Pollinator Love

Pollinator Week fun in the garden. Photo by Vanessa Barnes.

"Pollinator Week is a time to raise awareness about Toronto’s wild pollinators," began Pollinate TO's Happy Pollinator Week message to the gardens this City of Toronto rewilding program supports. Gardens that support indigenous pollinator species are key to "supporting healthy and biodiverse ecosystems,' the message continues. "Toronto is home to one of the most diverse pollinator populations in Canada! These species are increasingly at risk due to habitat loss, pollution, and the growing impacts of climate change."

The invitation from the City was to let our "pollinator love blossom this week," and so it did on Tuesday morning, as Garden Educator Maya Ferguson-Klinowski introduced the children to the many different bees that call Toronto home and their many different sizes and colours. Then the children went to work creating bee puppets: paper plates adorned with their colour choices, stick-on wings, and popsicle stick handles, all to gently "pollinate" the flowers in the beds around them.

A 2022 York University study of indigenous urban bees in rewilded gardens found fewer bees in our gardens than in downtown gardens the research team observed, likely because of the high winds on the Rushton Road-St. Clair W. corner. Never-the-less, Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan is as we gardeners hoped: a place of healing where small pockets of indigenous plants renew their relationships with the bees that choose to make their homes here, from leafcutter bees cutting perfectly round circles in elderberry leaves to carpenter bees building their own “bee hotels” in rounds of decaying wood to mining bees sleeping through the colder months in holes dug into bare soil.

This Pollinator Week, take the time to get to know the more-than-human creatures that live here with us, and whose ancestors shared this Land with the Michizaagig, Anishnawbek, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat/Wyandotte Peoples with whom newcomers made Treaty. We are bound to be Treaty people to one another, which calls us to care for the Land we share.