Tree Tuesday: The travelling redbud

Every Tuesday, Todd Irvine of LEAF posts a stop from the Toronto Tree Tours, a collaborative project of LEAF and the Toronto Public Space Committee. The Toronto Tree Tours offers walking tours in neighbourhoods across the city as well as virtual tours on its web site. The aim is to introduce Torontonians to the individual trees in their neighbourhood while telling stories of our city’s ecological and cultural history.

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Bain Co-Operative tree tour: Stop 14

This redbud (Cercis canadensis) has been around. It was first planted over 15 years ago in the garden of the Ecology House, an environmental education centre on Madison Avenue in downtown Toronto. When the centre was closed down a few years back the garden was to be torn up.

David Orisini, a landscape architect, recognized the value of the little tree and saved it from the bulldozers by digging it out of the ground and moving it to a flowerbed at the Body Shop head office, another of his design projects. But the tree did not fare well there, most of its branches dying back nearly to the ground. So David moved it again, this time giving it to his friend Dagmar Baur, a resident of the Bain and a talented gardener. Dagmar planted the tree in this courtyard and nursed it back to health.

The redbud is now a lovely specimen, providing a shady place to sit, and every spring producing thousands of tiny pink flowers that line its gracefully arching branches.

Read more stories from the Bain Co-op tree tour . . .

Photograph by Michael Pereira