Rewilding a home landscape to support wildlife and increase biodiversity is a noble and worthwhile effort and should be every property owner’s right. However, ill-advised local ordinances that favor tidiness over ecology can make a native garden a target for fines and prosecution. On this week’s podcast, native gardener Craig Sinclair explains how he went to bat for his garden and overcame the forces that would see it plowed under and sodded over.
Craig and his wife, Beth, are residents of Smith Falls, Ontario, Canada. Wanting to overcome the feeling of helplessness that climate change and biodiversity loss can instill, they transformed their front yard from a traditional lawn into a mulched native garden, with flowers, shrubs and trees that provide habitat and nourishment for beneficial insects, mammals and birds. But not everyone appreciated their efforts, and they soon found themselves on the wrong side of town bylaws enforcers.
Beth and Craig Sinclair in front of their Ontario home. (Photo Courtesy of Beth and Craig Sinclair)
“My garden was an expression of wanting to do the best I could do for the world for this little location where lawns have won out everywhere, to have native plants, to have pollinator plants, to have flowers, to allow butterflies and woodpeckers to have a home,” Craig says. “I knew it was right, and we are going to persist, but it didn’t cause it to hurt any less.”
An important part of Craig’s story is that he suffered a workplace injury that has left him with permanent disabilities, the severity of which has only let up in recent years.
The Journey to Feeling Better
An unforgettable date for Craig is December 11, 2007. He was injured at work when a couple of hundred pounds of industrial fencing fell on his head. He suffered a concussion — his 13th. From that day on, he has been permanently disabled. He has chronic migraines and a host of other issues, most that stemmed from his injury.
“We had two young children at the time, and so it radically changed my life,” Craig says.
He said he was trapped at home, constantly medicating and having trouble sleeping. He wasn’t able to read again for 10 to 12 years, and he didn’t drive again until three years ago.
His family moved to Canada so he could get surgery, removing a rib from his neck and working on his shoulder as well. That greatly relieved his pain, but being any distance from home continued to be extremely challenging.
“The place I live is kind of the only world I had for a lot of years,” he says.
In 2019, his kids went to a climate protest in Montreal. It was the biggest climate protest ever held in Canada. International climate activist Greta Thunberg was among the speakers.
Craig says as he slowly became more able to pay attention to the world outside of his life, he read the IPCC Report on the Impacts of Climate Change. He learned about the ecological crisis and loss of native habitat, and felt hopeless, unable to engage in any meaningful way.
But then he began walking again. His friend’s seeing eye dog, in retirement, became his dog, and he walked the dog every day in a town of 10,000 people. On his walks, he noticed the natural world around him. He noticed that numerous trees in his neighborhood were being cut down, which he learned was due to the emerald ash borer.
“It was a huge loss. So many houses had these mature trees, 60, 80 years old, and they were all gone. And so all the shade was gone,” he recalls.
Native trees and shrubs being planted in late spring 2021, three trees per square meter. The yard is covered in 20 truck loads of free wood chips from local arborists and town work crews, laid 4 to 8 inches thick over cardboard covering the former grass lawn.
(Photo Courtesy of Beth and Craig Sinclair)
Craig learned his town had no regulations that would ensure the trees would be replaced. On his own property, Craig had no ash trees, but two giant maple trees, two red pines, five birch trees and a small group of chokecherry trees. But then the birch trees became diseases and a hazard. The town came and removed them.
Having read works by ecological designer Nina-Marie Lister, North American Native Plant Society past President and author Lorraine Johnson and entomologist and conservationist Doug Tallamy, and having become familiar with Doug’s Homegrown National Park, he became interested in the idea of transforming his property with native plants. He also watched a documentary on Miyawaki forests, a dense planting method with three trees per meter.
He planned to take advantage of the sunlight that would come down on his property once the birch trees were removed. With all the ash trees being taken down and ground into wood chips in his neighborhood, he could easily source free wood chips to mulch his native gardens.
But then COVID hit and schools closed. His house turned into a classroom for his children. It was a lot for Craig to take considering his ailments. His migraines, which had been down to five per month, went back to occurring 20 to 25 days each month.
A reprieve was covering the whole front yard with cardboard from the boxes of all the things they ordered during COVID and having dump trucks deliver loads of wood chips. On most of their third-acre lot, the wood chips accumulated seven to eight inches deep.
“It looked crazy because there was no more grass,” Craig says. “There was no plants. I knew I had to wait for the wood chips to decay some in order to be able to plant in them.”
Craig and Beth began to get visits from the town’s bylaws enforcers. “They made it clear that neighbors had complained,” Craig says.
He explained to them that the plan was to plant pollinator plants and flowering plants in the first three meters of the yard, then a row of human-edible fruit-bearing shrubs, and then back toward their house they would plant trees, and make a forest.
“They accepted this, but they visited continuously still, maybe every couple months,” he says. “We never got written up.”
Swamp milkweed feeding a great spangled fritillary, Speyeria cybele, by the road. (Photo Credit: Craig Sinclair)
Taking the Initiative
By fall, as the cardboard and wood chip degraded, they started to plant and collect trees. He walked the town and did a tree survey of the town’s 4,700 lots. The town had no survey of its own and no urban forestry plan.
“It had a bylaw that was 45 years old that suggested seven types of trees that should be planted, but four of those trees were non-native invasive species,” he says.
He noted which trees were on private properties and which were on town property, and did a satellite survey of backyards. He prepared a presentation of his tree survey to the town councillors and met with the mayor.
Craig found that 70% of the trees were non-native Norway maples. He notes that 27 years ago, there was an ice storm that devastated the forest there, and when the town did tree replacements, it exclusively used Norway maples. And he found that only about 30% of city lots had trees of any sort.
“As I learned more, it became clear that this didn’t provide for native flora and fauna and habitat,” Craig says. He knew that native birds needed native seeds, the moths and butterflies needed native trees, particularly oak trees, native maple trees and native elm trees. “They don’t need Norway maples.”
Town officials talked about changing the bylaws, but at that point the initiative didn’t get much further than that.
A pileated woodpecker on rotting paper birch habitat logs next to a native American cranberrybush, Viburnum trilobum, providing berries in the years to come.
(Photo Credit: Craig Sinclair)
A Yard Transformed
“But by this time, my lawn was gone, and now I had a yard of wood chips,” Craig says. “I probably at that point had acquired 150 varieties of native trees, pollinator plants, vines and shrubs.” And in his backyard he had apples, pears, plums — an orchard.
“I’d always done traditional tomatoes and squash and peppers and normal, respectable gardening, but it was transformed into, I don’t know, a wild farm, like a forest kind of setting,” he says.
In his front yard, he had little starter trees. In their first winter, he lost 40 of the trees that rabbits chewed down to the ground, so he bought wire cages to protect them.
“Most of those have come off now in this third year. But those trees were so tiny, and now I have trees that are six, seven — some are 20 feet tall.”
There are elm trees, poplars and pin cherry trees, most bought at a nursery that specializes in trees that grow within 100 kilometers. He has additional trees that he sources from points south, considering how much the climate has changed over the past 75 years.
Craig and Beth’s front yard used to be a lawn but is now covered in native plants that provide valuable habitat and food for wildlife. (Photo Courtesy of Beth and Craig Sinclair)
The Knocks Kept Coming
He says in the midst of this it felt like my life’s work could be renewed. “I’d lost so much, and my kids were home for two years while I built these gardens. But then there was a dread underneath it all because the knock on the door kept coming.”
Sometimes, it was bylaws department at the door. Sometimes, bylaws with police, or bylaws with fire marshals. At times, as many as 12 or 13 town employees were on his lawn with measuring equipment and engineers.
“It was overwhelming. I could not face them,” he says. “My wife told me I should not face them any longer because it would make me angry and make me physically ill.”
Eventually, a notice was put on their door, with four charges against them. His wife called it a “scarlet letter,” which they were supposed to leave on the door for anyone to read — but Craig took it down within 10 seconds.
“It was in the winter still, but they said when it’s thawed, they were going to mow down four meters into our yard and remove everything we’d planted, and they were going to sod it over,” he says. “And we were ready for that moment. We knew that we were in violation of the bylaw. It was clear that our bylaw didn’t meet the constitutional freedoms that we had to freedom of speech.”
He cited previous cases in Canada that protected their right to garden and landscape how they saw fit.
“Sandy Bell in Toronto and Douglas Counter in Toronto had won cases that said the freedom of expression extended to how we treated our lawn, and our deeply held beliefs, religious or not, were protected speech.” he says. “And we could create, as we saw fit, to meet what we believe to be the right way to have a natural environment.”
He says small towns still hadn’t gotten the message — and still haven’t.
“We knew that it would become a bigger issue,” he says. “We’d have to go to court over this.”
A rotting birch log on the Sinclairs’ property. They were ordered to remove it under local Weed and Lawn bylaw. Trees in the background include sugar maple, black cherry, butternut hickory and northern catalpa.
(Photo Credit: Craig Sinclair)
Craig and Beth had 14 days to appeal to a citizen council, which would have a trial-type meeting where experts could present their case. Nina-Marie Lister, Lorraine Johnson and environmental lawyer David Donnelly spoke at the Zoom meeting on Craig and Beth’s behalf.
Craig says Nina-Marie and Lorraine are world-class experts at the highest level in the field of ecology, byways, urban planning and urban forestry.
“They brought their expertise and their passion to us, and our town ignored everything they said,” Craig says.
You can watch the meeting on YouTube.
He says some legal professors teaching about municipal politics have used the meeting as an example of how not to run a citizen meeting.
Craig and Beth lost, 4-3. The four who voted to move forward with an enforcement action against Craig and Beth had never visited their property, while the three who voted against enforcement had.
A chipmunk make a home under Craig’s Hugelkultur garden bed in the backyard.
(Photo Credit: Craig Sinclair)
A Victory
Craig and Beth appealed to the Superior Court of Ontario. It never came to trial. After the town had hired an environmental law attorney, the town agreed to pay for Craig and Beth’s legal fees and rescind all three orders that had been leveled against them.
“They were no longer going to threaten to destroy our property, and they made a promise to the judge and the court that they would revise the bylaw,” Craig says.
Craig and Beth would be permitted to keep their nurse logs, wood chip groundcover, wild strawberry groundcover and vines. It would all be permitted under the agreement.
“The new bylaw was drafted, and I had some role in consulting on some of that,” Craig says. “And new tree recommendations were made from the previous tree list for what to plant in your yard. And it’s been exciting to see some of that change, and also a little discouraging because we’re one of 420 some municipalities in Ontario. There’s 420 sets of bylaws here, and each of them are drafted by every local community. And there’s not a universal bylaw. So this win here has no effect on the next person. They can use us as precedents to fight for themselves. But that fight isn’t easy. It’s not a fight against the town. It’s a fight against shame. It’s a fight against fear. It’s a fight against anxiety of, how are people looking at me? How are people talking about me?”
Indian blanket flower,. Gaillardia Pulchella, a North American native flower growing next to the road at the Sinclairs’ home in summer 2021.
(Photo Credit: Craig Sinclair)
A Maturing Native Garden
These days, Craig’s native yard has come a long way from its start, which Craig admits was not sightly. It has matured and come into its own.
To conform to a sight triangle bylaw for road safety, along the curb he has to keep the height to under 80 centimeters. He cuts down goldenrod and asters to 40 centimeters, and then they rebloom again.
“The milkweed and the goldenrod and the asters and hundreds of other varieties of flowers blooming in the spring and in the summer, and in the fall — it’s fantastic,” Craig says.
The yard has an abundance of butterflies, beetles, bugs and birds.
“It feels hopeful,” he says. “The climate crisis hasn’t really improved. The ecological crisis is worsening. The laws that need to change haven’t changed, but hopefulness is alive. And the opportunity to do what I can do feels hopeful.”
Even in the past year, Craig and Beth have had knocks on their door. The fire chief, with special powers to resolve what he deems hazards, “doesn’t need to go through the legal system to remove our property’s plantings,” Craig explains.
“There was discussion that that would happen without us having the right of appeal, and we negotiated and worked with them for weeks and months, and they relented and they didn’t bring their land moving equipment and didn’t plow under our yard,” he says.
“There’s systems in place that have to change, and a mindset of what is safe and what is good and what is healthy has to move from lawn to ecologically restored native plantings and gardening.”
A northern leopard frog (Lithobates pipiens) sitting among native Brasenia schreberi in the pond Craig and Beth dug in spring 2021.
(Photo Courtesy of Beth and Craig Sinclair)
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Craig Sinclair. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you’r native garden efforts been discouraged by ordinances or bylaws? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 134: Bird Population Decline and What Gardeners Can Do to Help
Episode 142: Why Our Plant Choices Matter: Nature’s Best Hope, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 206: Our Most Essential Trees: The Nature of Oaks, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 232: Ecological Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, with Rebecca McMackin, Part I
Episode 233: Ecological Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, with Rebecca McMackin, Part II
Episode 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Town of Smith Falls Property Standards meeting YouTube
Reddit Posts by Craig Sinclair about his yard
“This couple had to fight for their right to rewild!” | Rewilding Magazine:
“Couple’s win forces Smiths Falls to revisit approach to ‘naturalized’ lawns” | CBC News
“Town’s lawn survey skewed, Smiths Falls couple says” | CBC News
Our shared garden: The importance of native plants | Canadian Geographic:
“Victory in the fight for the right to a natural garden” | Hometown News:
“Smiths Falls couple fight bylaw order to clean up their naturalized yard” | Cottage Life:
“A Naturalized Garden Goes to Court…” | Lorraine Johnson’s Blog:
“Ontario Couple Argues Constitutional Right to Keep Wildlife-Friendly Naturalized Lawn” | Animal Law Digest Canada Edition
Territorial Seed Company – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner
Proven Winners ColorChoice – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
