Battle over front-yard meadow ironic
LORRAINE JOHNSON AND NINA-MARIE LISTER
Drifts of goldenrod nod under the weight of yellow blooms. A goldfinch visits thistles, collecting seeds. Monarchs drink from black-eyed Susans and milkweeds, while insects create a latesummer chorus, interrupted only by the lawn mower down the street.
This front-yard meadow not only looks different from the neighbours’ lawns, it does something different: It provides a welcoming refuge for all the life that is too often banished to the edges of our urban landscapes.
This meadow is habitat, but it is also a battleground — the site of a fight over competing visions of how to be in the places we call home.
On Aug. 22, Mayor John Tory proclaimed Flight of the Monarch Day, calling for action to enhance local habitat for bees, birds and butterflies. Four days earlier, this meadow was slapped with an advisory notice due to its “long grass and weeds,” a violation of property standards.
Where the bylaw officer sees offending plants, the meadow’s steward — a landscape designer, urban planner and professor of urban ecology — sees a flourishing natural system for precisely those creatures the Aug. 22 proclamation claims to support. The irony is thick: The city’s own progressive policies support biodiversity and pollinators, encouraging natural landscapes and native plants, and yet property standards rules safeguard the lawn — a pesticide-dependent monoculture that sucks water, denudes habitat and depletes soil health.
This disconnect between city policy and bylaw enforcement is more than nonsensical: Every time the Toronto grass and weeds bylaw has been tested in court, it has been declared a violation of the charter, justifiable only if health or safety issues are at stake. So why does this bylaw keep resurging like a virus?
When the meadow’s steward wrote to the city to defend the planting, she received a form letter, warning it might take longer than normal to respond because staff were busy with COVID-19 emergencies. There are, it seems, ample resources available to deploy against meadows, but not enough to adequately address the intersecting crises of biodiversity, climate change and plunging pollinator populations, along with multiple social crises. Property standards that punish people for allowing nature to flourish are especially punitive during a pandemic, when access to the healing power of nature has been shown to be necessary for our mental health. Birdsong and cricket chorus are as important to our well-being as they are to the ecosystems that sustain us.
A meadow might look “messy,” but whose health and safety does its diversity threaten? The only threat it offers is to an esthetic of control — the “normal” look of yards and gardens that treat all insects as pests and all abundance as an affront. Are we really still comfortable defending an esthetic that is rooted in colonial ideas of control? Landscapes that weed out difference and subvert indigenous plants? Surely if the pandemic has one overarching lesson, it is that normal is the crisis.
The latest mutation of the grass and weeds bylaw at least allows natural gardeners to apply for an exemption. But this places a distorted, costly burden on gardeners to defend their biodiverse yards, and on the city to stretch limited resources and train enforcement officers in plant identification. Which plants are weeds? What counts as overgrown? Who gets to decide, and based on what? These are not questions of science but of esthetics — and it’s biodiversity that is on trial.
Until we address the disjunct between city policies that, on the one hand, encourage habitat and bylaw enforcement that declares pollinator-friendly plants as “weeds” to cut or “tidy up,” our cities will continue to be inhospitable places for the natural systems upon which all life depends. Surely, in a global pandemic, on top of a climate emergency, on the edge of biodiversity collapse, we can support the nature that supports us: Let’s celebrate diversity and outlaw the lawn. Or, at the least, stop threatening to punish those who see beauty and ecological health in nature’s abundance.