Turning a new leaf in suburbia

Also published on Resilience

Social critic James Howard Kunstler referred to suburban sprawl as “the greatest misallocation of resources in history.”1 In his view, “The suburbs have three destinies – as slums, salvage yards, and ruins.”2

While agreeing that suburbs in their current form are “hopelessly maladapted to the coming world of energy descent,” permaculture pioneer David Holmgren nevertheless believes that “Low-density detached housing with gardens is the ideal place for beginning a bottom-up revolution to recreate the household and community non-monetary economies that our recent forebears took for granted as the basis for an adequate, even comfortable, life.”3

Suburbs have not come to an end – I’m my region, in fact, they are still adding suburban sprawl like there’s no tomorrow. Signs of positive transformations of suburban developments exist across North America, but you might need to look carefully to notice.

This post will look at some of those signs of transformation and how they might be accelerated. In contrast to the last post, Can car-dependent suburbs become walkable communities?, this post and the next will focus mostly on small-scale initiatives.

The major theme of this series of posts has been the contrast between car-dependency and walkable communities. Walkability is a transportation issue, of course, but it is more than that.

It is often said that transportation planning and land use planning are two sides of the same coin.4 It’s important to look at both issues, not only as they are addressed in government policies, but also as they are addressed by individuals or small groups of neighbours.

For the purposes of this discussion, three key features of suburbia are:

  1. zoning rules that mandate the separation of residential districts from commercial districts and industrial districts;
  2. the default assumption that people will drive cars from their homes to workplaces, stores, cultural events, and recreational facilities; and
  3. the organization of the resulting car traffic into maze-like local residential streets, larger collector streets, six-to-eight lane major arterials, and expressways.

These basic parameters have many implications as discussed in previous posts. The practice of driving everywhere means there also needs to be parking at every location, so that a typical suburban district has several parking spaces for every car. (See How parking ate North American cities.)

The funneling of traffic to bigger but more widely spaced roads leads to traffic jams during every rush hour, and dangerous speeding when traffic volumes are low. The dangerous collector and arterial roads put vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, at risk of death or serious injury in getting from their own immediate neighbourhoods to other neighbourhoods. (See Building car-dependent neighbourhoods).

And the low residential and employment density of sprawl makes it difficult and expensive to build public transit systems that run frequently and within a short walk of most residents. The result is that suburban sprawl seldom has good transit, which in turn strongly reinforces car-dependency. (See Recipes for car dependency.)

Change will not be optional

Notwithstanding the difficulties of transforming the suburban pattern, I believe it will happen for this simple reason:

That which is not sustainable will not be sustained.

First, suburban sprawl is not financially sustainable, particularly in the governance arrangements we have in North America. As Strong Towns has demonstrated through numerous articles, podcasts and videos, North American suburban expansion has been a Ponzi scheme. While expansion infrastructure is usually paid for through a combination of federal government and developer funding, local municipalities are left with the liabilities for infrastructure maintenance and eventual replacement. That wouldn’t be a problem if the new districts could raise sufficient property tax revenue to cover these liabilities. But they don’t.

Low-density housing tracts, interspersed with one-story shopping centers and strip malls, all surrounded by expansive parking, don’t bring in nearly as much property tax/acre as denser, multi-story developments in older downtown districts do. The low tax revenue, coupled with very high maintenance-replacement liabilities for extensive roadways, parking lots, and utilities, eventually catch up with municipalities. And then? Some can keep the game going, simply by getting more funding grants for even further sprawl – thus the “Ponzi scheme” moniker – but eventually they run out of room to expand.

As Charles Marohn has written, “Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that’s just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes.”5

Worth noting is that as climate instability forces infrastructure reconstructions to happen more frequently and to higher standards, the pressure on municipal governments will be even more intense. And as energy costs spike higher, fewer residents will be able to afford the long commutes in private cars that they now take for granted.

When suburban municipalities face bankruptcy, what will the choices be? Certainly one choice is to abandon some areas to become, in Kunster’s words “slums, salvage yards, and ruins.” For reasons explained below, I think it’s more likely that municipalities will allow more varied and denser developments than are currently permitted by zoning codes, so that a larger property tax base can help cover infrastructure liabilities.

Suburban sprawl is also likely to prove unsustainable at the level of individual homes. Debt has grown rapidly in recent decades, and a great deal of that debt is in the form of mortgages by homeowners – many of whom live in the far reaches of suburbia.

Jeff Speck wrote “The typical American working family now lives in suburbia, where the practice of drive-’til-you-qualify reigns supreme.”6 Due to a dearth of affordable homes inside American cities (and in Canadian cities as well), new home buyers have only been able to qualify for mortgages far from urban cores. The price for somewhat cheaper housing, however, is that each working member of the family is likely to need a car to get to and from work. In Speck’s words,

“The average American family now spends about $14,000 per year driving multiple cars. … Remarkably, the typical ‘working’ family, with an income of $20,000 to $50,000, pays more for transportation than for housing.”7

When families are paying for the biggest mortgage they qualify for plus the cost of keeping two or more cars on the road, the shock of higher interest rates, a rise in unemployment, and/or higher gas costs can be too much to sustain. Referring to the 2007-2009 oil price spike and economic downturn, Speck explains that “as gasoline broke $4.00 per gallon and the housing bubble burst, the epicenter of foreclosures occurred at the urban periphery.”8

In coming economic crises, on a collective scale or an individual scale, I wouldn’t expect the suburbs to be abandoned or to be torn down en masse and rebuilt. Frankly, I don’t expect society to be wealthy enough to simply start over in other places or following other patterns. Instead, I would expect both municipal governments and individuals to muddle through by making a wide range of adjustments. And some of those are starting already.

The household as a place of production, just consumption

As Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson have written, “Built environment change is slow and contested. In a developed city, turnover (additions and alterations) in the built stock is typically much less than five per cent per annum.”9 But while buildings, lots and streets may change slowly, the activities that go on there may change more rapidly.

One significant change has been happening already, in spite of zoning rules that typically disallow the change.

In a post titled “Your Home Office Might Be Illegal,” Edward Erfurt wrote,

“The frontline zoning battle for the right to work out of your home hit center stage during COVID. Under most zoning codes, we are all breaking the law.”10

He adds that “Working from home and working out of a home has become normalized. … Others have even taken the next incremental step of leaving a corporate job to open a new business in our homes.”

Simply turning a blind eye to zoning violations is one thing, but Erfurt urges municipalities to take a proactive approach:

“Home Occupations should be permitted by right in every zoning category in your community. Whether you are working remotely for a large corporation or running your own business, you should have the right to do this within your home. Cities should encourage home occupations as a tenet of their economic development strategy, and a single line could be added to any code to focus the planners.”

Robert Rice describes how the dynamic is now playing out in Houston:

“This is how the Suburban Experiment really ends: not with explosive legislation, but with regular people making the best of what they have. In Houston, what we have is houses. I propose that these new house-businesses, home offices, and de-facto multifamily residences are the first increment of intensity for a suburban neighborhood.”11

Some of these changes are taking place in accord with current law and some in defiance of current law. However, many jurisdictions across North America are now changing rules to allow modestly greater density in residential areas, including in suburbs. Travis Beck recently wrote:

“Minneapolis, for example, ended single-family zoning effective January 2020, allowing the construction of duplexes and triplexes on all residential lots. Oregon passed legislation in 2019 requiring cities with populations above 25,000 to allow construction of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes on all residential lots. And California’s 2021 Senate Bill 9 allows the construction of duplexes on residential lots and the splitting of sufficiently large lots into two parcels, effectively allowing four housing units to be built in place of one.”12

Even the province of Ontario, infamous for bungled attempts to enrich land speculators by fast-tracking sprawl on previously protected lands, recent legislation specifies that “up to three residential units are permitted ‘as of right’ on most land zoned for one home in residential areas without needing a municipal by-law amendment.”13

Intermittent additions of one or two residences per lot may seem insignificant compared with the scope of the housing crisis; such zoning changes are certainly not sufficient to make suburbia sustainable. Yet such changes provide for greater flexibility in housing options and promote actions by individual property owners and small contractors, in contrast to the large developers who are often spoken of as the only actors who can solve the housing crisis. Paradoxically, the pace of densification on a lot-by-lot basis could pick up in an economic downturn, if significant numbers of homeowners decide it makes sense to downsize their overly-large residences by creating one or two rental units.

It’s not only the number of residential units and the number of residences that matter, but also the kinds of activities that happen in residential neighbourhoods. As discussed above, a large number of suburban homes are now de facto workplaces. The work done in and around homes, whether or not that work is counted in official economic statistics, could become a greater factor in the suburban economy.

The Victory Garden movements of the last century encouraged people to raise food in their own yards, whether they lived in cities, the nascent suburbs, small towns or rural areas. In the US, during WW I about one-third of US vegetables came from Victory Gardens. By 1943 during WW II, there were 12 million Victory Gardens in cities. A Wikipedia article notes that “While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism.” (Image on left is a WWI-era poster from Canada; at right is WWII image from use. Images and data from Wikipedia article Victory garden.)

One of the key features of most suburbs, visible from the street or from the air, is the small- or medium-size plot of lawn adjacent to each single-family dwelling. But the biological desert of the standard lawn can easily be replaced with something much more life-giving. Alexander and Gleeson write:

“Digging up backyards and front yards and planting fruit and vegetables, keeping chickens, and composting, are important practices, reconnecting people with the seasons, the soil, and the food on their plates. In the words of permaculture activist and educator, Adam Grubb, we should ‘eat the suburbs’.”14

A frequent objection to this idea is that few people could raise all their own food on a typical suburban lot. Quite true, and quite beside the point. More relevant is that many and perhaps most suburban residents could raise a significant portion of their fruits, vegetables, herbs, eggs, and other foods if they choose. In the process, they and their communities would become more resilient while promoting greater local biodiversity.

Suburban landscapes often include many other strips of green, kept semi-alive through regular mowing and sometimes watering: strips between areas of parking lots, in front of strip malls, on medians within major arterials, within the “cloverleafs” of expressway interchanges. Alexander and Gleeson invite us to imagine the transformation of these areas:

“Over time, we can imagine food production crossing beyond household boundaries, too, re-commoning public space. This is already under way, as people reclaim nature strips for food production, plant fruit trees in the neighborhood, establish community gardens, and cultivate unused land through “guerrilla gardening.’”15

Alexander and Gleeson write in an Australian context. In North America, a great example of similar change is the work of permaculture proponent Jan Spencer in Eugene, Oregon. Over the past twenty-three years he has transformed his quarter-acre suburban lot into an oasis. Starting with an 1,100 square foot home fronted by a driveway big enough to park six cars, Spencer gradually turned the driveway and surrounding spaces into three-dimensional gardens, added enough water tanks to collect thousands of gallons of rainwater to keep his gardens happy through the typically dry local summer, and built a 400 square foot living space for himself so he could rent out three rooms in the house.16

As Spencer explains, a key permaculture principle is to design each change so that it meets multiple purposes. With his changes he has, among other things, increased the residential density of his property, provided an income for himself, taken major steps toward food security, added carbon storage, buffered the effects of extreme heat, drought, and rainfall, and reduced the draw on city utilities such as the water system.

Such activities hold the potential of turning the suburban household “into a place of production, not merely consumption.”17

Trip generation

What do home offices and front-yard gardens have to do with transportation? Recall the incantation of traffic engineers: “trip generation.”

A home with, for example, two adult residents “generates” fewer trips when one of those adults can work at home most days instead of commuting. The home will generate fewer trips to buy groceries if the household grows a lot of their own vegetables in the summer, and perhaps puts up some of those vegetables for the winter too.

A family with two or three cars for each working member may find they can trade one of those cars for a bike, taking the bike on grocery runs much of the time. Each family which reduces the number of cars they own not only reduces traffic, but also reduces the number of parking spaces needed both in their immediate neighbourhood and at the stores, schools or workplaces they can reach without driving. Which, in turn, makes it more feasible to gradually increase the number of residences in a neighbourhood or the number of stores in a shopping plaza, as the need to devote precious space to parking is reduced.

Obviously, not every suburban resident can make these type of lifestyle changes at present. Just as obviously, we don’t need all, or even most, suburban residents to become car-free before we see a major impact on traffic patterns and usage of public transit. Finally and obviously, only a limited number of people will willingly bike or walk outside of their immediate neighbourhoods until we make the roads safe for them, and few people will willingly switch to public transit if the service is slow, infrequent, or unreliable.

So zoning and land use changes, while necessary, are not sufficient to transform car-dependent suburbia into sustainable, walkable communities. Many changes to transportation policy and infrastructure are also needed. Some of these will require governments to play a major role, but many can be initiated by small groups of neighbours who see immediate problems and advocate or demonstrate simple solutions. Those changes will be the subject of the next post in this series.


Notes

1 TED talk transcript, April 20, 2007.

2 Quoted by Leigh Gallagher in The End of the Suburbs, Penguin Books, 2013; page 206. As an aside, it was in Gallagher’s book that I first learned of the Strong Towns movement; I have been learning from their blog posts, books, podcasts and videos ever since.

3 Foreword to Degrowth in the Suburbs, by Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; page vii.

E.g., see Land Use Impacts on Transport: How Land Use Factors Affect Travel Behavior, by Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, Victoria, BC. Page 3.

“America’s Growth Ponzi Scheme,” Strong Towns, May 18, 2020.

Walkable City, 10th Anniversary Edition, by Jeff Speck, Picador, 2022; page 30.

7 Walkable City, page 30.

8 Walkable City, page 30.

9 Degrowth in the Suburbs, page 12.

10 Edward Erfurt, “Your Home Office Might Be Illegal”, on Strong Towns blog, Oct 13, 2023.

11 Robert Rice, “The End of Suburbia Starts with Disobedience,” on Strong Towns blog, Oct 13, 2023. Rice explains both the differences and similarities between the deed restrictions that are common in Houston, and the zoning-based restrictions much more common in most American cities.

12 In “ADUs Can Help Address The Lack Of Housing. But They’re Bad Urban Design.” by Travis Beck, Next City, Oct 5, 2023.

13 From “Backgrounder: More Homes Built Faster Act, 2022”, Ontario Government Newsroom, November 28, 2022.

14 Degrowth in the Suburbs, page 133.

15 From “Suburban Practices of Energy Descent,” by Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson, Energy Transition and Economic Sufficiency, Kreps & Cobb, editors, Post Carbon Institute, 2021; page 189.

16 See Spencer’s description of this project in “Transforming suburbia,” on Resilience.org, October 6, 2023, and a video tour of Spencer’s property conducted by Laura Sweeny of Raintree Nursery.

17 “Suburban Practices of Energy Descent,” page 190.


Image at top of page: Levittown, PA, circa 1959, adapted from public domain image at Wikimedia Commons.

bright lights of june

PHOTO POST

In the first week of June, the last of the far-north migratory birds were still passing through. By the end of the month some local nesters were ushering fledglings out into the world.

Ruddy Turnstones and Red Knots at Port Darlington breakwater, June 5, 2022

In the meantime a wide variety of flowering plants made up for a chilly spring by growing inches a day – aided by lots of sunshine and frequent rains.

Primrose rays

But bees of all sorts have been noticeably, worryingly scarce this year. I was glad to see this bumblebee shake off the water and resume flying after a drenching shower.

Bumblebee shower

Some of the beautiful insects I first mistook for solitary bee species turned out to be flies of the hover fly family (aka “flower flies”, aka “Syrphid flies”). They make their way from flower to flower harvesting pollen, so they are important pollinators.

Fleabane after rain

Daisy fleabane is one of the first meadow flowers in our yard each spring, and the hover flies are busy.

Fleabane and Syrphid

Daisy dew

A spread of white daisies also beckons pollinators to unmown areas of the yard.

Daisy flower fly 1

Daisy flower fly 2

Virginia spiderwort blossoms, each only the size of a twenty-five cent piece, look a deep blue in shade and purple-lavender in full sun.

Virginia Spiderwort

Though I spotted what appeared to be a single small grey bumblebee visiting the spiderwort, it didn’t stick around for a photo. There was a much smaller creature grasping the spiderwort’s yellow anther – not a bee as I first thought, but likely a hover fly known as the Eastern Calligrapher.

Eastern Calligrapher

Meanwhile, overhead, the Baltimore Orioles have filled the air with chatter and song – especially as the fledglings were coaxed out of the nest.

It’s time to go

It’s such a nice nest

Perhaps the most ancient beginning-of-summer ritual, in these parts, is the march of turtles to lay their eggs. This Painted Turtle came out of the marsh and made her way across the lawn to the sand. She dug a hole for a nest just a few meters away from last year’s chosen spot, she deposited her eggs, she carefully covered them, and she tamped down the sand. We looked away for a moment, and she was gone.

Turtle procession

making arrangements

PHOTO POST

Two birds move near each other. An insect hovers next to a flower. A ray of light sneaks between two big trees. Temporary arrangements all, sometimes enduring an hour, sometimes a second. But if you can arrange to get your camera into the right place at the right time, you might make the arrangements last a bit longer.

Swallowtail and Phlox

In the lawn and garden special arrangements form every day, rewarding a fresh look.

Painting with Wind

 

A Tree is an Open Window, 1

 

A Tree is an Open Window, 2

In the marsh the egrets and wood ducks add new pictures.

Proximity

 

Quiet Glitter

As migration time approaches, a few turkey vultures along the shoreline gradually become dozens. They glide with seemingly effortless grace but they’re all business when they come closer to earth.

Rustic Perch

As the season turns, travelling birds wait for their moment, then fly south in their ones, twos and hundreds. Far below, deep in the woods, a profusion of mushrooms erupts from the soil, flashing through the rich damp dark.

Six of One

 

Tip of the Hat

 

Almost Like New

 

Behind the Curve

the fullness of summer

PHOTO POST

The afternoon sun is hot, but the evening air cools. Gardens and marshes are lush and green, but golds and reds peek through. Fruits ripen, seeds swell. The fullness of summer is now.

Wood Duck in a Rippled Mirror

A young Spotted Sandpiper (the spots will come later) hunts in the shadow of lily pads.

Sandpiper seeks Shadow

The full-grown pads easily support the weight of these diminutive birds.

Sandpiper seeks Light

The lily pads may also hide supper – a frog, perhaps? – for a Great Blue Heron.

Blue on Green

Closer to home a Blue Jay relaxes in the early-morning sun.

Blue Jay with Tall Grass

The hundreds of Red Soldier Beetles that gathered on a Hydrangea Paniculata were not ready to relax.

Busy Beetles

Mushrooms pop up every day and many, like these on a wood chip path, won’t stand up to the mid-day sun.

Sprouting through the wood chips

The Tomatillos in the garden, on the other hand, love the August sunshine as long as they get enough water.

Tomatillo Forest

The Sour Cherry crop is now put away – and our resident Chipmunks were glad to help in the harvest.

Ground Squirrel out on a Limb

Cherry Chipmunk

watching the web

PHOTO POST

The onrushing summer engulfs us with new blooms, hot winds, welcome rains, and a procession of insects that each play their role in the march of seasons.

Milkweed leaves, above, may soon be eaten to shreds by monarch caterpillars. Meanwhile a Black & Yellow Mud Dauber Wasp uses the vantage point to look for any unwary spiders who might soon be food for wasp larvae.

Some plants are as beautiful while they bud as when in full bloom. Below, a Bergamot flower begins to open; it will soon attract not only bees but hummingbirds.

Two Story Bergamot (click images for larger views)

For many long days we feared the dry heat was so intense that many plants might falter. Few sights were so precious as raindrops on foliage.

Variegated Rain

One of the minor pleasures of rain, to a photographer, is that a drop of water can serve as a free magnifier lens, highlighting details in leaf structures.

Such trivia aside, you might well ask how the underside of a poppy leaf, below, managed to capture rain drops and reflect the morning sunshine.

Wet Leaf

Fortunately a gentle breeze had turned one floppy leaf down-side-up.

An early morning mist brought out otherworldly colours and shapes of a poppy bud.

Strange Dream

The rains did come when most needed, and many flowers have grown to their showiest. Below, a Red Soldier Beetle (aka Hogweed Bonking Beetle) prepares for launch from a feral Daisy.

Upward Spiral

Evening Primrose flowers and Green Metallic Sweat Bees are spectacular in their own rights and doubly so together.

Double Flash

A Bumblebee sitting on a raspberry leaf looks as prickly as the canes beneath the canopy.

Bramblebee

Many flowers, of course, are working towards the production of seeds. A Chipmunk is enjoying the bounty of a previous year, in the shape of a sunflower seed.

Seedy Side of Town

Few seed heads are quite so intricate as that of the Yellow Salsify, below. Did spiders get the idea to weave their mesmerizingly symmetrical webs from watching the formation of Salsify seeds – or was it the other way around?

Salsify’s Web

And then there are the wings of the Dragonflies. These graceful denizens of the marsh don’t often land in our gardens, but perhaps the hot pink Hollyhock was an irresistible draw.

Patterns on Pink


Photo at top of page: Yellow & Black Mud Dauber on Milkweed (click here for full image)

 

pairings

PHOTO POST

If you want to see some scary exotic creatures on the hunt, you could buy yourself a camera with a lens as long as its price tag, then book an even more expensive safari to the far side of the world.

Or, you could pick up a half-decent magnifying glass, lie down in your backyard or in a weedy vacant lot, and take a close look at the passing pageant of insects.

For this post I ventured no further than my yard, at most about 30 meters from the house.

The great thing about looking closely for small insects is that you will also see more of the beautiful detail in leaves, grasses and flowers.

Red and Green (click images for larger views)

Above, the tiny leaves of a new shrub willow catch the morning sun. Below, one of many varieties of grass now going to seed.

Seeds of Grass

While I studied grass seed a bright beetle came in for a landing.

Pinnacle

The same creature landed on an Alfalfa plant a few minutes later.

Eye Spy

Since I’m not sure what kind of beetle this is (perhaps a Longhorn Beetle?), I can’t be sure if it was chewing the holes in the leaves, or waiting to chew on the bug who was chewing on the leaves.

There was no such ambiguity in another scene of combat.

Candy Stripe Cobweb Weaver

Some wasps eat spiders and some spiders eat wasps, but in this case a Candy Stripe Cobweb Weaver was methodically wrapping up what appeared to be a Blackjacket Wasp, who soon gave up struggling.

The wild Yellow Salsify flowers attract early-rising pollinators – but they gradually close up when the sun gets hot in mid-morning.

Salsification

Daisy Fleabane, on the other hand, takes a few hours to unfurl in the morning and its purple-pink petals gradually take on a bleached appearance by mid-afternoon. Like the Salsify it makes a great photo backdrop for many insects, in this case the beautiful Musca Domestica.

Wings of Pink

The Calligrapha beetle is named for the distinctive patterns on its shiny shell. The Calligrapha Amator, below, is popularly known as the Ontario Calligrapha though it is also reported in Quebec.

Calligrapha Amator

Perhaps the flashiest bug in our yard is the Green Metallic Sweat Bee, here photographed on a chive bloom.

All That Glitters Is Green

But this unidentified spider, spotted on the same alium, is awfully photogenic too.

Pink and Gold

colours of summer past

PHOTO POST

Vivid colours are not so easy to come by this time of year, but when you look close to the ground the garden still shows some hues as bright as a summer flower.

Striped Composition (click images for full-size views)

The play of sun and cloud on water seldom disappoints and seldom holds one shape for long.

Curtain Rises

Though the colours in the marsh fade fast a few of the shrubs are as loud as a flight of geese.

Fast Company

Frequent rains keep the beaver pond full and keep beavers busy plugging leaks.

Making Progress

Out in the pond it is strangely quiet with the birds of summer now gone south.

 

Alphabetical Order I

 

Alphabetical Order II

The forested bank of a creek preserves some of summer’s stories just for a moment.

Bed of Leaves

The life stories of these trees move more slowly.

Start at the End

I’m All Ears

November roared in with a gale that threatened every warm memory of summer. But as dawn rose on November 1 the winds softened and our beautiful neighbourhood was mostly unscathed.

First Sun of November

 


Photo at top of post: Points of Presence (click here for full-size view)

 

before and after flowers

PHOTO POST

With most summer flowers now fallen away or drying, it is up to butterflies and damselflies, grasses and fruits, to provide flashes of colour. While monarchs are drawn to the late-blooming Silphium, their caterpillars chew through Milkweed leaves.

Perspectives in pink (click images for larger views)

A wide variety of dragonflies and damselflies drift across from the marsh to our gardens – and clearly, for them this is a busy time of year.

Freefloat

 

Stars Came Out

 

Orange arrangement

Some of this season’s lilies are strikingly colourful even as they dry in the sun, and a few are still attracting pollinators.

Firedust

 

Listening Post

But sometimes you want to escape the heat. This rabbit relaxes on the beach in a cool morning breeze, having earned a break after a long night of pillaging gardens throughout the neighbourhood.

Coming-of-Age Story

On Westside Marsh, a trio of Mute Swan cygnets now look almost grown up, though their grey bills and mottled grey feathers still set them apart from their parents.

Under the Canopy

The flowers that are just now coming into bloom tend to be very tall. At two metres or more, the Himalayan Balsam is a good bit taller than its native cousin the orange-blossomed Jewelweed, which blooms a bit earlier. (The crushed stems of both species yield a clear juice that sooths the burn from Poison Ivy.)

Himalayan Balsam’s hollow but sturdy stalks are beautiful in their own right, though they are usually hidden deep in the understory. A tenacious competitor, it can quickly take over an area and produce a thick stand that leaves no room for other plants. Those who have had the experience of struggling to control a well-established stand realize this plant’s magnificence comes at great expense.

Jewelweed One

Its pink flowers are succeeded by an equally elaborate exploding seed pod that can distribute hundreds of seeds several metres in every direction. If you see a few of these flowers you might want to enjoy their beauty now – and then pull up the plants before they can seed next summer’s forest.

Jewelweed Sundown

 

Top photo: Monarchs’ Realm

 

heat of summer

PHOTO POST

As the most intense heat wave in years takes hold of the lakeshore, the growth of some plants accelerates, others parch and wither, and many marsh-dwellers seek mid-day shade or the cool of twilight hours.

With a still bountiful supply of moisture, green plants in the marsh are tall and lush, though the air is steamy with transpiration.

Featured Creature (click images for larger views)

Water levels are dropping, exposing little isthmuses and giving grasses a chance to spring up out of the mud. This killdeer is feeding by sunset in Westside Marsh.

Stepping to the Sunset

Garden plants are remaining lush only if they are watered every day or two – but these Evening Primrose blossoms did grab onto a generous morning dew.

Primrose by Morning

 

Blooming Bergamot

Bergamot, above, and Viper’s Bugloss, below, answer the mid-day sun with particularly intense bursts of colour.

By a Thread

 

Ring Bill

Ring-billed Gulls, above, and Osprey, below, keep watch over waters of marsh and lake, and swoop down frequently to grab small fish.

Balance One

 

Balance Two

 

At Roost

The chilly waters of Lake Ontario can usually be counted on to keep the air a bit cooler – though on a calm night the cooling effect seems not to make it even 50 meters inland. Perhaps that is why two Great Blue Herons forsook their fishing grounds in the marsh one night and joined the gulls out on the Port Darlington breakwater.

 

Heron at Light House Rock


 

Top photo: Red Goose (click here for larger view)

Colour in the eye of the beholder

Photo Post

The marshes are a sea of green, wild and garden flowers are coming into bloom, and one 24-hour period this week saw a burst of nesting activity by the Snapping Turtles.

Notwithstanding all the vivid hues, the tranquility of many midsummer days comes across beautifully in photos of minimal colour.

Waterbug (click images for larger view)

 

Spin

In our garden the Asiatic Lilly (above) and Sea Holly (below) were just about to bloom.

Sea Holly

The lawn is dotted with Daisy Fleabane (below).

Pink & Yellow

Even in the compost bin, an occasional “flower” sprouts from the dark decomposition.

Compost Flower

 

Beach Path

On the dunes and on the marsh, elegant forms rise from the sand and water surfaces.

Making Waves

 

Sunset Stride

As the sun dips below the horizon, a family of swans climbs out on a mud flat, while a turtle digs a lakeside nest to deposit her eggs.

Excavator

 
Top photo: Close Look (click here for larger view)