Author Archives: The Manic Gardener

written 4/15

If I didn’t know there was a pesticide near-ban in Toronto, I wouldn’t be able to tell from the look of lawns and parks around town. Since my parents still bike everywhere though he’s 81 and she’s "in her eightieth year," as she modestly puts it  (they don’t own a car), I see a lot of lawns and parks up close just biking with them to lunch, or the cheese store, or the lawyer’s, or a friend’s house.

What appears in those lawns and parks, though, isn’t all that revealing, because spring here is weeks behind. When I planned the trip, I figured I’d be able to learn a lot from how the lawns and parks look, even if I didn’t manage any official interviews. After all, it’s April, and though spring is barely a rumor back in Montana, it should be well-advanced here.

Or so my memory of high school springs told me.

After several days here though, I cannot claim to have made great progress. My calls are all suspended in some virtual purgatory, and the weather is not co-operating. When I got up this morning (this was ), it was 34 degrees Fahrenheit here, or barely above zero on the Celsius thermometer used in Canada (and in the rest of the world), and 39 in Bozeman. A few days ago the split was even wider: forty something here for the high and seventy-seven in Bozeman.

(Of course, the temperature in Bozeman is now falling and due to continue doing so; by the time I get home it should be back in the normal range, dang it. Where is justice?)

In Toronto, the trees are bare of leaves, though some appear to be thinking about budding; the lawns are green, but only just. Crocuses are blooming everywhere, and the tiny blue-flowered scylla, and on one ride I spotted daffodils are out on a warm south-facing slope, but no forsythia yet. It’s been a long winter here.

I’d read one blog entry before leaving that said Toronto’s parks look awful; that certainly wasn’t my impression, but the dandelions were barely sprouting, much less flowering. So I can’t say I got a good impression of the parks, but in this context that means not that they look bad, but that I didn’t have a good chance to form an impression. Since my next visit may be in October, I’ll hope that fall this year also comes late. If it comes as early as spring is late, I’ll be looking at fallen leaves and brown grass, or even at snow.

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things—"  I’ll write about the relevant things too, but not this time.

These days I’m writing an article, a website really, on organic lawn care for Planet Natural, which I think of as my little local organic gardening store. That’s a bit (but only a bit) like thinking of the Mayo Clinic as your corner drugstore since Eric Vinje, who runs the place, ships products all over North America and gets interviewed on a semi-regular basis for a lot of "green" stories these days.  And that is the fault of the ladybugs, which is another story.

"Yeah, I just got off the phone with this guy from –" what was it this time, the Washington Post? I forget. If he’s looking for sympathy, he’s looking in the wrong place. He may be Mr. Rising Star of the organic gardening, but we’re a ways yet from a point at which I have to call him "sir" or he has to tuck in his shirt.

So like I said, I’m writing this article, and the most amazing stuff drifts across my computer screen. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the research-and-write job: there’s all the information you learn about the actual topic, but there’s all this other stuff too, the odd facts that come zinging in at an acute angle to the story as I understand it, go whang into the center of the piece and stick there, quivering.

Here’s a sample:

There are over 200 public lawn bowling greens in present-day Glasgow.

The Levitts, who built some of the early cookie-cutter suburban developments in the US, (including the first Levittown, on Long Island) didn’t believe in basements (they pioneered cement-slab houses), but they set up a little newspaper for each development.

–The first North American golf courses were built in Canada.

–Up to 50% of homeowners who use pesticides don’t read the labels or follow the directions.

–Clover used to be considered a desirable part of upscale lawns.

–Almost none of the turfgrasses available in North America are native to the continent.

–Lawn bowling or one of its close cousins is five to seven thousand years old.

–The pesticide Mancozeb is marketed under at least fifteen other names.

–Almost everything Americans (Canadians too, probably) did to care for their lawns in the 50s encouraged crab grass.

–A hundred and thirty-eight Canadian towns and cities (including 2 million-strong Toronto) and one entire province (Quebec) have banned the cosmetic use of all synthetic pesticides.

–Switzerland banned 2,4D in 1988.

–You can vacuum up cinch bugs from a lawn, and at least one parks director in Nova Scotia does so regularly.

–In parts of Canada, pyrithium is legal against certain pests, but insecticidal soap and NEEM are not. Go figure.