Garden of Hope for High Park

            As with everything in Toronto, the city parks are pinched.  When a non-government organization (NGO) steps forth with an offer of a new landscaping, such are unlikely to be trusted out to the cold concrete of Nathan Phillips Square.  Even less likely is such an occurrence when the NGO is the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Breast Society Foundation.

            Their proposal is to replace the present formal Italianate, or Sunken Gardens, high atop the hillside in High Parks\ with a more natural ‘Garden of Hope.’  The new garden is to be a gift to the people of Ontario from the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer foundation.  The proposed location in High Park is no casual choice.  One of the woman confirmed t o have died of the disease in Toronto is buried in the park.  She was Jemima Howard, wife of John Howard (1803-90), Toronto’s first Surveyor and Engineer.  It was he who designed and built Colborne Lodge, the couple’s historic home located at the south end of High Park of which 120 acres formed their estate.  They are both buried hard by their home, in what was then an ornate rose garden.  Prior to this, in 1873, John Howard deeded his estate to Toronto on the clear understanding that it is to be used as a public park.  Since his death, several other parcels of land have been added to form the magnificent park that exists today.

            Even prior to Howard’s death, his home was known for the surrounding gardens.  The daughter of the park caretaker, one Thomas Wise, wrote about 1882 that:

“The Lodge was surrounded by fruit trees, flowering shrubs and lilacs.  In the early spring the gardens were a mass of blooms daffodils, narcissus, tulips with blue grape Hyacinths bordering the winding paths …the furrows of a ploughed field now trampled level and grassed over …here, too, grew strawberries, daisies, buttercups, orange lilies, bluebells and many other varieties of wildflowers.”

            G. Mercer Adam, writing in his book Toronto: Old & New  (1891) called the park “the beautiful wooded resort of the citizens,” even if, a dozen or so years later, the loose sand on Bloor Street at High Park was a hazard for the new automobiles venturing that way.  In the entire province at that time, however, there were just 535 cars.  More popular around that same period were the mineral baths in the park at foot of hillside where today a stream plashes  (note to editor: the word is plashes) down into a pond with a Japanese lighthouse on an island.

            It may come as a surprise even to loves of High Park the Hillside Gardens, Italianate or Sunken Gardens and the rocks over which the stream tumbles are all of much later provenience.  Indeed, they reflect the landscapes beloved of a half-century ago.  Then, in the 1950’s, formal gardens were desired for the public hence, especially, the Italianate Gardens with their sparkling pools surrounded by somber, dark evergreen yews, rigidly regimented into clipped hedges and topiary wonders.

            These gardens are heavy on manpower, as the city parks division knows to its cost.  So, perhaps not inappropriately, these formal gardens are to be torn from the very breast of the hillside, to be replaced by New Age landscaping.  This embraces with open arms all that is natural, without artifice.  Such will be the proposed Garden of Hope.  Every period has its style and the formal continental landscapes of Europe, reflecting back to the Renaissance gardens if the romantic now decries Italy and elsewhere, natural school of landscaping.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  As directed by the Ontario Chapter of ht e Canadian Breast Foundation’s brief to potential landscape architects and planners: “The design will create a beautiful and rich garden that inspires renewal in nature and espouses the softness of femininity of texture and form.”  Further, they instruct that “the garden must build an ecological identity in context with landscapes of restoration in the reminder of High Park.”  To this end, a directive has been produced by the Natural Environmental Sub-Committee of High Park Citizens’ Advisory Committee outlining the need to plant native species and avoiding invasive ones.  It is to be “a place of retreat, of meditation, or nurturing, and simply of fresh air, exercise and enjoyment during months of exhausting treatment or convalescence.”

            It is, as such, notes the Foundation, the first project of its kind in Canada, although perhaps the catalyst for other like it across the country.  Budgeted at $600,000, the design was open to competition.  The winning design is to be detailed in July/August of this year, with construction commencing in the spring, 2002, planting during that summer and the Garden of Hope finally opening at the beginning of October 2002.

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