WHAT: LEAF’s last tree tour for 2009
WHEN: Wednesday, September 23 @ 6pm
WHERE: St. James Town. Meet at northwest corner of Winchester Street and Rose Avenue (Winchester Public School).
Fall has almost officially arrived. And as the summer comes to a close, so do LEAF‘s popular Toronto Tree Tours. LEAF arborist Todd Irvine (also one of Spacing‘s founding editors, our former Greenspace columnist, and a regular contributor to the Spacing Toronto blog) has conducted over 80 tours throughout Toronto over the past four years, raising our awareness of the importance the urban forest and turning the media and local politicians on to trees by making issues of mulch, soil compaction and canopy cover sexy (or at least sexier than they sound).
The last tree tour of 2009 is set to take place this Wednesday at 6pm in St. James Town. This will also be Todd’s last tour. Knowing that LEAF’s tree tours are in the capable hands of tour coordinator Claudio Tata, Todd, who also works as a consulting arborist, has decided to move on to explore other yet-to-be determined projects (we hope to get him talking on Spacing Radio soon).
Over 800 people attended a Toronto Tree Tour this year alone. If you weren’t one of them, or even if you were, consider joining the St. James Town tour Wednesday night. The group will meet at the corner of Winchester and Rose, in front of Winchester Public School.
LEAF is teaming with Green Thumbs Growing Kids (GTGK) to close the Toronto Tree Tours season with a walk through St. James Town. The tour begins at Winchester Public School in Cabbagetown, where GTGK has worked with community members to turn a barren patch of schoolyard into a bountiful learning garden. GTGK founder Sunday Harrison will tell stories of students—the majority of whom live in the apartment towers of St. James Town—learning to grow and harvest vegetables and fruits.
The tour will head north, through the narrow rows of century-homes in Cabbagetown, crossing Wellesley Avenue to enter the starkly different St. James Town. With over 17,000 residents living in 18 apartment towers, St. James Town is the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada. It is also one of the most diverse: 68% of residents are visual minorities and over 60% are immigrants. Unfortunately, St. James Town is also one of the poorest neighbourhoods, with the average family income of residents 41% below the Toronto average. Tour participants will hear from Surabhi Khare, a member of Community Matters Toronto, a grassroots residents organization facilitating community buidling in this diverse, constantly-changing neighbourhood.
Tour leader, arborist Todd Irvine, will discuss the connections between poverty and the urban forest by comparing the expanses of asphalt and dying trees in St. James Town to the leafy refuge of Cabbagetown just a block to the south. The tour will conclude with a visit to a mature Horsechestnut tree thought to be the only tree to survive the redevelopment of St. James Town in the 1960’s.
