Trinity Bellwoods Park has its famous white squirrel, making rare appearances shared delightedly on social media, a kind of urban badge one achieves in downtown Toronto. However, the Toronto Botanical Gardens (TBG) in North York may have the city’s friendliest squirrel, who stands on his hind legs with his hands clasped together, plaintively looking you in the eye.

“Go away, Freddie,” says Paul Zammit, sighing. “People have been feeding him.”

Zammit is the director of horticulture at the TBG, and as he surveys the site he points out squirrels, hawks, ground hogs and mouselike voles that make their home among the 3,600 different kinds of plants he cares for.

“Gardens are opportunity,” says Zammit, wandering between planting beds, naming off dozens of different kinds. “A garden isn’t just esthetic, there’s an opportunity to educate.”

Bees are one way to educate. On site there is both a “bee hotel” and collection of hives they call a pollinator garden. Zammit explains many bees don’t sting, nor do many produce honey, but they are integral to the garden’s biodiversity. Apart from Zammit, there is only one full time and one seasonal gardener to take care of all of this, but 40 volunteer gardeners also pitch in.

The TBG is every backyard green thumb’s dream, with nearly 20 themed gardens, each with a different purpose. Even the paved surfaces around the gardens are permeable, collecting rainwater that is stored in underground cisterns and used to water the plants. Smaller, raised-bed gardens could inspire people living in apartments without a backyard of their own, and they even grow potatoes in blue box recycling bins. The TBG also does programs with youth in priority neighbourhoods, many of whom don’t have the opportunity to garden.

Toronto’s first certified straw bale shed is here too, complete with green roof. Using straw as a natural insulator, it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. “Some people have visited the gardens and built their own at home,” says Zammit.

The TBG is a charitable organization with 2,000 members and a partner with the city of Toronto, as their four acres are within the larger Edwards Gardens Park at Lawrence Ave. East and Leslie St.

In 1954, businessman Rupert Edwards sold the gardens, rockery and nine-hole golf course he had built on his property, which extended down into Wilket Creek ravine, to then-Metro Toronto. Edwards wanted it to be a public park, and the Gardens opened in 1956 just as the area was evolving from farmland to subdivisions, particularly across Leslie St. in Don Mills.

Soon after opening, the Garden Club of Toronto established their location within the park, and in 1965 moved into a building designed by Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama. Nowadays that mid-century building is connected to a larger LEED Silver Certified addition completed in 2005 and designed by Montgomery Sisam Architects. LEED is a system that rates how sustainable and green a building is, including the construction process, and the “Terraced Garden” by the parking lot was formed out of the waste rubble the new building created.

Zammit points out the arbor running along the front of the building holding up a tangle of currently bare vines. “It allows maximum light in the winter, and provides shadows and shade in the summer,” he says. “It’s the power of trees.”

The site is ever-changing and unpredictable, especially this season with our delayed spring. The TBG also changes the theme of some gardens. This summer their “Kitchen Garden” will focus on plants used in cocktails and smoothies.

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Walking up the “Spiral Mound” garden, much of the site comes into view. A lush place with thousands of individual parts, it’s a natural city within this city we’ve built around it.