Tag Archives: Toronto History

From Wharf to Table

Alas, this is a special day. Our long awaited Harvest Table has arrived in the park. There is a story, of course that goes with this table. The heritage wood was part of Toronto’s original docks – some of them built as early as the 1830s. In the 1880s, the docks were covered with landfill so that the city could expand southwards and new docks were built further south.  A century later, developers excavated the land to build new condos and found the original docks perfectly preserved. The wood was salvaged and we were lucky enough to acquire some of it from the wonderful Lambos of Canadian Salvaged Timber Corporation in Toronto. The rough design for the table was done by landscape architect Jane Hutton and OCAD graduate Casey Wong built the table with the help of Mark Wilson of Metal Art Studio. As you may have noticed in a previous blog, landscape architect Sander Freedman of Sander Design integrated our lovely tabletop into the urban forest booth of the Green Living Show where it made it’s grand debut. So what’s next for this lovely table?

Well, we’ve got some temporary benches from the Green Living show that we’ll be using with it for a while and we’re raising money to make some matching benches that go with the table. Soon Parks and Rec will put the table and the benches on concrete footing. Ultimately, it will seat up to 20 people and will be a place for orchard picnics, pruning workshop, fruit sorting, chatting, relaxing, having fun and other stuff.  The wood is old pine, so each spring our volunteers will go out and sand down the wood and prepare it for the year to come. We hope the table will be a place for us to play, learn and socialize together for many years to come!

Toronto's Original Docklands...covered by landfill for over a century

Uncovering Toronto's Historic Docks

Orchard Harvest Table in Park

Living History

Community orchards exist in the UK, in Boston, in Philadelphia and in Vancouver. But I thought they were new to Toronto. Not so, I discovered, when talking to a local resident Harold Freeman who grew up in the neighborhood 60 years ago and remembers playing in the fruit trees as a young boy.

This was a different kind of community orchard. It was an orchard planted in the early 1900s and later abandoned. The community shared the produce with interested residents harvesting the trees and using the fruit. As that abandoned orchard was parceled off and sold to developers building new homes here in the 1940s, the fruit trees were part of the deal and so the new houses were built with these mature fruit trees in their front or back yards.

As an adult, Harold returned to Cedarvale to buy one of these homes. And his new house, like many others in the neighborhood, had a yard filled with fruit trees. Since then the two apricots, a pear and a plum tree in his yard have died of old age. But Harold still has a beautiful apple tree in his backyard which I visited recently (top photo) It’s the biggest apple tree I’ve ever seen. It’s multistemmed. And at the ripe old age of 80 to 100 years old, it still looks beautifully healthy.

Harold’s neighbor Eileen has four fruit trees in her yard as well. “The pears are delicious!” she says. (Eileen is on the far right in the bottom photo)

I’m hoping to return in the fall to taste them first hand!

Apple Tree from the Historic Orchard in Cedarvale

Apple Tree from the Historic Orchard in Cedarvale

Four more old fruit trees, possibly from the historic Cedarvale orchard

Four more old fruit trees, possibly from the historic Cedarvale orchard