Thank you to each and every one of you for your part in a wonderful and amazing year at our museum garden.
You have done phenomenal work this year, each in your own unique way - sharing ideas, sharing seeds, starting a native plant bed in your own yard, sharing plants from your yard, starting seeds and raising seedlings to expand the species in our garden, planting, figuring out how to water the beautiful transplants when the sprinklers weren't working using truck loads of water and making extra trips in the long-lasting extreme heat days, digging out the quackgrass that once seemed endless but is now almost gone, removing the sick or overly rambunctious native plants, starting programs to share the garden treasures with children and their parents, collecting seeds, labeling plants and sharing your enthusiasm for growing native plants with everyone who asked to help them make beautiful neighbourhoods.
I am so blessed to be working with kind and generous people who show how much they care about the natural world with smiles, enthusiasm even when the work is hard, and curiosity for what is possible in a world that seems nothing like the one we knew a year ago.
Yet, being connected with our group working in the garden has shown us that some things really do endure beyond the struggles of the moment: green shoots pushing their way to the warmth in Spring, beautiful flowers and grasses feeding buzzy and fluttery and "creepy crawly" tiny treasures living in our patch of peace, camaraderie of common purpose, and hearts filling with joy seeing and touching and hearing the abundant life around us while we work in the garden.
We will be planning the beds for next year, meeting with two of the city parks and open spaces maintenance divisions about supplying seeds and growing plants for the parks, exploring and defining our pollinator corridor project to understand we can best help the migrating birds, mammals and insects through growing native plants, and connecting with WWF Biopolis.