Tag Archives: Pape Avenue

Good Samaritan — a true tale of guerrilla gardening

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes a guerrilla gardener needs back-up.

My friend Ann McGuire meets me at the southeast corner of Pape and Cosburn Avenues. This neighborhood mixes high-rise apartments, post-war homes, light industrial businesses such as autobody shops, as well as retail and restaurants. It is a gritty counterpoint to the tonier Danforth Avenue to the south.

Ann is seeking some shade on the steps of the Bethany Baptist Church on a steamy morning in late June. Underneath the church’s hand-painted Food Bank banner is the tiny garden that this guerrilla gardener has chosen to nurture this year. Nothing fancy, but over the course of several covert missions this spring, the garden has been:

— watered and weeded, revealing an eclectic mix of perennials

— received minor repairs to its brick perimeter

— welcomed two new red geranium arrangements, adding a splash of colour, and

— refreshed with a new cover of forest-brown mulch to preserve moisture and keep down weeds.

As a truck pulls up to deliver pallets of food for this week’s food bank (supplying local residents in need, “no questions asked”), Ann and I inspect the tiny garden.

Ann knows her stuff. As a retired teacher and long-time community gardener, she is also a volunteer at Toronto’s Botanical Garden. I point to a mystery perennial that is arising from the mulch. Buds are forming above its thick, light green leaves. “That’s Sedum,” Ann says, noting the star-shaped flowers emerging on stems.

Sedum

She has a closer look at two shrubs growing around my token pot of geraniums and declares that they are a dwarf variety of cedar. Vigorous hostas show off their wide leaves and first white flowers. A volunteer milkweed plant rises, perhaps to attract the Monarch butterflies that have reached the city from their winter home in Mexico.

The church has obviously put some care into designing and planting this garden. Our mission this year is simply to give it some TLC. The garden fronts a tiny but popular public space. Many area residents take advantage of the red city bench nearby to take a load off, sometimes on the way home from a shopping trip. Others wait on the bench, or in the bus stop close by, for a TTC bus. An artist has beautified a drab hydro box at this corner, using it as the canvas for a colourful mural.

In the wee hours, the city bench on this gritty street corner hosts a few impromptu parties. The guerrilla knows this because he sometimes must dispose of the evidence — like a cigarette lighter or a Mars bar wrapper tossed into the shrubs.

Hosta and geraniums bloom at the tiny garden

The guerrilla gardener will be out of town for awhile, and Ann has kindly agreed to check in on the tiny garden periodically to do some weeding and watering. She is truly a guerrilla garden Good Samaritan.

To beat the heat, we walk half a block north to the Serano Cafe, a nice meeting spot on the east side of Pape Avenue, with a patio offering morning shade. This cafe is an offshoot of the popular Serano Greek bakery further south on Pape.

As we chat, I learn that Ann is also being a Good Samaritan to one of our fellow community gardeners, Mike Murakami. While Mike recovers from some health issues, Ann has kept in touch with him to offer help. This week she made some tasty cake featuring the red currants from Mike’s Thorncliffe garden plot — and delivered it to Mike in his apartment.

Ann must head off for her volunteer shift in the library of the botanical garden. We part ways. The tiny garden at Pape and Cosburn is in good hands.

Ann is the fifth friend to take up the Guerrilla Garden challenge in 2021. For more on the exploits of this year’s brave band of guerrilla gardeners, see previous posts in this blog.

And here’s to Good Samaritans.

Ann McGuire

Thursday food bank at the guerrilla garden

Posted on by
Reply

The guerrilla gardener infiltrates the southeast corner of Pape and Cosburn Avenues to tend to the tiny garden he has adopted at Bethany Baptist Church. As camouflage, he wears his Eddie Bauer relaxed-fit jeans, Mark’s hiking boots, a short-sleeve shirt and a brown Bruce County Plowing Match ball cap. Nobody will bother him. He is the invisible man who weeds and waters the flowers and shrubs, and has mended the brick perimeter surrounding the garden.

From a green plastic watering can, he douses the pot of geraniums and some of the existing hostas and other perennials that are now bursting from the soil as spring turns to summer. He cleans up a few pop cans and candy bar wrappers littering the garden and deposits them in the city garbage container next to the bus stop.

But today is not ideal for covert gardening action. Hundreds of people have gathered for the church’s weekly food bank. They’re lined up on a hot afternoon for several hundred yards along the south side of Cosburn Avenue, a street of rental apartments in Toronto’s east end.

Food bank volunteers have set up a series of kiosks, organizing the donated food by categories including pasta and dry goods, juice and other drinks, and what appears to be a small hot-lunch area. The food bank recipients are in line according to family size, with the biggest families first.

Some volunteers have tossed empty cardboards boxes on top of several shrubs the guerrilla gardener has been nurturing. Gah! But this is no time to by picky. It’s time to observe a community organization and its volunteers in action — serving people in need.

Volunteers cruise the line to chat with recipients, check registrations and answer questions. Others dole out food. The Thursday food bank operates year-round at the church, in the blistering heat of the summer and deep freeze of the Canadian winter. The 103-year-old organization also hustles to deliver online services and youth programs during the pandemic.

The guerrilla gardener will be patient, bide his time, and make contact with the organization to find out more. And he will be back regularly — to nurture the geraniums and shrubs.

On a mission

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s guerrilla mission is about geraniums. A pot of red ones are about to land this morning, clandestinely, at the southeast corner of Pape and Cosburn Avenues — a little splash of colour amidst the hustle and bustle of this city neighbourhood.

The driver of the northbound 25b Don Mills bus pulls down his mask to take a sip of coffee. As he opens the front doors of the bus, he looks over to see a guerrilla gardener crossing Pape. The middle-aged gardener, wearing a Bruce County Plowing Match ball cap, is trying to look nonchalant while hauling a bucket of soil, a geranium arrangement, a garden trowel, a black plastic garden planter, and some rocks (for drainage) across the intersection.

The front suspension of the 25b bus kneels to help passengers board. Just a few feet away, the guerrilla gardener finds a nice spot for the flower planter, at the west end of the Bethany Baptist Church. Like this neighbourhood, the church has been hustling during the pandemic, providing a weekly food program along with virtual services and youth programs. Later today, hundreds of people will line up on Cosburn to receive food donations.

Across the street, McDonald’s is getting a facelift, the golden arches still rising above the construction site hoarding.

With the geranium arrangement firmly nestled in the black planter, the guerrilla gardener decants extra soil to ground the tiny garden in its new home. In the final phase of this covert action, he walks back to his nondescript 2011 Dodge minivan to get a watering can, and returns to give the geraniums a good dousing. Leftover water provides a drink for some emerging hostas and other perennials on the site.

As he patches up a few bricks at the garden perimiter, his cochlear implant battery beeper goes off. To change the battery, and keep hearing the birds and buses, he sits on a sturdy red bench provided by the church for passersby.

Rough-and-ready Grackles — black birds with hints of metallic green — flutter over to the bench, expecting a treat. There is nothing but a stale crust and two cigarette butts on the ground. The gardener makes a mental note to bring a muffin next time.

The sun is shines on a warm May day after a long winter and even longer pandemic. To the north, the road is busy with multi-modal transportation. A cyclist, a pick-up truck driver, and the Cosburn bus driver and passengers all wait patiently for the light to change to proceed westbound. On a hydro box nearby, an artist named Sarah has painted a pretty floral design to beautify the space.

Of course, a tiny garden is more than a clandestine guerrilla mission. It will need nurturing over the coming months. Weeding, watering, pruning, tidying, waiting, appreciating.

But for today, this gardener’s mission is accomplished.

Guerrilla garden reconnaissance

Posted on by
Reply

I’m on a mission. But this guerrilla is packing garden tools and geraniums, not weapons. It’s a mission of hope and peace, to beautify a city space after a long winter and grinding series of covid lockdowns. The city could use a little spring cleaning.

I’m returning to the scene of the crime — the gritty intersection of Pape and Cosburn Avenues in Toronto’s central-east end. It’s where my first guerrilla garden flourished a couple of years ago, aided by some good Samaritans who stopped by to water and tend the plants. The local crossing guard, Leo, told me then that people had admired the tiny garden and wondered “Who is this mystery guy with the flowers?”

Today, the garden’s former location is out of bounds — a new building is rising from the ashes of the former Crow Dry Cleaners on the northwest corner So I have to scout an alternative site. On the north-east corner, a busy McDonald’s restaurant, where older Greek couples congregated for coffee before the lockdown, is undergoing renos. To the southwest, a bright and cheery Greek Cafe has sprouted on the corner, serving coffees and baked goods to passersby. On the fourth and last corner, I spy a possible garden site. I swoop in to scout it out.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is bethany-church.jpg

The Bethany Baptist Church has closed its doors during the lockdowns but hustles to provide services, youth programs and hymn sings by zoom, plus delivers a weekly curbside food bank for local residents in need. Each Thursday, people who use the food bank line up on Cosburn Avenue, according to household size, to receive donated food. In these tough times, the line can stretch for hundreds of yards.

The Church’s tiny gardens at the southeast corner of Pape and Cosburn are nicely arranged with perennials including some hyacinths and tulips sprouting in spring. But they could use a little TLC. The brick garden perimeter needs some repair, and annual flowers could brighten a few bare areas. This spot has a friendly feel to it. Red benches on both sides of the church create some public space where citizens can take a load off and chat, these days with masks, both at the garden and next to the TTC bus stop.

The garden reconnaissance is complete. This guerrilla is hungry and could use a mid-afternoon coffee and muffin. Once risk of frost is past in early May, the gardening mission will begin…