0:06
In some horticultural circles, my guest is a well known ‘zone pusher’ of North American trees and shrubs.
What's a zone pusher, you may ask?
It's someone with their eye on the changing climate and the opportunities it presents to grow resilient, diverse plants outside their traditional hardiness zones.
0:29
Hi, this is the Garden Shift and I'm your host, Tina Cesaroni.
Kevin Kavanaugh is the owner of South Coast Gardens and Consulting in Saint Williams, Ontario.
This episode is filled with stories from his early life in Quebec, working summers in bogs and wetlands propagating blueberries, to fundraising and advocacy work while at the University of Toronto with the Botany Conservation Group.
0:56
Kevin then spent years working for national conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund and Nature Conservancy of Canada.
Today, if you go to Kevin's nursery, be ready to be awestruck.
Mature specimens of magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas, pawpaws and dogwoods, to name a few, form a storefront forest that demonstrate what he has built in the last 20 years.
1:24
It's not only about the plants, it's the whole story.
A charmed ecosystem where passionate staff will spend time to make the right choices for you.
Kevin tells us to be concerned.
Gardeners spend time slowing down and really looking at nature.
1:42
Get excited, get motivated and get planting.
That's a hopeful message and exactly what we need to hear.
Hi, Kevin, welcome to The Garden Shift.
1:59
Hi, Tina.
I'm really excited to be here.
Kevin, you know, for many years I've heard some great things about you, but I don't think we've ever met face to face in real life.
So I wanted to change that and get to know you and get you on the garden shift.
So this summer I took a trip to Saint Williams, a beautiful town nestled on Lake Erie, specifically to see South Coast Gardens, your nursery.
2:23
As an aside, I'm going to give full credit to Sean James for reminding me that your nursery was a must see, worth the drive to get out of my urban centre, my GTA focus.
He even told me where to go to get fresh pickerel.
So you know, So thanks to Sean James.
2:40
Unfortunately, when I did go down, I missed meeting you.
You had a previous engagement, but your staff took really good care of me.
I left with dozens of plants and plants I've never grown before.
And we're going to talk more about plants.
But first, I want to start with your early days in Quebec, your education and how your love of forests set you on an ecological path.
3:02
Well, it really has been a path.
I mean, one of the things that I always like to tell some of the younger employees here is just you have no idea where life is going to take you sometimes.
And I think the only consistent for me has just been an absolute love of nature, passionate about it.
3:20
How that's expressed itself through my life has been often quite different at different stages.
But yes, growing up in Quebec in the Eastern Townships not far from the Vermont border, the forest came right to my backyard where we were living in a small town and I spent all my hours awake.
3:39
I think that I had off in an exploring every possible nook and cranny.
And it's where I just had my first really, I would say magical experiences in connecting with nature there.
The most vivid.
I think there is a plant that is in flower there.
3:55
It's a native rhododendron.
Rodor is what it's called.
It's all through the Atlantic region and into Quebec and Eastern Ontario.
And it blooms in the spring.
And I remember sitting by a big clump of this probably I was maybe 7 years old.
And while I was there, Hummingbird came and I was really still, It's amazing to think got 7 years old.
4:16
I could be that still.
And a foot from my face.
It fed off these flowers to the point where it was blowing the hair on my side of the sort of face and everything.
And I was absolutely blown away.
4:31
And I could tell that it was just a there was something in me that looked at this image and the way the bill could insert into the flower.
And I was like, there is this is like literally magical.
And and then just more and more things, tree climbing and having a tree frog jump out and land on your face.
4:48
Oh my God, things like that.
So it was, it was always an exciting thing.
It was never a dull moment.
It was a place that captivated my imagination, challenged me as a kid about my own limits in terms of doing some stupid things at the time too.
You know, maybe I shouldn't have waited in the stream quite that far and, you know, start sinking in the mud and all that kind of thing.
5:09
But it was just a tremendous exposure first hand.
And I I tell people even today who aren't as familiar with nature, I said go for a walk on the wild side and do a slow walk.
Just go in and just start looking and stopping periodically and then really looking and you begin to see things that just sort of rushing by you don't otherwise and you never know what's going to reveal itself really.
5:36
Truly, you're reminding me of that book, The Nature Deficit by Richard Louv.
You know, and how so many, so many of our kids just don't get those experiences, those early, early experiences.
That's right.
That's right.
I think that's one of the things that really strikes us here.
5:53
I mean, we're now living.
I've lived in Toronto for many years after I came to Ontario, but seeing people come into the nursery and especially a lot of kids, we've sort of figured out ways to get them excited about plants.
6:09
We've got some cool things and right away talk about linkages and some of the ancient things we've got as showpieces of, of plants to the dinosaur world and how old they are.
And, and we have a little, you know, water feature garden where there's always going to be frogs to be found.
And for a lot of kids that come in with their parents, it's sometimes really the first time they started getting sort of excited about the plant link to a lot of this, which is kind of fun.
6:36
And I don't care what the link is to nature, whether it's plants or frogs or, you know, bugs or beetles.
It's just good to see that connection kind of sometimes reawaken our sometimes really awaken for the first time.
We're going to talk about your garden centre in a second because there were so many magical things there, but let's talk a little bit about your conservation work.
6:57
Did you start that mostly when you moved to Ontario or were you doing some work in Quebec as well?
I did most of that when I moved to Ontario.
So I was actually in Q1 of the things that was very impressive impressed upon me when I was working through my years at McGill University was in the summer.
7:18
I took summer jobs obviously like every undergraduate usually does.
And I got really lucky and I connected with Agriculture Canada on a program to develop a Hardy version of high Bush blueberry, which is a native species.
7:34
And there's many of them growing here in southern Ontario and southward.
But at that time southern Quebec was a little chilly to grow a lot of these varieties successfully.
But it this species on which they're based actually extends into southern Quebec.
So we were a team of students were hired to go into bogs and wetlands all through southern Quebec and eastern Ontario to find local populations of this blueberry and sort of assess the environment they were in for growing it more commercially.
8:05
But also then to take cuttings and begin propagating these many wild individuals through a long term breeding program.
And but are we were at the first step.
So we spent 3 summers literally slogging through bogs and amazing places.
8:21
And I mean, as many of your listeners will know, I mean, these are places rich with orchids and crazy plants, pitcher plants, sun dues, I mean, wonderful mosses, you know, shrubs like Labrador tea and things like that.
So, you know, here we are out being paid as students to look for blueberries.
8:40
Then the process just exploring these incredibly beautiful wild environments.
So that was my first real connection.
And then sort of it began to motivate me.
I think the first motivation in a big way came when I was doing research at university in Ontario and I went to a conference where the first satellite photos were coming in of the Amazon on fire and you can see the smoke plumes from outer space and the extent of it.
9:12
And there was a lot of discussion beginning about, you know, loss of our tropical rainforest.
And so we had a group at UFT where I was that was called the Botany Conservation Group.
And it was just basically students and we got together to do little things that we could do enable conservation actions that were happening around Southern Ontario.
9:36
And so we challenged ourselves to raise a little bit of money on a project that World Wildlife Fund Canada was involved with to save a place in Costa Rica called the Monteverdi Rainforest.
And so that timely connection of being really saddened but motivated, I think through seeing that loss from space, that if there was some little action we could do to help out.
9:58
And that just blew up into a huge event that raised a lot of money at the time, a lot of awareness.
And I think that was my full on launch into the sort of conservation world.
We did many other little things too.
They were raising money to help legal cases against highways going through wetlands in southern Ontario.
10:19
So we began to get involved.
And when you do that, you meet people and you other people who are trying to make change as well.
And they often, you know, you connect you, you get motivated by them.
You get him a generally humbled by sometimes what people do as volunteers or are working.
10:37
There wasn't a big environmental sort of realm in Canada with a lot of jobs at that time.
It was mostly through volunteers.
That's changed quite a bit with time.
But so it was just inspiring to see people who were equally passionate and really making that decision to step up and try and see what they could do to change the outcome for nature.
10:59
He was sick.
He involved in that fundraising.
Yeah, the big fundraising night we did Monteverdi, we, we were just a small group of students and it was a lot of luck on our side probably.
And we just began wanting to raise maybe $1000 to with the, there was a sort of an opportunity to come available and monetarily to buy an acre for $25 Canadian.
11:25
And it was not far off I think the actual price of those days and back in the mid to late 80s.
And so we thought, well, she's surely we can come up with $1000 and have a little partner of that place be from, you know, the University of Toronto Botany conservation group.
11:41
And it just snowballed.
We suddenly began talking about it and the only room we could rent at UT happened to be because of others being booked.
Convocation Hall which seats over 2. 1000 Little Place.
It's a little place.
11:57
I was almost kicked out of the group for having rented that.
When they came back, they said you did what?
And I said, well, so if we have if we just have a few people in the front row, whatever, you know, I mean, we'll do this and make a Long story short, it turned out that we found talent within our group and connection.
12:14
So I have been doing work at the time with David Schatzky on radio news, CBC Radio noon on my own research.
And I approached him and he said, well, that sounds like a great thing.
We'll do an advertisement on, you know, our radio news show about it and have it sort of a conversation.
And then one of the undergraduates in zoology department who heard about she is well, my dad actually works for a group that brings in musical groups that we have a Costa Rican group now that does traditional Costa Rican sort of instrumental.
12:45
And we'll get them to come to that night too.
And then, yeah, it just someone else said, well, we know that my, my, my cousin or something actually knows this guy who's just got a brand new TV show starting up.
His name is David Suzuki.
13:01
It's a show called The Nature of Thing.
So, you know, we called up David Suzuki on the West Coast.
He said, what a bunch of botanists.
He said, I know zoologists get motivated, but botanists, really.
So he said, sure, I'll come out.
He says, I got to tape a show anyway, So he got involved.
13:17
And then we heard from another gentleman who said, well, did you know Robert Bateman is actually in Monteverdi right now?
And so they contacted his agent and he was so impressed with what we were trying to do.
She said I'll donate an original oil painting for auction at the event, which brought all these other artists in at that point.
13:35
And it just blew up.
We filled to capacity convocation off and in one night we raised almost $55,000, which back in the late 80s was tremendous.
And it did a huge advancement of that project.
13:50
And that was just such a good feeling.
And I think at that point I realized that I had been very involved in sort of theoretical research at that point, But it was, you know, you needed to do something tangible for nature as well.
14:06
And that just, I don't know, I, I think those were turning points in my life about feeling like there's a way to make change and.
So at.
That point forward, I really was involved in national conservation organizations to help sort of make change.
14:23
And closer to home, so from the research I've done on you, Kevin, you went from, you know, fundraising for the Amazon to really caring about stuff in your own province and in your own country.
Yeah, the first job I I really took was, I mean there were many other aspects of my life in that regards, but was a job with what worldwide life von Canada in the end on a project called endangered Spaces, which was a 10 year program to significantly grow our protected areas network across the country.
14:55
So both provincially, federally and privately.
So that was a real sort of being tossed into the deep end initially and we really worked hard.
And that was really for me an eye from there to both get to see all of Canada.
15:12
I traveled to every territory and province.
I think in the course of that, to work with such talented people all around me as part of a really, really strong team and and to intersect with donors who were influential Canadians who cared, regular Canadians who just really wanted to see something in their own backyard happen.
15:36
So that was a really special time of my life.
Very, very influential, I guess to my way of thinking on a number of stuff and really seeing what can happen and how much work it takes sometimes to make things happen.
And sometimes we didn't make things happen.
15:53
I mean, it's not just always positive.
Sometimes you put a lot of effort into something and it might not happen, might not end in the way you hope.
But most times we actually were very pleased the way it did go.
So that was that.
That was quite a part of my life that really, I think, taught me a lot about how to engage people and organizations and governments in ways to make change and felt good.
16:22
I often used to like to sit there some nights, you know, you'd be in negotiating tables to be hours in the morning and it would be days on end and it would be really tiring.
And you and I always what kept me motivated.
And this may sound really corny, but I'm also an avid birder.
16:39
And one of the things when you're looking at all these maps and you're negotiating with forest companies and others about where the lines maybe could go to set some set asides in other areas that won't get put into industrial use was always that I have a voice, but that oven bird that was in my backyard two weeks ago does not.
17:02
And at some point, we are the ones and people make the decision on where those lines in nature go.
And so we have to keep motivated for all other life kind of on the planet.
And that was something that would keep me putting in that extra hour at night on on these projects sometimes.
17:20
Yeah, for sure.
So now you're in Toronto, you're working for different organizations.
I think you've worked for the DNC, which is the nature of Conservancy, right?
Yeah, yes, you are so busy doing all this work and making a difference.
17:36
Do you have time to garden in Toronto?
Because I've read stories about your backyard.
Well, yeah, my backyard stories are, as some of my friends think, legendary in terms of how crazy I am.
But when it comes to plants and gardening, the very first place was in actually Cabbage Town in.
17:57
I mean, first of all, I should say every balcony I had as a student at a high rise because there was no view of the street because it was nothing but plants.
And when I finally was able to be renting a property, we got permission every time from the landlord to garden the backyard, well under the proviso under two of them that when we left it would be put back into lawn, which is all that was.
18:26
Clients with you.
Exactly, and I mean, in one, I even found a little hobby greenhouse and put that up with permission as well and grew a lot of plants from and, and it's it's kind of fun because one of the things I also found was that you can read a lot about plants.
18:43
You can read a lot about these places until you experience a plant going through its own life cycle and how it behaves and what how it reacts to temperature changes and the rainfall and dry and all that, you really don't know that plan.
I have a good friend here who said to me at one point she said, yeah.
19:03
She said when someone asked her how do you know so much about plans?
She says because the plants have taught me and and it.
But that's partly the skill of observation.
You pay attention, you observe and and that's how you build some of this knowledge.
So yeah, my backyards were never had grass in them and they were immediately dug up upon arrival.
19:25
And when I finally was able to purchase a home, the same thing happened, only this time the front yard went to.
Usually the proviso was you could do what you want with the backyard, but we want the front yard to stay as it is now.
I was not under that constraint.
19:41
And so the grass came out of the front yard and I was the first one on my street to do that.
But it was the most remarkable thing because that is How I Met all our neighbors.
And that garden became a bit of a communal gathering place when I was out weeding it and people asking about stuff.
19:57
And then others would combine and out of it came the 1st St.
Barbecue and everything else from that has built community and by the time.
We actually left that address after about 9 years, I think.
I think there was only one or two homes on the entire St. our section of our block that had grass in their front yard.
20:18
Everybody else gradually did the same thing and it wasn't all native plants, but it was just that why are we mowing this little patch in Toronto of lawn when we could actually have something so much more interesting.
So that was.
It was that when you were still in Cabbage Town.
No, that was actually at that point I'd moved up to Bayview Village in the Mount Pleasant, so which is a bit closer to work.
20:41
And yeah, really, really cool neighborhood.
And now when you drive through it, I have recently, I'm astonished it from how the gardening sort of bug has hit that whole neighborhood.
Everybody now has mostly garden in their front yards.
20:58
There's not a lot of grass left.
Back when you were doing that, you didn't get any bylaw officers coming and slapping notices on you or anything.
Rather you had the neighbors coming and saying, how do we do this?
That's so wonderful.
It really was.
21:13
And at the time there were, I had friends in other parts of the city that were being hit with bylaw issues around some of the issues next to sidewalks and that.
Now I kept it pretty tame and low, I guess right next to the public sidewalk out of respect for people walking it and that.
21:31
But yeah, it was an issue, but not in our area.
And, and usually those were complaint driven.
So unless something wasn't happy and most of the neighbors were thrilled to see it and, and got excited about just like amazed at what we were growing in the front yard.
21:47
And I had a couple of friends who are really into food on the street and they literally did a lot of their started putting in pepper plants and more attractive veggies mixed in right on the front yard.
And it was kind of a really fun concept.
But I, I think more than anything, it was watching how that transformed our neighborhood community as a place for gathering and people just just casually, because until then I realized so many streets, everyone spends all their time in the backyard.
22:13
So they don't actually, other than maybe across the fence or the board next to the median neighbor on each side when you're in the front yard, anyone walking by on the sidewalk is a conversation opportunity.
And and through that.
So, and, and it was interesting.
My interest in gardening while I was working for these national conservation organizations was one where there were opportunities to start giving talks to some of their biggest corporate donors on gardening.
22:38
Just when they found out that I had this, they said, we know we have these lunch and learns, we have things.
And so I got completely unrelated to what I was hired to do and it really a passion project started doing public education on doing more for the gardening world.
And also at that point, how to begin incorporating native plants and nature into that, which is through that How I Met Lorraine Johnson early on and we developed kind of a great friendship and and she did a the crazy article on my garden in Toronto.
23:13
And I mean, I was expecting a little column and it turns out it's like double page spread in the life section when Saturday.
And it just kind of that, you know, those things precipitate new opportunities and it's just kind of never really stopped.
23:28
It just keeps kind of building from there.
And I mean, you know that I've asked the Ray Johnson for that article, so she's going to hunt it down for me because I couldn't find it in the archives of Toronto Star.
But I mean, I did find so many other articles, but this one woodland retreat they called your backyard, and there probably is when you were up in Bayview closer to the bayview village area or yeah, July 2001, and it actually said that you planted more than 800 species of trees implants.
24:01
Probably not.
Maybe trees and plants together.
It was.
It was probably one of the craziest.
I just couldn't stop, you know, So I found niches and a lot of them were very small.
That's what people say, well, where are these 800?
And I'd get them down on their hands and knees and I'd say, well, see, here's here's this little kind of thing here.
24:21
And it was a largely shaded garden.
We had trees in the backyard that were there already.
So I really built it into a woodland garden, which a lot of people hadn't done in shade.
They only thought of hostas and things like that that would be appropriate there.
So I just tucked in.
24:38
I don't know how many species of Violet and everything.
I had all sorts of people had no idea where that many species of Trillium and there might only be one of each of them, but there was really diverse gardens.
And I was, my interest was to just show people so many different kinds of plants.
24:55
And I had quite a little tropical collection, subtropical collection going on as well at the time, so.
Well, it's like you said, you have to grow it to know it, right?
And I'm sure that's what got you.
So how do you go from that to, you know what?
I think I'll move down to Norfolk County and Grant and become a grand Erie Master Gardener and open a garden centre.
25:18
Like I say, it was very organic.
There were no grand plans to do that in the way when I was working with The Nature Conservancy Canada, they had opened an office here in Norfolk County and my partner works for Birds Canada, which is a national charitable organization for the conservationist study of birds who would also found an opportunity that literally is just down the road from where we now live in Port Rowan, ON.
25:46
So when there, there's a quite a hub of conservation action here in Northville County because of the opportunity in Southwestern Terry, which is quite rare with really the most natural habitat remaining of any other part of southern Ontario.
26:03
So Nature Conservancy had Norfolk County as one of its national focal points.
They had a regional office here.
But as a national staff, so long as we periodically went to Toronto for national meetings, we could work at a hub station like this.
26:19
So I did and so we moved down and that was initially what I was doing and still having this crazy big planet collection.
And in the back of my mind for a long time, I'd always imagine and had an interest in maybe doing something to promote flora more than just as as a focal point of what's important for both habitat and nature.
26:46
The I, you know, have huge respect and continue to obviously support the major organizations that used to work for there.
So there was a lot we always used to have the joke though, about it's all about the charismatic megafauna, tigers, the elephants, the bears, the whales, that all these things.
27:02
And I'd be the guy in the corner going, but the plants, the plants, the plants, you know, they're kind of fundamental, the whole thing.
And those organizations more recently have all moved into having a much bigger public focus and program areas to do exactly that.
But, um, I, I'd really thought it'd be really interesting.
27:19
I enjoyed designing gardens.
I'd worked with quite a few other landscapers.
They'd hired me just, and I actually didn't charge them at the time because I didn't think I was worthy of it to design gardens based on having had the exposure through Lorraine's article on that.
And every one of them ended up kind of being like, they kept coming back for more.
27:38
And I realized I have something here, you know, so maybe I should just kind of take a big step.
And you know, where we were living at the time in Norfolk, the property across the street from us, we had an opportunity to step in and purchase it.
And so I, we did.
27:55
And that was the place by imagine having the garden centre or the, the design business and their small nursery.
And it just kind of evolved from there.
I mean, it was not great luck.
I mean, I always tell a lot of people there's a lot of luck in a life, but you, but you know, you also need to be ready to grab it when it happens.
28:18
And so we did that and I imagined would have a very small business, which I still do.
I try to control it, have maybe quality over quantity, and also to keep pace with my own sort of interest in life.
And so it's built and grown and I'm really excited and happy about it.
28:41
I'm surprised in some ways by it.
And it's given me an opportunity to further delve into deeper, dive deeper maybe into the plant world.
The need to protect nature using native plants is kind of feeling like my whole different parts of life are now coming together, are coalescing and all.
29:06
I've always had a strong interest in public education.
I think it's important that we don't just hide from other people.
But you know, that's an opportunity to bring up your point of view and educate about some of the things that maybe people haven't experienced themselves.
So we do a lot of talks and workshops now and the staff that I have, one of them, Dylan Cowan, is also now doing Co presentation corporate presenting with me at a lot of these events, which is great.
29:39
It gives a different perspective from person in a very different point in his life.
And he's also going to become, hopefully the, I think the youngest master gardener in Ontario, potentially.
Refreshing when I met Dylan, his depth of knowledge and his passion for someone who's so young.
29:57
Just loved Dylan.
But hold on, Dylan told me about what the property was before you made it South Coast.
Can you tell that story?
Well, it yes, we, we've become very good friends with our neighbors who formerly owned it across the street and they had a farm that had gone through many iterations, the last iteration of which had been growing Gladiolus.
30:21
In fact, he grew 200 and very proud 237 varieties of Gladwell's property and said a lot to the Toronto Farm Floral Market as well.
At the time, however, the land had been retired, he was older and and his children had gone on to careers quite off the farm, so to speak.
30:44
And so I had originally approached them to maybe lease a bit of land and he said, well, I really like what you're proposing.
I gave him an idea of what we were thinking of doing.
And so we had the opportunity to actually purchase it.
And it was literally 20 years ago a, you'd called, I guess a fallow field.
31:02
It had been formally in agricultural plot of land.
And the rear of our property is actually a parcel of older growth Carolinian forest.
And in between we're restoring a lot of it.
So the nursery itself only occupies sort of two or three acres of it and we use the far reaches to do seed collection and and growing some of the plants we do propagate.
31:27
So the whole property is very much a part of the business.
But the intensive part is, is the the front area and everything growing there, which most people can't absorb right now.
Was this been planted within the last 20 years?
And you know, it's pretty as you have experienced, it's quite a dense little garden.
31:50
Lost in that front part of your nursery and I didn't want to be found.
Do you know what I mean, Kevin?
Yeah.
And I was with my husband and he enjoys doing this kind of horticultural stuff with me, but he really like got into it at one point.
32:05
I'm like, where's Dylan?
And they're in the back telling stories and, and about every tree and every plant.
Anyways, it it's just magic.
And I'm going to post a lot of pictures that I took there so people have an idea, but.
Just like let's.
Just talk about that whole like I want to call it like a demonstration garden that you walk through in the front forest.
32:24
I don't know what do you call that.
Um, basically it's like I sort of joke, it's sort of our storefront in a way, but it's mostly a bit of a demonstration garden.
One of the things I remember I when I started doing this, I thought, well, hey, I mean, I want to garden, but I also thought when I used to go to some very small scale nurseries that were sometimes a bit more specialized, one of the things they had done was to have accessible garden that you could see some of the plants that they were selling, but at a later stage in their life.
32:59
So a lot of people come and they'll buy something in a four inch pot, but wonder, well, what does it look like in two years for like how big is this tree get?
And you can say, well, there you go, that one was planted in 2007.
You can see the rate of growth and the size and what it looks like a bit bigger.
And I've had a lot of feedback on that, that they wished more nurseries could do that because it really is a quick opportunity to gauge if they're undecided about something, you know, they can read a label and says, well, grows to 100 feet tall.
33:26
Well, how fast, how big, what does it really look like?
Is it printable?
All these questions.
And so this was an opportunity to showcase a little bit of that.
It was also an opportunity to talk about ecological features.
33:42
Now that I want to see people incorporate their gardens.
So we have a brush pile, we have a water feature.
And we've been even since you've been to the garden, Tina, we have added more signage and more educational signage.
And this winter we're really going to be ramping that up.
33:58
I want people to walk through a garden and feel like they could do this in their own backyard.
So this isn't also a grand garden that people think might only go into state.
It's broken up.
It's a fairly small scale in many respects, as you saw.
34:14
But it means that people look at things, they go, I could do that in my backyard too, or I could do a little thing like that.
And I like the way this kind of, you know, it's a way to get people thinking, excited, hopefully motivated and also educated.
34:31
It's really, I think education right now is a big part of our nursery.
We really enjoy being able to tell people about the plants they're purchasing about we, we, we get a lot of joking at the nursery that I come here because you're the only person to tell me I can't buy this.
34:50
And it's.
And the reason being is that we grill everybody about.
Well, what, where are you planting it?
What's your soil?
How well, how much of A gardener are you?
Are you going to be watering this a drought?
Because I don't like to see people get discouraged when they spend money and then the plant dies.
35:07
So it so if it's not the right plant for what they're doing, it's like picking a pet.
Maybe it's like, yeah, there's certain ones fit certain lifestyles and we need to do that and people appreciate that.
I I would like to say honesty about it, but mostly education about it.
35:23
And they respond to that and they come back and they, they said, I, you know, I won't name names, but I can't get that at, let's say, a big box store when they have their seasonal plants out for sale or something like that.
They're looking for that plant knowledge, which I try to instill in all the young employees who come here.
35:42
And Dylan's a good example who came with a lot of plant knowledge like that already, but really building quickly on it.
And because I want people to feel like they're they're really leaving confident, more confident about what just purchased and what they're going to do with it.
Yeah, let's talk about some.
35:59
Of your zone pushers as you call it.
Was excited to come down to see some Magnolia species.
Can we talk a little bit?
About that, let's talk magnolias.
They are one of the, there's two groups of plants that are that I'm super fond of.
36:15
One are rhododendrons and azaleas.
The other one are magnolias.
And we don't have a lot of that in the native floor of southern Ontario.
We have 1 Magnolia species, cucumber tree.
But I did a lot of my graduate research in the Appalachian Mountains in the United States, eastern US, where things like magnolias are sometimes a dominant tree and some of the forest stands.
36:37
I was working in a very different take on what you see up here.
And so one of the things I became interested in, in terms of at the time, people used to put us under the thing of zone pushers when you start planted things from further South in the north to see how they perform.
36:55
And part of it was actually, I've still got the science guy in me.
It was, well, I'm, I'm just curious how these things will do in a Southern Ontario climate.
And I've done a lot, a lot of my, again, educational background touched and tapped into a lot of the tree migration that happened post glaciation and all that stuff.
37:13
So I, I mean, you know, things aren't static in the natural world.
They move around, they respond to climate.
The challenge we have right now is that thing is changing at such a pace that, that these things don't know how to respond that quickly to it.
But so, so the garden has a lot of species from people might call them near natives, but they're sort of near, near natives.
37:34
They're a little bit farther than just next door to us in some cases.
And I think again what the plants sort of teach me in doing that is we still see sometimes on the really tender ones from further South.
And when I say further South, I'm talking like northern Florida, southern Georgia, way South in a bit of die back in a cold winter.
37:54
But the all of the others are performing magnificently.
And I, you know, I I've, I've got photos from when I was in that area in the 1980s doing my research.
So 40 years later, I'm getting photos from them growing in my garden, flowering at the same date as they were in Kentucky or Tennessee.
38:19
And this is kind of intrigued me.
And it it speaks, you see, you know, hardiness zone maps where they keep updating and changing them and the hardiness those just keep moving north and north and north and north.
And you wonder what's that real?
Well, the plants are kind of telling me, yeah, that's real.
38:36
I can live in southern Ontario and the seedlings are coming up beneath them in the sense that, you know, they're getting their life cycle right through in our climate regime.
So that what was sort of initially just a curiosity on so I'm pushing is now brought me into a place where it has me very concerned as I have been a long time about climate change.
38:59
And also beginning to see not only the fact that southern species are now performing so well with Southern Ontario, but after last summer's big drought and the heat and going around to some of our native Woodlands and seeing how some of our more temperate species appear to be really suffering and, and not performing as well maybe as we would have hoped for that.
39:21
This is a, this is a major shot across the bow, though.
We got to wake up and do things.
One of the things I, I have felt strongly about is we need to be very hopeful and think about actions we can take that are hopeful, but we have to appreciate the challenge nature is facing right now.
39:40
And it's not just loss of habitat.
It's that, you know, the climate things are growing in.
It's not the climate of 40 years ago.
It's not the climate of 300 years ago.
And if we're my philosophy is beginning to shift to if we're really going to do nature justice and service in our gardening world, we need to be incorporating species that may not be locally growing right now.
40:02
We need to look at the possibility that we need to help these things adapt and we need a learning gardens.
We have to be very cautious how we apply that into surrounding natural areas.
But I think we can learn from gardens about seeing how plants and one of the examples I use in all my talks now is read by.
40:20
So it was not that long ago.
I mean red buds, this small tree if any of you yours don't know.
That flower is beautifully pink flowers in the spring.
It's just absolutely gorgeous.
And so of course gardeners are keen on that.
It I mean, look at this thing pop in the spring and it it's natural range with South of Ontario.
40:40
You know, there's some debate about whether there was one tree hanging on at the tip southern tip of Pelee Island at one point, but the vast majority of its range is South of the boundaries of, you know, province of Ontario.
Well, we planted it.
We, we helped it migrate northward by being gardeners who loved this species that now so many gardeners are telling me it's becoming a weed in my garden.
41:02
Like the seedlings are coming up everywhere.
They're giving them away.
I have photos of little, you know, streetside stands of free red buds in little pots that they pulled out of the garden.
And the tree is basically telling us, well, the climates warmed enough.
41:17
This is this is part of my natural range now I'm migrating north and you guys help me just move fast enough.
Like, we moved it at a rate that it could basically adapt.
And here in Norfolk County, we see it now coming into the natural areas.
It's now beginning to take on its role in natural areas as much as it used to do in southern Michigan or Ohio or Indiana.
41:38
And I mean, these are all signals that gardeners have contributed toward.
But really providing I think that sort of evidence that boy, if that's happening, but what about all the species that aren't getting that help from gardeners or we aren't fully aware of?
41:55
I think we have to take examples like that and really think hard about, you know, how we need to create gardens that are going to support the plants, but also the fact that species that pollinators, butterflies and birds that depend on these, they're trying to move north in terms of climate change as well, but they may not yet be finding the community plant communities habitat.
42:20
So this this is becoming a big motivator for me.
And I think that we keep being surprised at what we find when we, when we look at the role of our gardens in the plants we're putting in there.
So the garden I have is almost truly a central Appalachian garden in many respects.
42:39
We have all our local natives, but we also have sour wood and, and big leaf Magnolia and umbrella Magnolia and even southern Magnolia and things like that.
Sweet Bay Magnolia are real collection of them.
And some do better than others.
But it's, it's interesting for people to visit that and see these species and see how well they're performing and begin to appreciate.
43:04
It's always an opportunity to educate about, well, what does this telling you about the environment and how it's changing.
There's obviously some fantastic nurseries out there that specialize and I appreciate their specialization, but the unique thing about South Coast gardens is the diversity, right?
43:24
Talk a little bit about Rhodos and azaleas.
So where I am up here in Toronto as a master gardener, we get a lot of questions about failed rotos and what am I doing wrong.
So tell me about, yeah, some tips or some some losses or success stories about rhodos and azaleas.
43:42
Well, I mean, I can share the frustration.
I've killed quite a few over the years myself, but we have a collection of probably now over 300 varieties and species in the garden scattered through I I think I first became interested in rhododendrons, especially because I was never in some ways a good Canadian.
44:05
Cold weather is not my thing in a big way and I remember seeing my first row to Denver as a kid with leaves in the middle of winter unfolded and there's this shrub with actually green leaves and January and I thought it was the coolest thing going that I didn't even know that could was possible.
44:22
You had up needles if you were going to be green in winter, not big fat leaves.
So out of that, but was really born at fascination with them all my life.
So I I was able once I started gardening to use more and more of them and I just began to be more interested.
44:39
The challenge I found and, and the, the way around the frustration with it is with rhododendrons, it's all about the roots and you have to have not only the right soil pH, but we drowned so many of them.
And we don't plant them right in the sense that they have very, very fibrous roots so that you have to, and they stay in the upper part of the soil spectrum.
45:01
They're not deep rooted so you can't drown them.
So if you're stuck with clay soil, you really need to plant them on the clay, not in the clay and build some good organic matter up around them.
And we've recently been donated a few mature rhododendrons from a garden in the Niagara area.
45:20
And who would that have been there for 40 years?
And when we went to move them, we had basically just peeled them off the top.
It was.
Remarkable because the gentleman had built a big thick layer of good decaying leaf material and stuff and that's where they lived for 40 years and they never really had an interest in going into that hard clay.
45:41
So it's, it's about prepping the site, not drowning them.
But the other key thing I'd like to say is they are often grown commercially now in quite peaty soil.
So if you don't get the roots into the soil quickly and it does take time, the roto they dry out very quick.
46:00
And when that all that the most of the roots are in dries out, it's exceptionally hard to rewet.
So the idea is we're using your fingers to break that root ball up and bring as many of the roots up so that they're really going to be mostly within 2 to 4 inches or 10 centimeters at the top soil.
46:17
And that enables them to connect into the other organic matter and you know, and then water them for the first few years to get them established.
So the other thing too is the one challenge they have in our climate is that if you've got leaves, you lose water when it gets warm in winter on through the leaves.
46:34
And if our ground is frozen, the roots aren't resupplying moisture back into those leaves.
So we get Browning and die back from desiccation, winter desiccation.
So I began telling people that for the first few years, until they're really established in sort of midwinter, if you can put a screen in front of it to block it from the South and the West sun late in the afternoon.
47:00
So late February, March, while the ground is frozen but the sun's getting stronger, you'll keep those leaves cooler and they won't just much water.
And generally speaking, your plant will come and once it's really established, they seem to get by that a little bit that they're never damaged as much.
47:16
So are you talking about like a burlap screen?
I actually prefer to use a white sheet because the white reflects the light better than burlap.
And the other thing is people will get busier going away for the winter.
So they put the screening up in November and by the time the plant really needs it in late February or March, it's either been incorporated into a squirrel nest somewhere or some wet snowstorm or ice storm is pulled it down.
47:42
And so I try to say put your stakes in in the late fall, but put the sheet up around Groundhog Day because up until then the sun's just too weak to really cause as much problem.
It's that late winter period when the sun's warming the leaves more, but the roots are still frozen and that's the six week window that we lose probably more.
48:01
We're seeing more damage done to rhododendrons than anything else, and.
So wow, that's a fantastic tip.
So how far north would a Roto's native range go?
In the yeah, well, there's actually rhododendrons, not in ones we would use in gardens per se that go into the Arctic that are very low growing in the tree line.
48:25
The majority that we really should be using in southern Ontario are a group we like to call the ironclads because they seem to perform well.
So the parent species is Rhododendron Catawba yensi.
The Catawba rhododendron, which is native to the Appalachian Mountains not far from us.
48:42
And because it's in a continental zone, it that species is adapted to the swings in temperature we often get here in southern Ontario and a bit of a drier climate.
So they are super well adapted and they're the best candidates for success with rhododendron.
So always kind of look for that grouping of species that have Catawba or Catawba Ansi in their, in their botanical name and they will do probably likely the best that you're going to have.
49:09
I, I always recommend those for people wanting to see if they can grow them.
There are some new ones that are coming out of newish ones that are coming out of Scandinavia where they've used some other parentage to develop some very hearty ones.
And they're seemingly doing really well now.
Things like Hagan, Helsinki University and things like that.
49:28
But the things like Braselton, katabi and see all them, the white one think those species do really well.
English roseum, Roseum elegans.
Those are some of the cultivars that are pretty darn tough.
That's the one I got.
49:44
Good.
OK, so Kevin, are you going to take a break?
Does your nursery close going into winter or in late fall now?
It does take a break.
We stay open till the end of October on our Thursday, Friday, Saturday hours, but then we do close the nursery for the winter and we'll be opening up again next spring.
50:06
But in between we do all sorts of workshops and talks and other planning for projects that will be coming up next year.
In the winter, we take advantage of the time to get down and draft some of the things we want to do, so we always stay busy, no question about it.
50:24
Kevin, thank you so much for the magic and thank you for the hopeful stories.
And I'm going to come down and see you in the spring, make sure you're there.
This time we didn't, we didn't even talk about long point.
But I'm going to have to get you back to talk about the observatory because I know you're a big birder and, and I'm actually speaking to someone from Birds Canada in in a couple weeks.
50:46
So that's really exciting too.
So, yeah, yeah, because I think it's, I think we're going to talk about Project Peter Watch, which is really exciting.
Well, so yes, we, I'm actually helping, I'm helping them with this program that's called Gardening for Birds.
51:04
I've been contracted to build that a little bit bigger this year.
But we've also been, Dylan and I have been brought on to do a fall event on October, Sunday, October 18th.
It's going to be celebrating birds in the garden and it is a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Project Feeder Watch.
51:21
So we are working with them to basically say, you know what I mean?
In your yard, you build a native garden because we've done demonstration gardens we installed last year for Birds Canada headquarters in Port Rowan.
51:38
And so we're going to be talking about those and teaching people about them at this event.
But we're celebrating 40 years and over the 40th anniversary of Project Feeder Watch.
So we're saying that in addition to your feeders, if you build a native garden, you've got like the best possible place to bring birds in to feed on native seed, what you're augmenting that with and your feeders.
51:59
The two programs just are naturals to go together in a backyard or frontyard, OK.
So we're going to be very excited to do that.
We've got to think a great program coming together.
I think it's going to be down very soon.
And so that's one of the things we get busy with so.
52:16
I'm going to watch for that and that'll be in the episode notes for sure.
Kevin, thank you so much for your time and I'll be fantastic work you do for for nature and take really good care.
Well, and just thank you too, Tina, for all you do with these podcasts and giving people an opportunity to give a voice to all the work that's being done for nature by so many.
52:38
Appreciate it, It's been fun.
Kevin.
Thanks, Tina
