Laneway Butterfly and Berry Garden

Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan first participated in Toronto Urban Agriculture Week in 2020, the year we built the Right Relations Food & Medicine Garden during the Covid lockdown, and received our name from Elder Catherine Brooks. The soil we uncovered was like concrete, and we were unprepared for the power of the winds whistling through this urban canyon.

Visiting during a garden tour, Toronto Urban Growers organizer, Rhonda Tietel-Payne suggested that a line of raspberries planted along the north edges of the Right Relations fence might reduce the impact of wind, and so it came to be.

By 2023, the raspberries along the fence were burgeoning, though stunted in places by wind. The wild strawberries and elderberry cuttings gifted by Meg Orlinski in 2021 were also well established, so our Crew decided to begin a small berry patch in the corner of the laneway by the fire escape.

Hippo School teachers and parents had nurtured common milkweed plants along the school wall for years; in 2024, Garden Educator and Community Artist, h kryworuchko, worked with Lumy Fuentes and Canada Nos Une to add interest to the children’s daily treks through the laneway to their outdoor playground.

Much of the potential laneway garden space was never-the-less taken up by buckthorn, orange daylilies*, burdock*, plantain*, and other bossy and bully plants, even if the starred plants are edible and/or healing. For 2025, we are thrilled to have Pollinate TO funding to build out the Butterfly and Berry Garden by removing overgrowth and replacing (most) of these plants with Indigenous plants and berries. In the process, more than a dozen common milkweeds and 2 wild grapevines revealed themselves. Red chokecherries, low bush blueberries, thimbleberries, flowering black raspberry, butterfly milkweed, bluestem goldenrod, wild blue indigo, and verbenas have now joined them.

Huge thanks to Preston Walberg for spearheading this renewal, and to Vanessa Barnes, Robin and Michael Buyers, Cleone Grasham, h kryworuchko, Cath Lofsky, and Annie Yang for pitching in.

The Hippo School children will celebrate this new garden during Pollinator Week, June 16 to 22. Since our June activities are focussed on all that it means to be a water protector from an Indigenous perspective, they will not only learn about the relationship between milkweeds and monarch butterflies, but install “muddles” to offer visiting butterflies and birds a drink.

Nibi/water gives life, nibi is life for all living creatures. Like the children, we must all be water protectors.