Douglas Counter is exactly the sort of gardener and volunteer that the City of Toronto’s PollinateTO program is intended to support and encourage. Not only has he created a native plant habitat garden in his front yard, backyard and boulevard, but he regularly offers community tours, sharing his knowledge and inspiring countless others to grow habitat in their yards, balconies and community projects. Even more, he is a native plant propagator extraordinaire, growing and giving away thousands of native plant seedlings to gardeners (through PollinateTO and Project Swallowtail), making it easy, low cost and do-able for others to get started on their habitat journeys.
Douglas Counter with some of the thousands of native plants he propagates and donates to gardeners. (Photo by Lorraine Johnson)
On August 16, 2023, the very day that Douglas was giving a tour of his native plant garden to City staff from the PollinateTO program and receiving accolades for his work, the bylaw enforcement office received a complaint about the “tall grass and weeds” in Douglas’ garden. (The “tall grasses” are native grasses and there are no Noxious Weeds in his intentionally planted and maintained 20+-year-old native plant garden.)
A few weeks later, Douglas received an Advisory Notice from the City, asserting that his native plant garden was in violation of the grass and weeds bylaw.
The irony of the City’s Advisory Notice goes beyond the fact that Douglas’ garden is promoted as a stellar example of a pollinator garden by one department of the City at the same time as another department is threatening the garden as a violation of the grass and weeds bylaw.
To understand the full extent of the irony, one needs to go back to the early 2000s, when Douglas took the City to court over their threat to mow down his native plant garden. Douglas won the court case. The judge ruled that the grass and weeds bylaw violated his constitutionally protected right to a “natural garden.” The court decision also affirmed the right to create a “natural garden” on the public right of way of the boulevard, subject only to health and safety restrictions.
Douglas Counter’s court case affirmed the right of gardeners to express their environmental beliefs on the public right of way of boulevards, subject only to health and safety restrictions. (Photo by Douglas Counter)
And yet, this summer, under a new and supposedly improved grass and weeds bylaw in Toronto, flawed enforcement continues. If winning a court case won’t stop this, what will?