cones and there’s white cream inside. Before they get too hard and full of cream, you boil it and it’s like corn on the cob.”

She notes how the entire plant is used. “The stalks, you use that too. You boil it to make soup. The whole plant is good.”

She adds plant medicine knowledge about milkweed’s properties. “In the fall, when it has the milky creamy stuff, the hairs like a corn, it’s used to treat psoriasis, poison ivy, all kind of eczemas and skin problems,” she says.

Cayer grew up foraging on the Anishinabeg original territory with her family. Her twin sister, Kathleen Cayer, joins us as we tour their mother’s yard in July, spotting edible leaves, herbs, and berries.

They describe foods and childhood memories. “My sister says, ‘Cotty, come and eat this. This is good for you and come and eat that.’ She just knew which flowers were good to eat,” says Cayer.

They spent time with their father, mother, sisters, grandmother, and grandfather on the land in their territory. “They told us, ‘Go pick this, go pick that, go pick this, go pick that.’ We were always sent on a mission. We’re gatherers. We learned to gather a lot of stuff as kids: medicines, birch bark… We had to climb mountains and go through swamps to get birch bark. What else?”

“We would come home with big bowls of wild strawberries, raspberries. Now, you’d be lucky if you get a cupful. It’s getting scarce,” says Cayer.

Their mother, Anne Cayer, 83, still picks berries in the bush. The family travels to La Verendrye Park around 120 kilometres away from Kitigan Zibi to pick blueberries.

“We’re not afraid of the bears. We’ll go way out in the big fields. She’d be so far in the bush. I’d be like, ‘Mom, come on. There might be a bear coming. Doesn’t bother her. She said, ‘They’re not going to bother us,’” says Cayer.

For Cayer, food is medicine and for sharing.

BIO/ MILLIE KNAPP, ANISHINABE KWE, WRITES ABOUT MINO PIMADIZAWIN, THE GOOD LIFE, AND ARTS AND CULTURE.

Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events new members

Committee, Municipal Outreach Committee, as a moderator for the Summer 2022 Ground Round Table with a panel of city councillors, and currently chairs the Discipline Committee.

A Design Lead and Senior Landscape Architect at R.J. Burnside and Associates Ltd., Shawn has over 25 years’ experience working on a wide range of projects ranging from high rises, streetscapes, and public spaces in both the private and public sector. His work reflects the imperative role landscape architects play within cities, along with a deep understanding of relationship building at the municipal level. Shawn is a five-time elected councillor in Wellington county. He is running for mayor this fall in Centre Wellington.

The President’s Award recognizes Shawn’s commitment as an OALA Councillor who has not only extended significant volunteer time and knowledge in assisting on Council, but also helping to advance the OALA government outreach efforts.

01/ Shawn Watters

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the OALA

02/ Glengarry-Prescott-Russell MPP Stéphane Sarrazin (left) and Minister of Environment, Conservation, and Parks David Piccini (right) at Alfred Bog.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the Ministry of Environment, Conservation, and Parks

03/ Jason Berniqué, MPP Stéphane Sarrazin, and Minister David Piccini at Alfred Bog.

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the Ministry of Environment, Conservation, and Parks

04/ Grow Fruit Trees Fast, cover

IMAGE/ Suzane Poizner

awards

Shawn Watters, OALA, CSLA, is the recipient of the 2022 OALA President’s Award. The President’s Award is given in recognition of the contributions by an OALA Full Member who supports and advances initiatives and actions of the Association and promotes the profession of landscape architecture in Ontario. It is given in recognition of dedicated volunteerism, generous service to the Association, and for leadership in the field of landscape architecture.

Joining OALA Council in 2021, Shawn Watters has played a pivotal role fostering public awareness of the OALA. Shawn said that he became a volunteer knowing he had a good understanding of the political landscape, and he would dedicate his skills to advance OALA’s strategic goals. Shawn did not waste any time keeping his word—he has contributed significant volunteer hours to the Practice Legislation

The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects is proud to recognize and welcome the following new members to the Association:

Jonathan Vandriel * Stephanie Cheng Melissa Coderre Ashley Hosker

David Ibey Devon Kleinjan Michael Magnan Guy Walter

Asterisk (*) denotes Full Members without the use of professional seal.

01 02

oala awards

The OALA invites you to nominate your peers for the 2023 annual awards. The deadline for nominations is January 6th, so if you have someone in mind who deserves recognition, make sure to put their name forward.

You can read about the various award categories and how to submit here: www.oala.ca/OALA-award-nominations

parks

The Alfred Bog lies 70 kilometres west of Ottawa. It is a whopping 3,000 hectares (that’s 4,200 soccer fields), and accessible by 273-metre boardwalk trail called the Bog Walk Trail. The bog is home to rare species of insects, birds, and reptiles, and at least nine rare plant species. It is the largest bog of its kind in Southern Ontario.

For that reason, the Province is proposing to designate Alfred Bog as a non-operational Provincial Park, with the aim of “ensuring the long-term protection and health of local wildlife of this unique and scientifically important area, while continuing to provide recreational opportunities for the public, including walking on the Bog Walk Trail, hunting and birdwatching,” according to a press release from the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.

A non-operating park generally has few facilities and staff. You bring in whatever you need and you leave nothing behind. The last time a habitat was designated a non-operating park was Brockville Long Swamp Fen Provincial Park in 2017.

In the same press release, Nature Conservancy of Canada Regional Vice President Mike Hendren supported the province’s goal:

“The provincial park designation will build on nearly 40 years of conservation efforts by NCC and partners in the region to ensure that this unique wetland habitat is protected and cared for over the longterm. In the face of rapid biodiversity loss and climate change, nature is our ally. There is no solution to either without nature conservation.”

books

For many, fruit trees are a highly desirable feature for any greenspace. But they can be extremely difficult to grow successfully: they are slow to grow, high maintenance, and can take a long time before they start to bear any kind of harvest. Grow Fruit Trees Fast: a beginner’s guide to a healthy harvest in record time by Susan Poizner is a new book aimed to guide you through the process of establishing healthy and bountiful fruit trees, in the shortest possible time.

The book includes seven lessons, designed to teach you how to research faster-growing varieties of fruiting trees, how to keep pests away without using chemicals, and ways to improve soil health, among other things.

Poizner runs the website OrchardPeople. com, where you can find additional articles, podcasts, and resources for growing.

To purchase Grow Fruit Trees Fast, visit orchardpeople.com/shop.

in

memoriam

Martin Tavares, OALA, CSLA

The OALA is saddened to announce the passing of Martin Tavares on April 15, 2022. Martin graduated from the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) with a Bachelor of Architectural Science and had been a full member of the OALA since March 2008.

Before joining the City of Vaughan in 2002, Martin briefly worked for the City of Richmond Hill and in the private sector.

In his 20-year career at the City, Martin started as a Landscape Technician, rising through the ranks until holding the position of Manager of Parks and Open Space Planning since 2014 within the Parks Infrastructure Planning and Development department. He was also Interim Director of Parks Planning in 2019 and 2020.

In a posthumous nomination for Vaughan’s City Manager’s 2022 Ignite Award by his colleagues, Martin was regarded by many as a respected and caring mentor and educator, excited to share his insights and expertise as he cultivated true connections with staff and the community over the last two decades. He enthusiastically participated in various committees and working groups over the past two decades, representing the City’s interest in advancing park and trail development. Through his outstanding work on numerous projects and initiatives, he left an indelible mark on the landscape of Vaughan, in creating, expanding, and enhancing parks and open spaces for generations to enjoy for many years to come.

In honour of Martin and his service to the City of Vaughan, on June 28, 2022, Vaughan Council unanimously voted to name a new district park as Martin Tavares Park. This new 7.7 hectares (19 acres) park is located in the heart of Vaughan in the vicinity of Peter Rupert Avenue and Rutherford Road, next to the newly expanded Rutherford GO station. Together with the abutting Cook Woodlot and network of trails and stormwater ponds, residents and visitors will have access to 28.5 hectares (70 acres) of greenspace that Martin was advocating for and working to secure through the years. The vision and final concept for the park is based on extensive public and stakeholder consultation which Martin was instrumental in guiding through. Phase 1 of the park is expected to be under construction in 2023 and complete in 2024.

moved to Lively. Rodger’s love of nature led to a successful career as a landscape architect.

Rodger graduated from the University of Toronto in 1976 with a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture. He had received the Hough Stanisbury Scholarship in 1974/75. He then completed a Master of Landscape Architecture in 1980 at the University of California, Berkeley. During his long career Rodger taught at the University of Toronto and worked at the Eikos Group (Vancouver), and Parks Canada (Atlantic Region), Moorhead Fleming Corban, Marshall Macklin Monaghan (now WSP), prior to starting Todhunter, Schollen & Associates. He then opened Todhunter Associates Inc. where he worked as a planner, urban designer, and landscape architect until his retirement in 2017.

Rodger’s work was varied and widespread, ranging from streetscape master plans, environmental and trails, park and playground design to quarry visual assessments and waterfront planning in Northern Ontario.

in memoriam

Rodger Todhunter, OALA, CSLA

The OALA is saddened to announce the passing of Rodger Todhunter, on August 9th, 2022. Rodger had been a full member of the OALA since December 1982.

Rodger’s family announced his sudden passing with heavy hearts. Rodger is survived by his loving wife, Lynn; his children, Margot and Hilary; his step-children, Ashley (Dave) and Robyn; and his grandchildren, Jacob and Audrey. He will be missed by his brothers, Charles (Luanne), Richard (Brenda), and David (Carol); as well as many nieces and nephews.

Rodger was born in Sudbury. His early years were spent in Willisville, and then the family

During his fulsome career, he received the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Regional Citation award for the Landscape Visual Assessment Report, Bruce to Milton Transmission Replacement Project (2020), the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Planning & Analysis Regional Merit Award (Rockcliffe Park Redevelopment Plan, National Capital Commission, 1998), the H. Leland Vaughan Memorial Scholarship (ASLA and Northern California Chapter of Landscape Architects, 1979), and the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Student Award (1976).

Rodger was also active in the OALA. He acted as an OALA Advisor, and in 2019 he contributed to the Task Force on Membership Categories. Rodger will be missed by his peers and landscape architectural community.

05/ Martin Tavares

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the family of Martin Tavares

06/ Rodger Todhunter

IMAGE/ Courtesy of the family of Rodger Todhunter

The Sky’s the Limit

It’s Mighty Fun

Sky Towers takes fun to soaring new heights with its tiered levels of play inspired by the elements. Kids can experience sunlight catching on colorful prisms and feel the cool breeze as they gain a sense of accomplishment from perceived risk-taking. Opportunities for social hangouts are located throughout, fostering new friendships across the playground, and the community. See it in person at Gore Meadows Park, Brampton!

The Mighty Descent slide is a daring new play experience from Playworld! This massive slide is extra wide and lets many children experience the fun of sliding together. Mighty Descent is the first of its magnitude that’s not solely a hillside slide, although a hillside version is available. Add big fun to your next play space design with Mighty Descent!

Visit our website for more information: www.playworld.com

Playworld Systems, Inc. is a PlayPower, Inc. company. © 2022 PlayPower, Inc. All rights reserved.

Playworld Systems, Inc. is a PlayPower, Inc. company. © 2021 PlayPower, Inc. All rights reserved.

New World Park Solutions

P: 519.750.3322 • F: 519.304.3905 newworldparksolutions.ca • Info@newworldparksolutions.ca

New World Park Solutions P: 519.750.3322 • F: 519.304.3905 newworldparksolutions.ca info@newworldparksolutions.ca

k t h e w o r k e r s w h o p u t t h e i r l i v e s a t r i s k t o k e e p o u r c o m m u n i t i e s s a f e d u r i n g t h e p a n d e m i c

No-dig is a form of small-scale gardening growers in the United Kingdom have been practicing since the 1940s. At its core, the approach is a simple method using compost mulching to create a planting layer on top of the existing soil structure where seeds can be sown and whose nutrients can penetrate the subsoil eco-system. This style of gardening has been demonstrated to benefit soil quality, require less watering, and produce higher yields of crops with fewer weeds and pests.

According to the current expert, Charles Dowding, by following the no-dig method, the soil retains higher levels of carbon and conserves mycorrhizal fungi—tiny sprawling fungal networks benefiting plants by helping their roots to access more water and nutrients, making them more naturally resistant to drought, disease, or other stresses. By not tilling, existing soil structure is maintained, which allows improved drainage and aeration.

To start your own no-dig garden, begin by carefully selecting a location in your yard with plenty of sunlight and existing, undisturbed

soil that’s a manageable size (about 4 by 8 feet). Cover the area with a biodegradable weed-suppressing barrier (brown cardboard works great), this will kill perennial weeds over the first year. Add organic mulch to a depth of 15 cm on top of the cardboard—do not create raised edges to the bed with wood or other materials as these can be places where pests such as slugs can live. Finally, plant seeds—for the first year select shallow rooting options such as lettuces or other leafy greens with deeper rooting options possible in subsequent years.

Although no-dig is often discussed in the context of food-producing plants, the benefits can be felt for ornamental plants as well. With all its benefits, why not give no-dig gardening a try?

BIO/ MARK HILLMER, OALA, CSLA, IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD AND A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WORKING FOR A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY DESIGN FIRM IN TORONTO.

TEXT BY MARK HILLMER, OALA, CSLA

MODERATED BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

TEXT BY NATALIE ARMSTRONG, ALISON LUMBY, OALA, CSLA, AND ANDRIA SALLESE

TEXT

BY EVERETT DEJONG

TEXT

BY NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA

BY MILLIE KNAPP

TEXT

TEXT

BY MARK HILLMER, OALA, CSLA

President’s Message

For many of us these final months of 2022 will mark the beginning of the first holiday season where we are able to physically gather around the dinner table and share a meal with our families and loved ones.

However, with the increased pressures of inflation, the cost of food is rising. “Eating local” is no longer affordable for many families, and the need to invest in local agricultural infrastructure has never been clearer. As landscape architects, we need to pay closer attention to how public spaces can be better designed for local food production. For example, farmers markets can bring a sense of wellness and community to urban areas—as well as ensure Ontarians have access to affordable and local produce.

A successful conference in London

One of the Association’s highlights this year is the success of the 2GETHER conference, in partnership with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute, which took place in London, Ontario this past September. I had the opportunity to meet with NDP Economic Development Critic Terence Kernaghan, MPP (London North Centre), and London Mayor Ed Holder, who both engaged in a number of discussions with OALA representatives about building more equitable, accessible and sustainable communities.

Looking forward, I am also particularly proud of three initiatives OALA is working hard on:

1. PROFESSIONAL RELATIONS: We continue to raise our profile with our allies such as architects, engineers, planners, and landscape designers to build interprofessional relationships.

2. GOVERNMENT RELATIONS: We continue to engage with both municipal and provincial public office holders to promote a Landscape Architect Practice Act.

3. MEDIA COVERAGE: We are raising the profile of the profession with amazing coverage in specialized media including Canadian Architect Magazine, Building Magazine, Canadian Consulting Engineer, Daily Commercial News, and Municipal World

Municipal elections

This October, local municipal elections were held in 444 cities, towns, and villages across Ontario. I want to congratulate OALA members who took the time to engage in the election process and make their voices heard, as it is estimated only a third of residents actually take the time to vote in local elections.

STEVE BARNHART, OALA, CSLA OALA PRESIDENT PRESIDENT@OALA.CA

Editorial Board Message

Throughout human history, the growth, harvest, preparation, and eating of food has been an intrinsically communal activity. It is an act of coming together, distributed labour, storytelling, shared abundance, fostering tradition, culture, and knowledge, of feeding both the body and the soul. This theme felt perfectly suited for the Fall issue—after all, autumn is the season of harvest and plenty before the winter months ahead. It is a season of gratitude and thanks for the abundance of Mother Earth.

As Melana Roberts mentions in the Round Table, our role as landscape architects in the larger food system can be that of co-designer and facilitator. Farming and food production are not specializations which most landscape architects are well versed in. It’s critical we partner with farmers, Indigenous communities and knowledge keepers, and community members with a history and culture of food production throughout the design process. This requires food and access to food be at the forefront of our design thinking. How can we increase the productivity of our landscapes? This shift in perception can then lead to the codification and protection of these landscapes with policies such as Hamilton’s urban agricultural zoning designation.

Everett DeJong interviews University of Guelph’s Mike Dixon on growing food in space—and while at first glance it might not appear to pertain to us landscape architects working here on Earth, there are parallels to food production in harsh conditions such as the far North, in periods of excessive drought, or areas with contaminated soils. As the effects of climate change are predicted to make many of our landscapes much less predictable and hospitable, there is much to glean from these technologies as we design for the future.

Because food production is such an inherently communal activity, fostering food production is also fostering community care. Not only is it a way to nourish and feed our physical bodies, but it is a key part of nourishing the health of our mental, emotional, social, and spiritual selves. As Millie Knapp reminds us, food is also medicine. It also puts us in direct relationship with Nature and our more-than-human kin, as we are, of course, not the only creatures which require food. Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla’s latest book, A Garden for the Rusty-Patch Bumblebee, provides valuable knowledge and resources on how we can design spaces which provide, among other things, food to our valuable and vulnerable native pollinators.

On behalf of the Editorial Board, we hope you are well nourished—both in food and in community.

NADJA PAUSCH, OALA, CSLA CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD MAGAZINE@OALA.CA