Emily Waugh is a Toronto-based writer and past lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. When Vladimir Menkov lived in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, he figured his south-facing fence would be enough to protect his yard from the tumbleweeds that blew up from Washington each fall. But as he explained on Quora, the website where he has answered more than 1,700 questions like “Do bears and native North American animals cross the U.S.-Mexico border or even the...

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.

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.

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 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. 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 and cultures, but to learn and practice them – for some a first opportunity to do so.

As Geddy Lee reflects on how to “make a house a home,” a montage plays some of the team’s most “treasured moments” including Edwin Encarnación’s walk off homer to clinch the 2016 wild card game and beloved pitcher Roy Halladay sealing the franchise record with his 22nd win in 2003.The renovation, which will purportedly “turn the stadium into a ballpark,” however leaves this team history and context behind.

When Sum Artist (Toronto muralist Paul Glyn-Williams) was contacted about a new project that had “something to do with the Blue Jays,” he knew right away what it would be: José Bautista’s historic 2015 bat flip when, after crushing a three-run homer that would eventually win the intense playoff game, Bautista, in an unplanned release of charged emotion, tossed his bat so high in the air, it seemed it might never come down. In a way it didn’t.

A year later, Kijiji 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 shattered dreams, loneliness and financial despair. Beloved Canon photography equipment: "COVID killed my business." Limited-edition Epiphone Les Paul Nightfall guitar: "never gigged, thanks COVID." Ikea table and 3 chairs: "because no one's dining with me."

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Nuisance urban wildlife species highlight the conflict between human interests and the natural world. Many of these opportunistic species are attracted to cities by plentiful resources. Some have migrated to cities as their natural habitats are threatened by human populations, some are introduced, and, for some, the city has gradually expanded into the animal’s natural habitats. All have adapted to life in the city, and we have adapted to life with them.

Visitors to Toronto — or any new city— immediately notice differences between our city and theirs. A Dutch friend was recently surprised by our hydro poles. “They’re like giant trees in the middle of the sidewalk!” In our own city, we stop seeing these things as unique, if we notice them at all.