Every garden's secret ingredient

May 29, 2025

Whether you have a green thumb or not, or even a yard, it’s human nature to get out in a garden at the start of growing season. My friend Grace is happily tending pots of showy annuals, herbs, tomatoes, and even bushes on her 23rd-floor-apartment balcony. My neighbour Cathy has spent peaceful hours clearing away last year’s stems and stalks so her bleeding hearts and phlox have room to flourish and her sunny space can blossom into the multicoloured magnificence it’s known for all the way on into fall. Dennis and I focus most on our vegetable patch, growing goodies we’ll can and freeze and eat, eat, eat.

Then there’s Dianne Pazaratz, whose house is surrounded by blooms in every season, and her back forty already planted with edibles—greens, beans, tomatoes, beets and onions, not to mention the year’s supply of garlic she always shares with us. As if that wasn’t enough for her to handle, there’s her butterfly garden a few blocks away.

In a creek valley on town property, a flood plain ready and waiting ever since Hurricane Hazel for the next hundred-year storm. It would never be built on, Oshawa Parks staff assured Dianne when she approached them twenty years ago with an offer and a plan. To put in two big circular beds of native wildflowers, dissected by chipped paths so visitors could peer and peek at what beautiful insects come nectaring there. And between them a flowerbed shaped like a butterfly, wings spread and decorated with low-growing, colourful blooms. Bergamot, pearly everlasting, native black-eyed Susans, golden Alexander, swamp and butterfly milkweed…something for everyone. Food for hungry pollinators, and food for the soul for people wandering by. A gift to the universe.

Though it’s still her baby two decades later, and a constant concern, Dianne gets some help tending it from friends in local naturalist and garden clubs, and students needing volunteer hours. She starts with a clean-up day in late May, which I was lucky enough to get to last Saturday, weather-wise and time-wise. As well as weeding and chipping trails, tasks included planting eighty-some wildflowers to fill in a few gaps; she’d applied for and gratefully received a grant from TD Friends of the Environment to cover the expense.

I was glad she put me on debris duty plus pulling invasives, a mindless exercise that let me listen for birds—great crested flycatcher on territory!--and watch for interesting creepy crawlies--amber snails from Europe, maybe? And there’s satisfaction to be had in ripping knee-high dog-strangling vines out of the ground and tossing them on a compost heap, some already starting to flower. I took my revenge on European buckthorn, too, digging it up by the roots, until I saw how much was growing in the woods nearby, providing an endless supply of seeds, and gave up for the day. Always more to do to slow the invasion of aggressors that take over precious ecosystems and crowd out sensitive native species.

Though the morning was partly cloudy, with a few spritzes of rain, we did have one butterfly come by, a cabbage white, reminding us what we were there for. Maintaining a small vital island of biodiversity surrounded by asphalt and pampered, manicured lawns; as I drove away I saw a landscape company worker spraying some brown liquid on already dandelion-free grass.

All over the planet, we’re being left with islands, isolated pockets of diversity we have to protect or else lose entire ecosystems, and the unique life forms that inhabit them. Fortunately, we have a special weapon in this struggle, a secret ingredient in every garden, one Dianne knows and wields well.

It’s love. Love for the land, for the flowers and trees, birds and butterflies, and for the nature spirits who partner with us to tend them.