The Plight of Toronto’s Pollinator Gardens

Text and photo by Livia Dyring

Surrounded as it is by the neatly trimmed yards on the Etobicoke boulevard, Douglas Counter’s unusual garden draws the eye.

Here, every plant species — there are more than a hundred in Counter’s abundant yard — is native to southwestern Ontario, chosen to recreate the region’s tall grass prairie habitats. 

Even in November, it’s a stark contrast to the adjacent cropped turfgrass lawns that emulate a 1950s-era, North American suburban idyll. Some might say it looks unloved and neglected, which may be why Counter’s yard and boulevard garden has been forced to weather both complaints and City bureaucracy. 

In truth, it’s anything but: the garden, now twenty-six years old, is a memorial to Counter’s parents and a space of refuge for Toronto’s rich biodiversity.

Taking me on a tour, Counter points out a deceptively plain-looking prairie grass species, classified as rare in the wild. He has several species of milkweeds, he explains, as it is the only food source for the caterpillars of the endangered monarch butterfly. 

The native plant species make Counter’s garden a functioning pollinator garden, a precious habitat for pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, and other native wildlife beloved by his parents.

Ontario’s native plants, having adapted over thousands of years to thrive here, are a “significant minority” in Toronto, says Nina-Marie Lister, a researcher at the Ecological Design Lab, Toronto Metropolitan University.

“Our land has been developed and replaced,” she says. Instead of opting for native species, most Torontonians decorate using cultivars, plants selectively bred for their beauty that are not biodiversity-friendly. 

Pollinator gardens like Counter’s, however, also have other benefits for urban areas, she says: unlike resource-demanding turfgrass lawns, pollinator gardens are economically and practically sensible, as they rarely need to be watered or tended to.

Yet, pollinator gardens have had a difficult time thriving in Toronto. For decades, the Long Grass and Weeds Bylaw left them — their ecological or economic benefits still widely underappreciated — vulnerable and unprotected from those who wanted to see them mowed down.

Counter’s boulevard garden was slapped with the first in a string of such bylaw notices two decades ago. He refused to mow it down, he says, and took the case to the provincial courts, where the constitutional right to keep a pollinator garden was asserted.

The decision followed a precedent set by Torontonian Sandy Bell in the 1990s, who challenged the City at the Ontario Superior Court for demanding she mow down her pollinator garden, according to an essay by Lorraine Johnson, a Toronto-based cultivation activist.

In 2019, after he’d challenged another baseless complaint, he says, the City invited Counter and several others, including Lister and Johnson, to help change the problematic bylaw. The bylaw also happened to be contradictory to Toronto’s new biodiversity strategy. 

Last year, the city adopted a new version of the bylaw, called the Turfgrass and Prohibited Plants bylaw. There are now essentially two rules: no turfgrass can grow over eight inches and 10 specific plants that pose various health threats are not allowed.

Counter expected that to be the end of his troubles. This September, however, he received yet another notice — issued under the very bylaw he had helped change — saying he had to “cut and maintain the yard.”

He was puzzled: he has none of the 10 prohibited plants, and the comically little turfgrass he has stays trimmed, he says, pointing to a tiny, closely cropped green patch.

Receiving the complaint was “really upsetting”, he says. “If they’re sending [advisory and/or violation] notices… telling people they’re in violation when they’re not, that amounts to harassment, in my opinion.”

Why pollinator gardens like Counter’s come under fire might be explained by an unfortunate combination of conventional, colonially imported garden aesthetics, age-old neighbourhood disputes and misguided bylaw enforcement.

Though the bylaw curbs dangerous plants, the complaints — anonymously made via the City’s 311 hotline — are very rarely about a real problem in the garden, says Johnson.

Rather, they often arise from disputes over completely different matters, she says. A spat prompts one neighbour to use the bylaw — and its convenient anonymity — to cause trouble for the other. “It’s a very common pattern, I’ve seen it over and over again,” she says. 

The complaints are then evaluated and enforced by bylaw officers who lack the ecological and botanical knowledge needed to identify real breaches. “[Bylaw officers] cannot tell you the name of any plant… They determine, when they come to your property, whether it’s weedy [or] messy… any of those adjectives,” Lister says. “It’s borderline bullying.”

As a result, Johnson says, she’s had “dozens and dozens” of calls from distressed owners of urban pollinator gardens over the summer. “The City is complicit… [they] waste a ton of resources just because two neighbours are fighting.”

Pollinator gardens just happen to become easy targets, she says. Native species are often considered ugly, useless weeds in Toronto, and the perceived neglect attached to their presence in urban gardens can be provocative, she says.

Swansea resident Tamara Bernstein says she has received many compliments from neighbours and bypassers, but also “lots of rude comments,” recalling a dog-walker who stated Bernstein’s pollinator garden was “just weeds, anyway” after Bernstein asked her to keep her dog away.

In later email correspondence, she adds that baseless bylaw notices aimed at pollinator gardens are “detrimental” to the city environmentally and “cramp people’s horticultural creativity.”

Why native species are generally seen as weeds is a legacy from colonization, according to Johnson. 

The seemingly ordinary lawn is a “colonial landscape, imported from Europe” that has become the norm in North America, and “what municipalities dictate in many ways, through their laws and bylaws,” she says. 

“Returning native plants to the landscape… that flourished for thousands and thousands of years until they were massively disrupted and impacted through colonialism, I think it’s important on so many different levels.”

Lister says she wants bylaw officers to be trained and the responsibility put on the anonymous callers to identify how the garden violates the bylaw. 

She says she expects yet another trip to the courts to be necessary for those changes to be implemented by the city. “We’re really waiting for a legal case to break this open,” she says.

The City has acknowledged on the phone that Counter’s recent notice was sent in error, but he has requested a formal written apology, Counter says.

“We have a climate crisis… habitat is being lost. There are forward-thinking citizens like myself, who are doing something tangible to solve the problem… and we’re constantly harassed,” Counter says. 

“How many times do we gardeners have to take the City to court?”