The Sweet Sights and Sounds of Toronto’s Music Garden

Mrs. Russell was unable to pull out an enormous clump of weedy grass.  Her younger companion, Victoria Free, was made of sterner stuff.  Bracing herself either side of the offending weed, she grasped round the base and heaved.  Out it came, roots and all, to be tossed contemptuously on the large pile Victoria had been accumulating from the new Music Garden on Toronto’s Harbour Front.  Backs bent under a blazing hot sun, these two volunteers helped spruce up the Garden one recent Sunday morning.

The two-acre Toronto Music Garden is the result of a remarkable co-operation between the City’s Parks and Recreation Division and private donors guided by Jim Fleck, President of the Harbourfront Foundation and the Art Gallery of Ontario.  World-famed cellist Yo Yo Ma was inspired by Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.  Working with landscape architect Julie Moir Messervy he realized plans for a Music Garden.  “A contemplative place,” Ma says, “where a stroller could hear the performance of music in a beautiful garden setting: a magic landscape that is literally ‘set to music’.”

Boston was the first city Mr. Ma approached.  Unfortunately for Boston’s music lovers –but fortunately for those of Toronto- Boston bureaucrats turned their thumbs down.

The Toronto Music Garden stretches from the near the foot of Spadina Avenue, going west for a city block.  In order to experience it best, visitors would do well to stroll along the sidewalk to the west end and enter it there at the Prelude.  This is an undulating riverscape of sweeping curves bordered by boulders of the Canadian Shield.  These are softened by perennials such as dwarf spreading junipers and variegated iris, all backed by native Hackberry Trees.  Already, the visiting gardener is starting to salivate at the design, and especially at the plantings.

More (and better) is in store though, as glimpsed through the birch wood of the Allemande, and ancient German dance that is the second movement.  The trail curves sinuously through birch, pine, spruce and juniper.  Here and there a clearing emerges, planted mainly with the popular newly discovered ornamental grasses.  Higher and higher, the visitor is tempted until one emerges on a rocky viewpoint wrapped around by Dawn Redwood Trees, through whose trunks the Harbour may be viewed.

Bursting out of the forest into a magnificent wildflower meadow, we encounter the next movement, the Courante, an exuberant French and Italian dance form.  The path swirls and spirals upwards through golden yarrow, silver mound, purple coneflower, coreopsis, bergamot and English lavender, all backed by butterfly bush, wayfaring bush, black cherry and European weeping copper beech, to name but a few of the horticultural delights awaiting the stroller.  Birds and butterflies flit from flower to flower, shrub to shrub, while at the peak of the eminence a maypole soars overhead.

A poet’s corner is welcomed under the shelter of coniferous trees in the ancient Spanish Sarabande.  Boulders border the clearing in the centre of which reposes one enormous rock.  On top of this a clear pool reflects the sky overhead while from it water trickles over the rock face.  The Menuett from France changes the mood again.  Here a formal parterre garden of flowers is to be found.  One can admire lilacs, smoke bush, scabiosa, beard tongue, variegated iris, heuchera, crab apple trees, roses, weeping birch and much more.  These surround a handcrafted pavilion with ornamental steel.  A circular pavilion is designed to shelter small musical ensembles and dance groups.  The rollicking Gigue of England brings admirers down a series of huge grass steps faced with granite.  These form an amphitheatre, flanked by butterfly bushes, roses and astilbes, focussing on a stage set under a Weeping Willow.  And thus, the final floral movement of Yo Yo Ma’s inspiration is performed.

Toronto music lovers and gardeners are so often one and the same.  In a manner similar to the home garden (but on a far more extensive scale) pecuniary matters must prevail.  Little can take place without money, and for the Toronto Music Garden $2.5 million was required.  This was raised in part through private donors, and raised in the main by Toronto businessman Jim Fleck, who is also president of the Art Gallery of Ontario.  The City of Toronto also contributed funds along with the supervision and labour that built and maintains it.  The single City Parks gardener who is occupied in maintaining the Music Garden has a unique organization to assist him.  A local group of volunteers have a co-ordinator with the Parks and Recreation Division and may work -especially on weeding- any time outside the regular hours of work by the resident union gardener.  All concerned, like Mrs. Russell and Ms. Free, have built and are maintaining a concept in gardening whereby they come alive with the sounds, sights and scents of music.

  next article