Saved by a gardening angel

Toronto Star, May 6, 2000
By Catherine Dunphy

Garbage-littered wastelands turned into growing concerns

This hard rock, rubble-infested corner of our inner city is sure no garden. But try telling that to Toronto’s garden guerilla, Canada’s own Johnny Appleseed, downtown Corktown’s irrepressible Garden Nurse.

When Pat Ciufo, 46, looks out over the blasted and littered wasteland owned by Ontario Realty Corp. behind the Canary Restaurant and its parking lot, what she sees is a healing plant used by aboriginals to treat burns, as well as wild carrot, clover and chicory.

And a whole lot of dandelions.

"I’m not a formal garden type," she says. "As long as things are growing, I’m happy. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as weeds. They’re just plants in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Today at noon, this eyesore morphs into the Front and Cherry Streets Community Garden. There will be maypole dancers, politicians, speeches, some soil spreading plus seed and sapling planting to make it so. There may also still be the smashed cans of Schlitz, reminders of Wendy’s takeout, a Chevy hubcap and other urban detritus.

"Oh well" laughs Ciufo, a nurse a Mt. Sinai Hospital and single mother of three boys. "Soon we’ll have our hedgerow (along Front St.) And the birds will have a place to rest and they will come back."

It is the city’s 81^st community garden, the biggest one in town.

And Ciufo moved the earth to make it happen.

"She’s amazing," says Susan Antler of the Composting Council of Canada, one of many organizations involved in the project.

"She’s proof of the power of one," says Laura Berman of Field to Table, a food-producing operation which is utilizing some of the land for a project to determine just how much food can be produced in such a site.

Ciufo is persistent. It took five months to get a two-year lease on this land located at the heart of Toronto’s bid for the 2008 Olympics.

The Ontario Realty Corp’s management firm didn’t make it easy, but now the beleaguered bureaucrats are enthusiastic, perhaps because they’re well aware the connection to this garden is the only good news deal they’ve done in awhile.

The hassle of dealing with such authorities is largely the reason Ciufo likes "guerilla gardening" where green-thumbed do-gooders simply plant sections of forgotten land.

"It’s so much easier that way," she says.

She first planted a row of sunflowers along the laneway behind her house which could be seen- and appreciated– from Adelaide St. She did a guerrilla planting outside the front of Mt. Sinai two summers ago. "People said they liked it," she grins.

Then she decided that Sackville Park, at the corner of Power and Richmond Sts., needed improving.

"My boys hate walking with me, I keep stopping," she says.

Her eldest son Daniel, 20, agrees.

"She’s always walking past something and saying, "This could be so much better."

She’s created what she calls a healing garden, a small woodlot and a storm water garden in Sackville Park. She also got the idea for the Stepstone to the Don project, where she, her sons and neighbours planted 1,500 trees and shrubs.

Now it’s time for Front and Cherry. Because, as she says, she knows the right people, and has converted many more to her unorthodox gardening, the project involves just about everyone in the community and officials from almost all layers of government.

This garden will have a tranquility walk, an innovative cold frame greenhouse heated by compost, and a teepee encircled by gardens whose contents anyone can help themselves to.

It will have a wetland area, an urban agricultural research area run by Field to Table, and 30 to 40 small garden plots.

But for now all it has is about 140 truckloads of compost and earth.

The compost comes from the city’s Keele Valley leaf composing facility, complete with remnants of the plastic bags city homeowners dutifully used to collect their waste. The earth was removed from the west side of City Hall when the leaking roof of the underground parking lot was being fixed.

Today the potatoes, carrots, onions and later, beans, Swiss chard and corn will be planted for the stone soup garden.

But yesterday, Ciufo was still working out problems with neighbours over the project’s water source. She’s unfazed.

"I hope that they’ll see they can’t just sit and glare at me all day."

After all, when the harvest comes in, there will be soup for the critics, too.