Canada Blooms
According to the show’s 2014 announcement, “Wildflowers are naturally vibrant and attract beneficial insects to your garden, which in turn help fertilize our plants. To the local gardener, wildflowers can be very useful – not just as attractors to pollinators, but also in design of areas of the garden that are difficult to cultivate because they adapt to fit difficult situations.”
This year’s theme was a perfect fit for Pollination Canada. We joined exhibitors in the Gardener’s Fare section, and several members of SoDC generously volunteered their time at the table. Thank you to all of you who helped out!
We shared the floor with several fascinating exhibits. One of the more poetic ones was from Les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens in Québec, called Sacre Potager, which “presented heritage vegetables as objects worthy of adoration and worship, and as important elements of our shrinking biodiversity.” Each rare vegetable had a wooden altar associated with it, containing votive candles and inviting visitors to make an offering. The vegetables included Dr. Carolyn’s white tomato, Cherokee Trail of Tears beans, Tante Alice cucumber, perennial wall rocket, Marmande tomato, Saint Hubert garden pea and New Zealand spinach. The exhibit was designed by Cécile Combelle and Atelier Barda from Montréal, with input from SoDC’s French Program Coordinator, Lyne Bellemare, who suggested the vegetables and prepared some of the information that accompanied the garden!
Another installation, Severance, provided a journey through southwestern Ontario’s ever-changing agricultural landscape, "inviting viewers to peer through barn boards and imagine themselves within it." A looping black and white film presented stark images of the landscape in an effort to explore the ideas of beauty and loss and cultural value, while asking visitors: “What have we lost in our wild drive for progress?”
The Canadian Wildlife Federation featured a backyard habitat garden, encouraging the public to garden with wildlife – notably pollinators – in a responsible and sustainable manner. They handed out recipe cards for Dandelion Pumpkin Seed Pesto, asking folks to question their disdain for the much-maligned dandelion. The more dandelions we allow to flourish, the better off our bumblebees will be. At this time of year, any bumblebees you see are queens emerging from the long winter. They will collect nectar and pollen and locate a suitable nest to nurture their young until they can take over provisioning, while the queens assume their primary role of laying eggs.
John Oyston of the North American Native Plant Society presented a talk called “Native Plants: Beautiful, Important, Threatened,” encouraging gardeners to eliminate their use of chemicals, which end the symbiotic relation that plants have on their roots with mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi take the nutrients out of the soil and feed them to the plant, in return for the plant’s sugars. John suggested companion planting instead: Growing garlic with roses can control blackspot, nasturtium can act a trap plant for black aphids or the cucumber beetle. John also shared how Queen Anne’s Lace attracts more beneficial insects then all other plants together. In fact, in New Brunswick, when aerial spraying for sawflies was not effective, the government manually introduced Queen Anne’s lace, and the sawfly population decreased by 66% in three years.
John had several interesting suggestions for people to interfere less in their gardens and simply allow Mother Nature to take care of things. And with a hot summer looming, the idea of relaxing in the shade with a frosty beverage is certainly more appealing than toiling in the hot sun!
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