If you needed help cutting down a tree, retrieving rental car keys from the bottom of the lake, or building a dock, Tom Pigeon was the guy to call. He could build anything, fix anything, and figure out the answer to any problem the Algonquin bush threw at him. No wonder, he was practically born there. When Tom was just two and a half weeks old, his mother, who was born and raised in Algonquin Park herself, snow-shoed him across Cache Lake to their pine clad, A-frame home with no indoor plumbing and a foundation filled with sawdust to hold the heat of the wood burning stove. For most of the next 85 years, Tom lived and worked in the park, starting each day with two eggs, cut up bacon, and tea (no toast) right up until the week before he died last August. Tom was as embedded in Algonquin as it was in him.

In a country whose diverse landscapes and extreme climates both define and threaten the existence of its people, the words we use also connect us to where we are (and who and what was here before us). Anyone who has paid a hydro bill or felt the warm relief of a chinook wind implicitly knows how connected daily life is to the natural environment in Canada.

Right now the rest of Canada is moaning about out-of-stock Christmas gifts, shipping delays and higher pricetags. Yet there’s a part of the country where these problems are a frustrating fact of life — and they’re hoping climate change doesn’t make things even worse. Northern communities have learned to live with the high costs and low access of remote living, but climate change threatens to make both worse as warmer winters jeopardize the primary transport routes for people, goods, and wildlife.

On Sunday, most Canadians will set their clocks back one hour. The sun will rise at 7 a.m. in Toronto; 7:51 in Thunder Bay; 9:16 in Igloolik, Nunavut, and 10 a.m. in Pond Inlet. In Grise Fiord, Canada’s most northerly community, the sun won’t rise until 12:12 p.m. — on Feb. 10. In Canada, where a single time zone might stretch across nearly 30 degrees of longitude and over 40 degrees of latitude, people at the western and northern reaches of their time zones are sentenced to a kind of eternal jet lag, their circadian rhythms perpetually at odds with the alarm clocks they set for work and school.

As restrictions lift and summer begins to look normal(ish), Ontarians are once again hitting the road to head, as they would say, “up north.” But what exactly does “up north” mean in a country that spans more than 40 degrees of latitude – nearly equal to the difference between Cairo, Egypt, and Cape Nordkinn, Norway.

Claude Cormier, the Montreal based landscape architect who designed Love Park died Sept 15 at age 63. He leaves behind the gift of a 30-year career’s worth of seriously fun public spaces and an endless supply of smiles like the ones I saw on my first visit to Love Park earlier this summer. Marc Hallé, a partner at CCxA calls the rush of surprise and happiness people feel when they first encounter a CCxA park “the dopamine moment.” I think of it more as the Cormier Effect. An immediate feeling of joy that deepens and evolves over time.

The morning after Toronto was buried under 50 centimetres of snow, my phone pinged: “We’re looking for all hands-on deck at noon today for rink shovelling.” By midday, the natural ice rink at Leslie Grove Park in the city’s east end looked like a 16th-century Bruegel painting: dozens of parents and tweens pushing shovels across the ice surface, kids jumping in the resulting snowbanks and a half dozen neighbourhood dogs zipping back and forth across the newly revealed ice.

On a clear morning in late April, circling drones, news helicopters and billowing grey smoke hovered over Toronto’s High Park, announcing that the park’s rare black oak savannah was once again in flames — a necessary and dramatic disturbance to maintain the savannah habitat and regenerate the endangered prairie grasses below. “We typically do these in rural areas,” burn boss Jason Sickel told the crowd, among them a handful of High Park stewards in neon green vests with “Volunteer” across the back.

Thirty years ago, tourists weren’t able to take a Haida-led tour through the mossy remains of an ancient island village or prepare bannock with a Mi’kmaq community on Prince Edward Island. Back then, an Indigenous tourism experience might have simply meant the appearance of for-hire drummers or dancers. But the growing demand for authentic Indigenous-owned and -operated cultural experiences has given communities across the country economically sustainable means to not only share their languages

From Tom Thomson’s iconic Canadian landscapes to the evocative aerial photographs of Edward Burtynsky, many have attempted to capture the essence of this vast and diverse country in a static image. In Little Canada, Jean Louis Brenninkmeijer has tried the impossible — representing the entire country in miniature in a 45,000 square-foot former GoodLife Fitness at Yonge and Dundas. The first impression after passing through Little Canada’s passport control and entering the first destination, Lit

With offices closed during the pandemic and many kids kept out of the classroom, families have scrambled to carve out functional remote-learning spaces in homes that weren’t designed for the job. Faced with space constraints, acoustic challenges, and shortages of office furniture, even architects — experts in conceptualizing interior spaces with time and budget constraints — are struggling to keep up with the demands that school closures are putting on their small, open-concept homes.

Edward Burtynsky sees the world differently—not just as an artist but because he spends up to three months of the year looking at it from hundreds of feet in the air. Using a helicopter, airplane or drone, he flies over restricted industrial sites and resource-extraction landscapes shooting photographs that, as he puts it, “pull the veil” off how these processes affect the earth.

As the World Health Organization prepared to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic last March, online classified platform Kijiji was inundated with high-priced listings for hand sanitizer, face masks and other panic-buy items. With packages of toilet paper listed for up to $80, Kijiji decided to temporarily ban the sale of these products. A year later, the site is once again swamped with pandemic-related ads. But this time, prices are low, and the listings reveal a portrait not of greed, but of s

More than 90 years after Elsie Reford defied convention to grow exotic perennials as far north as the 49th parallel, the designers at the International Garden Festival at Métis continue to test the limits of the garden. Advancing Elsie’s legacy of experimentation and what she called ‘adventuring’ with different soils, plant materials, and hybrid species, the contemporary gardens at the Métis International Garden Festival continue to evolve as a living laboratory for exploration, innovation, and experimentation.

When asked to be the guest editor for this issue of Harvard Design Magazine, I was intrigued by the title “Landscape Architecture’s Core?” as it opened up a question—an invitation to enter an exploration into the “core” of the discipline as it continues to evolve, deepen, and diversify. Here, the core sample offered a relevant framework: A process where a study area is identified, an auger is driven into the ground, and a sample of material is removed to be analyzed for its physical makeup, i

Cities are constantly changing. With the inevitable cycles of prosperity and decline, political succession, ideological shifts, the rise and fall of industry, war, resources, and immigration, urban areas continue to evolve—growing, shrinking, diversifying, sprawling, and densifying in response to forces of change that act upon them. Parks and open spaces do not only adapt to forces of change, but also have the power to guide, shape, and curate the evolution of cities as the most effective catalysts for urban transformation.

They have been modifying the planet since they arrived. At first, their trace was nearly imperceptible, but as their population expanded, so did their imprint. Slowly, over thousands of years, they have reformed Earth to meet their demands. They have cleared its forests, dug up its resources, drained its lakes and rivers, paved its surfaces, and loaded its atmosphere with destructive gases. They have permanently altered the course of the Earth’s system, marking the dawn of a new epoch. How will they protect themselves along this path toward total extinction?

“Baseball has seen us through a lot of ups and downs,” my grandmother observed one evening about 20 years ago as we watched the Blue Jays game from the overstuffed pink chairs in her upstairs TV room. “It’s always just … there.” She was reflecting on the game’s steady and predictable presence throughout her more than 50-year marriage to my grandfather, including his deployment and return from the Second World War, raising three daughters and at that time in their mid-80s, saying goodbye to so many beloved friends.

Close since growing up in Rosedale, Elsbeth, 75, and Katy, 74, have been through it all together. Emily Waugh joins their daily stroll

In a year when the fear of spreading COVID-19 has put large indoor gatherings on ice, there is still a way to look forward to the holiday season — by looking back and going out. Many contemporary Christmas traditions were adapted from ancient solstice celebrations that infused the darkest moment of the year with light and hope. Celebrations were linked to seasonal cycles, and many rituals began outdoors or incorporated outdoor elements as signs of life and light.