Blogs

For Sintra, beautifying her yard is a family affair. Her daughter pointed her towards the LEAF service which resulted in her having a paper birch and American elm spring planted by LEAF in spring 2019. Plus, her grandchildren helped out with the fall planting of shrubs. Her Markham property now has a pagoda dogwood shrub, common snowberries and red osier dogwoods. Our Program Manager, Kim De Lallo, interviews Sintra about her enthusiasm for sharing the beauty of nature across the generations.

Environmental teacher, Ben Freeman, from TDChristian High School speaks on his experience using LEAF services for a very special project at this Woodbridge school.

Robert Christopher first planted a Freeman maple with LEAF in spring 2012. He was inspired again to add another fine-looking Freeman maple to his Toronto property in fall 2013. He added more beauty and biodiversity to his yard in spring and fall 2018 with three pagoda dogwoods and an Eastern white cedar. Because he takes excellent care of his trees and shrubs, you can see from the photos, things are thriving in his yard. Our Program Manager, Kim De Lallo, interviews Robert about his recurring support for LEAF.

This fall, our garden stewards spent a morning with Lillian Natalizio to learn how to properly harvest native plant seeds from our LEAF Learning Garden. Harvesting your own seed is a cost-efficient way to ensure your garden will have beautiful blooms year after year or to share seeds with friends and family. Here are the key tips we learned that day on how to harvest our own seeds.

We all know the benefits of having big, beautiful trees where we live. However, the unfortunate reality is that some communities miss out on these because their neighbourhoods lack trees. Recognizing the tremendous opportunity to increase canopy cover in the communities that would benefit the most, LEAF, Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), City of Toronto Forestry and Park People have been trailblazing the way for equitable tree planting! With grants from the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation, as well as TD Bank Group and the Arbor Day Foundation, the partners worked together with TCHC staff and tenants to plant 150 trees across 11 properties in Toronto.