Wild City

In Season: Mulberries

Leave a Comment /

A tub of mulberries, freshly picked.First pick of mulberries today. The street trees we usually pick from have had all their lower branches pruned in a hopeless (I dare not say “fruitless”) effort to reduce the masses of mulberry fruit squished into jam on local sidewalks, but about a kilometre away I found a street tree laden with low-hanging fruit and, with the property owner’s permission, picked about 4 cups.

Mulberries have a sweet and slightly tart taste. They make excellent mulberry-lavender ice cream, very good jam, and are an unbeatable companion to dark chocolate. They also stain strongly, and would likely make excellent purple or burgundy dye or ink. Like most berries, they freeze easily for use throughout the year—a good thing, because mulberries in the Toronto region fruit briefly, a week or two before the raspberries are in full swing, from late June to mid-July. The best mulberries to pick are the fat, long ones that detach readily from the branch. Mulberry trees with eastern exposure seem to produce the sweetest, fattest berries.

Mulberry trees are somewhat controversial in native plant circles, mainly because Asian white mulberry trees (Morus alba), reportedly introduced to North America in the 1600s, have replaced or hybridized with native red mulberry (Morus rubra) and are therefore considered invasive. Native red mulberry is severely endangered in Ontario: reports from 2014 indicated that there were only 217 red mulberry trees remaining in the province, clustered mainly in southwestern Ontario.

Personally, I am on the fence about hybridized mulberries. I am always open to correction, but currently it is my non-expert impression that the proverbial ship may have sailed on the prospect of restoring a sustainable population of non-hybridized red mulberries in Ontario. I am not convinced it is possible or even desirable at this point to eliminate hybrid trees. Having said that, at least two native red mulberry trees are on my wish list for Maher Circle and, if we are able to procure some for our native pollinator garden, I will endeavour to maintain a 50 metre clearance between our natives and any non-native or hybridized mulberries.

In the meantime, however, I am happy mulberry season has begun, and hope over the next week to pick a year’s worth for the freezer, of which a quantity will go into a batch or two of delicious mulberry-lavender ice cream.

In Season: Mulberries Read More »

Seen: Producers of Miracles

Leave a Comment /

Wild bumblebee pollinating raspberry blossoms on 1 July 2025, Toronto, Canada.Today is the third of July, and my raspberries are producing fruit. The first ripe berries, hot in the sun, always, are reverently consumed: sweetness on the tongue. Afterward, most of the berries go straight into the freezer until I have enough to make milkshakes, ice cream, and jam.

Reverently, too, we observe the bumblebees who pollinate the flowers and are therefore the raspberries’ principal keepers. Here is one, hard at work a few days ago, a producer of miracles in summer sunlight.

*

The cicadas are in season, too. I heard the first one of the season late yesterday, as the humid evening eased itself into dusk. I heard it again this morning, and hopefully soon we will have a loud chorus of cicadas, droning in the summer air.

*

Also, seen recently in my woodland garden: a male blackburnian warbler! I am terrible at bird identification, and my phone camera managed only pixelated pictures, but blackburnians have such distinctive plumage that it was fairly easy to narrow down the species while flipping frantically through my collection of field guides. I assume this bird was in transit and stopped by my woodland garden to shelter under the cedars and enjoy the bird bath.

Seen: Producers of Miracles Read More »

Shelter

Leave a Comment /

Image shows a small burrow entrance through snow into a dead tree stumpManitoba maples (Acer negundo) are native to northwestern Ontario and the prairie provinces, but have controversial status in southern Ontario, where they can spread aggressively. Manitoba maples grow quickly, colonizing disturbed areas such as vacant lots and along urban alleyways. Due in part to rapid growth, Manitoba maples tend to have brittle branches, leading to their reputation as ‘junk trees.’

But Manitoba maples also provide useful ecosystem services. They reduce erosion, hold soil, and grow where many other trees struggle to take root—especially important in disturbed areas. Their seeds feed squirrels and (among other birds) attract the evening grosbeak, a member of the finch family with distinctive yellow plumage. Manitoba maples also host boxelder beetles and rosy maple moth.

I am ambivalent about Manitoba maples. For years we had several growing on the margins of our city property. One, out front, we maintained as a privacy hedge until, tired of the need to prune it twice every summer (Manitoba maple branches grow as much as 2 metres each year, with pliable green shoots turning woody and dense by the following growing season), I cut it down. Fortunately an eastern redbud had volunteered beneath it— a slow-growing native species which produces a dreamlike halo of violet blooms early in the spring.

In the back, between our and our neighbours’ garages, a Manitoba maple once quickly grew tall and thick enough to crack the pavement in the walkway and damage the eavestroughs on both structures. With regret we took that tree down—except for an eight foot stump my husband suggested we leave in place to serve as a post supporting our back gate.

Over the past decade that stump, now weathered to bare wood, has housed a surprising variety of creatures. For several years a colony of carpenter ants dwelt within its chambers, hollowing out the wood until the stump resonated like a drum when rapped. One year, after the ants had moved on, it housed a small colony of native bumblebees. The stump has also housed a variety of shelf fungus, including turkey tail and Dryad’s saddle, and from time to time raspberry canes have sprouted from openings in its trunk.

Each year the stump wobbles a bit more on its axis, as what remains of its roots decay and gravity calls it back to earth. Last summer my husband stabilized the top with wood and wire, hoping to buy another two or three years out of our organic gate post. Our plan, when the trunk finally falls, is to take it to the circle park just down the street, where I coordinate a community pollinator garden, to enrich the soil and provide valuable habitat as it returns to earth.

Over the last few days Toronto has received a major dumping of snow, with about 50 cm accumulated over a three-day period. Between snowfalls we’ve managed to keep the sidewalks and walkways clear, albeit with snow mounded high on either side. While clearing snow near the back gate some of it, inevitably, ended up piled against our Manitoba maple stump.

This morning, on the way out back to shovel out the car, I noticed several small openings in the snow right against the trunk. Burrow holes, for a mouse, or a chipmunk, or possibly even a rat. Alongside them was a small cascade of wood shavings, sawdust from burrowing, Somebody, it seems, is overwintering in the long-dead stump of our Manitoba maple, taking shelter against the storm.

The next time I go out, I will leave it a small offering.

Shelter Read More »

The Changing of the Clocks

Leave a Comment /
swamp milkweed

Unusually this year, although I had made a note in the calendar, I forgot that the clocks ‘fell back’ an hour overnight. It was about 10:30—er, 9:30—before I looked at a digital clock this morning and realized our daughter, whom we’d hounded out of bed already exhausted from the first day of her Bronze Medallion qualification course, still had an extra hour to get ready for swim.

The extra hour is illusory, of course: a reminder that there is always a cost to playing with Chronos. An extra hour on a November morning is lovely, but by mid-afternoon one looks up at the clock, thinking it must be getting on to dinnertime, maybe even bedtime, and is dismayed to see how many more miles hours there are left to go before sleep.

As I write this it is 5:15 pm, and outside it is at the tail end of twilight—as close to dark as it might be at 9:30 pm at midsummer—and this makes me feel as if rather than gaining an hour with the changing of the clocks, we’ve actually lost about four.

These lost hours are what propel us toward hibernation, or at least carbohydrates and cozy mysteries. We turn inward, measuring the hours by midnight snowfalls and mugs of cocoa, and remain that way until New Years’ resolutions and the blinding January sunlight drive us out of our dens.

With the coming winter in mind, I went out today and, in the bleary November sunlight, put the gardens at the circle park to bed. Yesterday my excellent neighbour and I planted about 100 bulbs as a springtime surprise to our community, and today I mulched the beds with fallen leaves, swept the walks, and communed with the native plants tucking themselves in for winter.

Swamp milkweed pods
habitat logs

I am so pleased with what we accomplished this year at the circle park. In April the park was barren, much of its soil compressed into hardpan. In a single growing season we have transformed much of it into a living green space, replete with native flowering plants buzzing with insects. But I think the real measure of the park’s progress has been its late-season appearance–seed-heads bursting with promise, habitat logs settling into the soil, fallen leaves laid down like a blanket. It looks like a healthy woodland, a place possessed of its own sense of time, whose rhythms are closer akin to Kairos rather than to any arbitrary changing of the clocks.

The Changing of the Clocks Read More »

Turning

Leave a Comment /

exquisite milkweed pod

This morning a sense of turning. The sunlight slightly muted, the clouds luminous but shadowed underneath. A cool undercurrent on the breeze. Two days ago robins massed in the cedars, and today they have gone. Birdcast (a wonderful resource powered in part by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) reports a peak of bird migration is expected tonight, with 337 million birds expected to cross the night sky, navigating by the signals (cues in the quality of light, currents in the air and soil) that send them south.

Those of us who are earthbound prepare in our own way. I gather my preserving equipment and assess the ripening crabapples. It is time to pick sumac. On some bright, breezy day next week I will harvest my herbs and hang them to dry. In the coming weeks it will be time to make preserves.

I need to stain the front porch, and do some tuck-pointing of the bricks.

squash plant losing its gourdOne of my major projects this year has been establishing a natural garden at the circle park down the street. This work has been supported by the efforts of many community members as well as the City of Toronto, which provided us with a starter set of native plants. The park, long a desolate and derelict space, has been transformed into a living landscape of native plants and shrubs that has hosted many native species of bees, butterflies and other insets. Early in the summer I brought over all my not-quite-finished compost, figuring it would continue to break down in the soil, adding much-needed nutrients to support the new plants. As a bonus, a surprising number of garden plants have self-seeded, including tomatoes, dill, and several kinds of vines. This morning the melons and squash look ready for harvest; the pumpkin, still green, is nearly the size of a soccer ball; and the tomatoes (possibly Black Krims or, more likely, Green Zebra) are developing their distinctive stripes.

Soon, though, the garden will start to go dormant, and I am looking forward to ensuring it has a good cover of mulch to protect tender roots throughout the winter. But until then the asters, just beginning to flower, will bloom all wild and wooly, feeding wasps and bees right up until frost.

flowering aster with bumblebee

Turning Read More »