that time i got caught up in a lawn war between my neighbours (part 1)
okay, so last week one of our neighbours, who shall remain nameless, called bylaw on our next door neighbour, L, because her lawn was only half mowed. it had been 44C and 45C, with humidex, and i don’t blame her for not cutting her whole lawn. also, it’s her place and she can do what she wants. apparently not.
L is a single mom of two, has two dogs, and adopted the cat of the woman who sold her her house because it needed a home. she works in healthcare, she’s really funny, and she’s a normal human. i’m telling you this because i want you to know she’s not a troll who lives under a bridge. and even if she was, she should have been left alone with her half mowed lawn.
now, when bylaw showed up to give her notice - cut your lawn or face a $120 fine per day you don’t comply, the bylaw officer took it upon himself to issue a notice for us as well, because part of our front garden is wildflowers - daisies and brown eyed susans. i also have tall clover, which i know most people see as a weed (it’s a legume) and it smells beautiful, and the pollinators love them.
i love the garden. birds play in it, it’s full of pollinators, and it’s my way of offering food and shelter in a neighbourhood that is a bit of a food desert for animals of the non-human variety.
but to the bylaw officer, my wildflowers are weeds. and when i read the bylaw, i was not surprised to find that there was no definition of ‘tall grasses’ or of ‘weeds’. it’s so archaic - and also hadn’t been updated since 2018. yikes.
we went back and forth with bylaw for over a week - they had no definitions and couldn’t provide us with a list of ‘banned’ blooms, both men who showed up at my door proceeded to tell me that they weren’t ‘flower people’ and didn’t know anything about flowers, which is fine, unless you’re policing mine. then you should probably know a few things.
to make a long story short, it didn’t matter which way i offered to compromise, from putting non-native plants around the outside and keeping the inside naturalized, moving them to the back garden (bylaw applies to my back garden too, friends), to the bylaw supervisor himself pointing out if we took them to court they would lose because their bylaw is vague and unenforceable, they would not relent and we had to dig out a bunch of the plants for my parents to rehome and then we mowed the rest even while bumble bees and smaller native bees flitted from bloom to bloom. we were literally taking the food out from right under them.
anyways, i hate it now. obviously.
while he was here, the bylaw supervisor remarked that he was in charge of revising the bylaw since the city had just amalgamated a local area and if i wanted to send him an email with some things i’d like to see in it, here was his card. i can’t partly help but feel this was him asking me to do his job for him. how is someone who knows nothing about plants going to write a bylaw about plants?
being the spiteful and petty person that i am, i decided instead to write a proposal requesting the city change the bylaw entirely, embracing pollinator gardens, including specifics, like which plants are noxious or poisonous and should be banned, etc. and pointing out clear discrepancies between their bylaw and what the city’s website writes about wanting to be a green community, including their green development guidelines that are themselves in direct conflict with their own bylaw.
not gonna lie, it was very satisfying to write that in 1996 a woman took the city of toronto to court over her pollinator garden and the judge ruled that not only was the bylaw vague and unenforceable, but also that banning such gardens were against Sandra Bell’s Canadian Charter rights because it kept her from expressing her environmental beliefs and values. that’s how i felt. even though i stood there and explained the purpose of my garden, named the plants, named the pollinators, and they could literally see the pollinators in it, bylaw wasn’t even remotely willing to consider just … walking away.
since then, there have been several similar court cases[ii] regarding the constitutionally protected right to a natural garden. planting a pollinator/natural garden should not be considered an act of civil disobedience and people should not have to waste time challenging by-laws in court in order to assert their Canadian Charter rights.
so i drafted my draft and i emailed it to every city counsellor and the mayor, asking them to make an evidence-based decision on the bylaw when they are presented with it and i cc’d the three bylaw officers we’ve dealt with over the week. i realize i’ve basically written the bylaw for them, but sometimes it’s easier to do it yourself than to hope that someone else who knows exactly nothing about plants gets it right. i also feel like it technically forces bylaw’s hand, because now the city counsellors and the mayor have all seen the same information that bylaw has. and the evidence is right there. and they’ll also know that it’s MY WORK, not research that bylaw did on their own, that informs and directs the bylaw. they are now all in the know about other city bylaws that are specific and embrace pollinator friendly practices. if they choose to do other, they can be challenged on it in court. and no one wants that.
i wish i could explain to you how it felt, standing in my yard thursday afternoon, two bylaw officers fully dressed in uniform explaining to me that they weren’t flower people, but that the whole thing had to be removed because, shrug, that’s what the bylaw says.
habitat loss is the leading cause of pollinator decline[i]. accessible food and shelter have become less available, attributable to urban development, agricultural intensification and monocropping, and pesticide exposure[ii]. and in some neighbourhoods, like mine, it can be hard for pollinators and other creatures to find food because so many people have turf lawn with zero clover or violets in it. i’m just as guilty as the next person. you can see in the top picture that i have plants that aren’t pollinator friendly. double bloom peonies aren’t really used by bees or butterflies because the double petals makes it too hard to access, but i love them. but that’s why i was trying to make up for my own selfishness with other flowers of the pollinator friendly variety.
all this over a half mowed lawn during a week that temperatures were soaring, when heat warnings were issued, and severe thunderstorm watches adorned the top of the weather network page.
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[i] Kline, O., Joshi, N.K. 2020 Mitigating the effects of habitat loss on solitary bees in agricultural ecosystems, Agriculture, 10, 115.
[ii] Sanchez-Bayo, F., Goka, K., 2014 Pesticide residues and bees – A risk assessment, PLoS One, 9, e94482.
Kopit, A.M. Pitts-Singer, T.L. 2018 Routes of pesticide exposure in solitary, cavity-nesting bees. Environmental Entomology, 47, 499-510.
[i] https://foecanada.org/2022/08/protect-pollinators-call-for-by-law-modernization/
[ii]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/606c9e7dc06e361edcf23d6e/t/6192d6acb574f11f661d81a8/1637013164602/7+Gardens+Brought+Before+the+Law+essay+in+Book+of+Lists.pdf
SHEESH. Good for you. What nonsense you've had to endure. I hear about neighborhoods policing people's property, but that is not my experience in the ones I've lived in. Our yard/garden would be a nightmare in those places. At a minimum, we just overseeded our lawn with micro clover and it's beautiful and the pollinators love it.
Admittedly the downside of NOT policing such things is that people like my neighbors two houses down can let their back yard fill up with actually noxious weeds that reseed into everyone else's yard, but honestly, I'll take that and deal with it over the alternative.
Thank you! You did good for all the people in the world, for the world itself and, of course, the bees. How ridiculous has the world become? We pay out of our income to "help" the world yet cannot let the world grow to help itself for free.... Thank you.