Gardeners trying to do right by the ecosystem often run into antiquated bylaws, covenants and restrictions that prohibit natural yards. This frustration led to the creation of Bylaws for Biodiversity, an initiative to encourage lawmakers and homeowners associations to adopt rules that protect and promote biodiversity on private and public lands.
Joining me on the podcast this week to discuss the motivation behind Bylaws for Biodiversity are two of the program’s advocates: Nina-Marie Lister and Lorraine Johnson.
Nina-Marie Lister founded the Ecological Design Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning.
Nina-Marie is a professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she founded and leads the Ecological Design Lab. Lorraine is Toronto-based writer, editor, gardener and self-styled cultivation activist. In separate conversations, they defended native gardens and poked holes in the rules that would prohibit them in front yards or elsewhere.
Lorraine Johnson is a Toronto-based writer, editor, gardener and “cultivation activist.”
(Photo Credit: Phillip Wallis)
Outmoded Laws
“Most municipalities in North America have some kind of bylaw that normalizes turf grass lawn and discourages plants that do not conform to that aesthetic,” Nina-Marie points out.
She says municipal bylaws and homeowners associations rules must be reformed because they discourage biodiversity. “Right now, the emphasis on the lawn as the norm is, of course, a monoculture, not a thriving and flourishing landscape of care for other species.”
Pushback
Lorraine started writing books about native plant gardening about 30 years ago, and almost immediately she began hearing from people who were getting pushback from their neighbors or municipalities.
“Inevitably, I got involved with looking at these bylaws and ordinances and how they were barriers to what I was encouraging people to do — the planting of habitat gardens based on native plants and creating habitat for wildlife,” she says.
She became active in working to reform bylaws and giving suggestions to gardeners who were running into trouble with ordinances and restrictive covenants. She advised gardeners on how they could work with a municipality toward a resolution or how they could fight back.
Amid a climate crisis and biodiversity loss, rules banning ecological gardening make no sense and fly in the face of government efforts to combat these crises.
“What we need to do now more than ever is create these habitat gardens and encourage people to garden in a way that supports biodiversity, and anything that’s in the way of that I think really has to be looked at quite closely,” Lorraine says.
An insect visits a flower in Wolf Ruck’s natural yard, aka habitat garden.
(Courtesy of Wolf Ruck)
An Impetus for Change
“We’re in the midst of a massive cultural shift, and I think there’s growing awareness,” Lorraine says.
“Doing this sort of thing — habitat gardening, gardening with native plants — it’s still relatively new. I said 30 years ago in my first book on native plant gardening that I saw it as a slow evolution towards this type of gardening. So it is a slow evolution, but the impetus for it is really speeding up in the midst of the ecological challenges that we face.”
Lorraine says habitat gardens are based on a different attitude toward gardening and the landscape that can be.
“They really can be different from conventional gardens, and I think when we see something new, sometimes it not only surprises us, but in some ways is a little unsettling,” she says.
But we need to unsettle the conventional ways of doing things, as the conventional ways have led to all kinds of ecological problems, she says.
Ecological Design Lab
“This lab, in the most basic sense, is designed to connect people to nature in cities,” Nina-Marie says. “And we do that through good data, healthy practices and creativity. Planners and designers, of course, are all about not just studying space but making good places.”
The lab works to translate research into applied practice
“We’re training the next generation of professionals in design and in planning,” she says. “… We think of ourselves as a ‘think, make and do’ tank.”
The lab tries new things that are safe to fail, allowing students the opportunity to create in an unfettered way. They don’t follow economic goals of the past but rather seek what’s healthy for ourselves and for the planet, Nina-Marie explains. “How do we reconnect with the very things that sustain us?”
She says that though the impact of humans is enormous, the majority of the planet is not actually made up of humans. “And so thinking about how we relate to other species has always been central to both my work and the work of the lab. And when we think about other species and their needs, it actually makes us better humans. It actually makes us more compassionate people.”
Caring for other species, from having a companion animal to feeding backyard birds, is a way to tap into the need to reconnect to things that sustain us, she says.
The lab looks at very large-scale crises and solutions, such as climate resilience and biodiversity recovery.
“They’re integrated,” Nina-Marie says. “We know that climate change and biodiversity laws are entangled, and they’re also entangled with human suffering. So one of the things we can do is to reconnect — reconnect to nature, build our healing, build our compassion, using good science to actually recover some of the species that are lost.”
Combating climate change and biodiversity loss can feel like an insurmountable task, but Nina-Marie says there are small, humble ways to make a difference.
A common eastern bumblebee with a leg loaded with pollen in Wolf Ruck’s garden.
(Courtesy of Wolf Ruck)
Reveal the Beauty of Native Plants
“We can garden in a way that reveals the beauty of these plants, these native plants that have so long been kind of left out of gardening conversations,” Lorraine says. “So we can do that simply by modeling what we want to see in the world.”
It can also be something as simple as putting up a sign in your yard indicating that it is a Monarch Waystation.
“There’s so much interest and awareness about the plight of monarch butterflies right now, and people I think are learning that milkweed is such an important native plant for monarchs,” Lorraine says. “Well, 30 years ago where I live, in fact, even just seven years ago, it was illegal to plant milkweed.”
Things are changing, and that’s great, she says, but the acceleration of change really has to pick up, and the way to do that is to work with people’s love of creatures like monarchs and birds, and “make the connection between habitat gardens and native plants and these creatures that people love.”
One issue for native gardeners running into enforcement issues and complaints is that ecological literacy is not adequately taught in schools.
“We don’t grow up learning about these ecological connections between insects and plants, and so there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there about plants like milkweed or about plants like goldenrod,” Lorraine says, adding that goldenrod is a native plant that’s fabulous for insects.
“A huge percentage of the general public thinks that goldenrod causes hay fever, and it doesn’t,” she notes. “It’s an insect-pollinated plant. The pollen is heavy, it doesn’t blow on the wind, and yet that misinformation is out there.”
Common milkweed in Wolf Ruck’s garden. The leaves are food for monarch caterpillars and other insects, and many different insects visit the flowers for nectar and pollen.
(Courtesy of Wolf Ruck)
Safe Passage
Safe Passage is an Ecological Design Lab program intended to reconnect large landscapes for wildlife, particularly large-bodied creatures and far-flying birds that need space to roam for forage, breeding and cover.
“Ironically, when roads connect people in our communities, they disconnect and fragment other species’ habitats and their homes and their relationships and their communities,” Nina-Marie says.
The lab looks at ways to redesign connections based on ecological field data about how wildlife move and connect, for example, across roadways. “And the Safe Passages project was about literally, physically building bridges.”
These bridges include highway overpasses not for cars and people but for animals. They include vegetation, from grasses to trees. Other passages tunnel under roadways to achieve the same goal.
Safe Passage also builds metaphorical bridges between disciplines: ecology, architecture, landscape architecture, engineering.
“Some of those projects are now quite well known, and we have a huge collaborative network of researchers with whom we work,” Nina-Marie says.
Reconciling With Nature and Rethinking ‘Mess’
Lorraine says reconciling with nature is the real challenge. “And it’s made more difficult when there are bylaws and ordinances that put up barriers when we start to do that.”
Bylaws target so-called “messy” yards. Lorraine wants to rethink and rebrand the loaded term “mess.”
She advises thinking of habitat gardens as complex gardens, places where there’s lots going on, where there are all kinds of relationships that are being stewarded between plants and other plants, between humans and plants, between creatures and plants, between soil, microorganisms and plants.
People who see a mess in a habitat garden aren’t seeing nature’s order, Lorraine says.
“If we think of a forest, would we ever call a forest messy?” she asks. “Would we ever call a meadow messy? Well these are places where nature organizes itself. We can take part in that.”
However, a habitat garden can be tended more like a conventional garden, she points out.
“If you’re someone who really loves a very ordered look in terms of human conventions of design, you can achieve that look with native plants,” she says. “You can create a landscape that is very orderly that will still have loads of ecological value.”
But at the same time some people tend to conventionally ordered gardens, she wants to allow and celebrate those who are creating complex landscapes that might look “messy.”
When the law gets involved in gardens, it unfortunately sides with tidiness over ecological value and nature’s order.
Aesthetic terms like “tidy” are subjective, Lorraine says.
“My definition of what is neat and tidy and not messy can be very different from someone else’s,” she says. “And why is one idea the dominant idea that we all have to conform to? I’m all for diversity and different ways of creative expression in the garden.”
What some people see as a “mess” is ordered by nature.
(Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Bylaws for Biodiversity
Bylaws for Biodiversity started by accident, Nina-Marie says.
“In my own family’s yard, we have a habitat garden,” she explains. “We have for a long time — a decade. It’s a meadow and a habitat garden, and a southwest-facing corner slope in the city of Toronto. And we were served with a notice of violation, and we were told to cut the weeds and grass in our yard.”
Her son, 17 years old at the time, opened the door when the bylaw officer served the violation. What weeds should we cut? he asked. What grass? Because there was no grass.
The bylaw officer had no training in plant identification and said, “Well, just cut all the grass and weeds.” It wasn’t a helpful answer.
“It surprised me that this bylaw was still on the books in Toronto because I had understood it to be resolved in 1996 in a court case,” Nina-Marie says.
That case is Sandy Bell v. Toronto, in which an Ontario Superior Court ruled that a natural garden falls within a right to free expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Sandy Bell had what she called an “environmental garden” in her tiny downtown Toronto front yard.
“Sandy Bell took the city of Toronto to court to assert her right to garden in a way that was in line with her values and as education for her child, and she won,” Nina-Marie says.
In response to her own experience, Nina-Marie started the Bylaws for Biodiversity research program, founded in 2021. The program works to better protect and promote biodiversity across public and private lands through the revision of outdated weed and grass bylaws.
“It’s always important to understand how people define their garden,” Nina-Marie says. “What do they mean by ‘garden’? … Because we work with city planners and we work at the intersection of where legislation and the law come to regulate our properties, we wanted a really clear idea of what we meant.”
While there are many different types of gardens, she says the one thing that unites them is that they are “landscapes of care” where there’s care being taken and care being shown.
A garden is not abandoned or left entirely to its own devices.
The Ecological Design Lab made clear that Bylaws for Biodiversity is intended to work with the owners of landscapes of care.
“We were going to work with people who had received notices of violations for gardens they were tending — not for abandoned lots or for something like that,” Nina-Marie says. “But rather these were gardens where people were making a concerted effort. There was intentionality, there was direction, there was design. Even if you disagreed with the aesthetic, someone was caring for that landscape.”
That was a useful starting point for the program to ensure it was focused on achieving its goals.
“That care ethic is, as it turns out, really important because people are, of course — emotionally and financially, oftentimes — invested in their garden care,” Nina-Marie says. “And so when they receive a notice of violation, it can be, first, deeply stigmatizing.”
Some gardeners feel traumatized by it, particularly if action is taken without their knowledge, such as a force-cut order or a mow order.
“To see something that you’ve tended and cared for that is alive and flourishing, giving habitat to others, to see that destroyed, is deeply upsetting,” Nina-Marie says.
The destruction takes an added toll for people who used their gardens to heal from emotional trauma, sadness of distress, she adds.
“For many people, the garden is the thing that feeds us,” she says. “It feeds our bodies. It feeds our souls and our spirit. So this is something we really want to support. It is a win-win-win, ecologically, spiritually, emotionally, when we have gardens that do something for the health of the planet and other species, not just humans.”
The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, the David Suzuki Foundation, Lorraine and Nina-Marie’s lab worked together to craft the report “Bylaws for Biodiversity: Barriers and Opportunities for Naturalized Gardens on Private Property.” They also created a toolkit for municipalities and a toolkit for planners.
A small pollinator on goldenrod. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Embracing Habitat Gardening
Lorraine recalls a conversation she had with a gardener who until recently thought that dead leaves looked messy. She asked the gardener what changed her attitude. It was learning the ecological value of leaves when left on the landscape where they fall.
The gardener learned that dead leaves improve the soil, mulch the soil, prevent frost heaving, and provide habitat for all kinds of creatures, such as and overwintering bees, butterflies and moss,
“I’ve started to see the beauty in that,” the gardener said.
“Every creature needs food,” Lorraine says, “and these food webs, we can nurture them in our yards. That’s one avenue to caring.”
Complaint Driven
Unlike other areas of the law, bylaws are complaint driven, Nina-Marie explains. They are only enforced when the city receives a complaint.
“When the city receives a complaint from someone, they’re obligated to investigate the complaint. … The problem occurs when the values of the gardener are differing from the predominant values of a neighborhood, perhaps, or even one particular person who repeatedly calls enforcement.”
The Bylaws for Diversity program started with a social media campaign launched to call attention to continued enforcement of rules that should have been overturned many years prior.
“We might all remember in the late summer of 2020 when in many places we were finally allowed outdoors again,” Nina Marie says. “And there was a kind of groundswell of recognition that people needed to be outside for psychological well-being. And that for many people being in their shared community garden, their front yard, their front stoop, even their balcony, their porch, was really important. So it was a particularly ironic moment to receive a notice of violation for being outdoors, working in the garden.”
At the time, Nina-Marie lived across the street from one of Canada’s best-known landscape architects, Janet Rosenberg.
“We have very different gardens and very different aesthetics, but we have very similar values,” Nina-Marie says.
Janet replied to a group of people who had been complaining loudly about Nina-Marie’s garden, which they called a “messy, overgrown jungle” that was untidy and unsightly, and “a neighborhood blight.”
“Janet very kindly said, well, you know, this garden has all sorts of benefits that you may not see. And even if you don’t agree with the way it looks, it has value. And you should be supportive.”
None of those complainers ever introduced themselves to Nina-Marie personally and shared their concerns. They only complained behind her back.
After a social media campaign in support of her garden, her case received positive attention from The Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper in Canada. Architecture critic Alex Bozikovic wrote the article “Ecologist’s Wild Garden Is a Challenge to Lawn Order.”
“What we received after that was even more surprising, and that was love letters. We got little letters tucked in our mailbox,” Nina-Marie recalls.
One of the letters said, “Your garden brings us joy. Every day we pass by, our hearts grow.”
A Toronto Star article by crime reporter Jennifer Pagliaro followed, titled “‘What Kind of Barbarian Would Mow Buttercups?’: The City Tried To Rip Up a Local Ecologist’s Natural Garden. Now She’s Fighting Back.”
“We really thought that this was an opportunity to intervene, to do many different things, one of which is public education, but the other of which is to really apply pressure on municipalities to change their bylaws, to bring their bylaws into the 21st century, and in a way that supports both climate resilience and biodiversity recovery,” Nina-Marie says.
She invited the mayor to tea in her garden, and that opened the door to a conversation that resulted in the local bylaw being updated.
“The mayor was very empathetic, as it would be hard not to be standing in that garden at the end of September,” she recalls.
The mayor invited members of her lab to speak to the city as subject matter experts to advise the city to update their bylaw.
Model Bylaws
“The very first thing we did was have a graduate student, Carly Murphy, write a model bylaw for the city and say, ‘This is what a bylaw should look like that is supportive of biodiversity and the rights of people to garden as they wish,’” Nina-Marie says.
“No one was saying, ‘We have to lose the lawn.’ We were saying, ‘Have more than a lawn. Have less lawn, have more life.’”
The model bylaw encourages municipalities to be more clear and specific in defining what is an unsightly yard or a noxious weed.
“Bylaws are legislation. So they have to be enforceable, which also means they have to stand up in a court of law. If you can’t define a weed in science, how would you defend that in a court? It’s really important to ask that question. Weeds, of course, have multiple definitions,” Nina-Marie says.
So Toronto made a list of “prohibited plants” — plants that had health and safety risks to people or to other species, such as ragweed and poison ivy.
“Terms like overgrown, excessive, wild, messy, untidy — these are subjective terms, and they cannot stand up in court as it turns out,” Nina-Marie says.
She noted that your rights don’t trump everyone else’s. “If you were making other people sick somehow with your yard, that would be a case where the law would step in and say, ‘Health and safety risks warrant you having to make a change.’”
This could include a tripping hazard over the sidewalk.
“Focusing on health and safety is defensible, but focusing on aesthetics is indefensible,” she says. “… That’s a much easier case for enforcement. Let’s restrict ourselves to health and safety, not to how something looks.”
Cues to Care
Cues to care are elements in a landscape that show that it is well-maintained and cared for. They can include actions, structures and plants.
The term of art was coined by Joan Nassauer, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.
“You are actively stewarding nature in your landscape,” Lorraine says of the cues.
This can be a sign, pathways, a border, an ornamental sculpture, woodchips, etc. Things that show municipalities, homeowners associations and neighbors that a landscape is being tended in a purposeful way and not just abandoned.
“Habitat gardening is the exact reverse of abandonment,” Lorraine says. “It’s saying, ‘Hey, wait, I’m a part of this ecosystem and I want to engage with it, and I want to do something to support ecological health and functioning.’”
The people who are able to devote the time, effort and resources to standing up for habitat gardens are heroes, in Lorraine’s opinion.
“They are the ones who are pushing the needle quickly and at a structural level, because it often leads to either bylaw changes or homeowner association changes, or even legal successes,” she says.
A syrphid fly on purple aster.
(Photo credit: Amy Prentice)
I hope you enjoyed my conversations with Nina-Marie Lister and Lorraine Johnson. 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.
What do your local laws and ordinances say about natural yards? 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 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 314: Native Gardeners vs. the HOA: An Important Victory for Wildlife
Episode 317: Native Gardeners vs. the HOA, Part II
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
Episode 400: Defending a Native Garden From Misguided Laws
Episode 401: Fighting for the Right to Have a Natural Yard, with Wolf Ruck
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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.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Bylaws for Biodiversity Toolkit for Municipalities
Bylaws for Biodiversity toolkit for planners.
“Ecologist’s wild garden is a challenge to lawn order” by Alex Bozikovic | The Globe and Mail | August 2020
Is It Time To Rethink Our Lawns? by Emma Murphy | The Peterborough & Area Master Gardeners | September 2020
“Battle Over Front-Yard Meadow Thick With Irony” | The Toronto Star | September 2020
“Ryerson Professor Advocates For Lawn Biodiversity In Toronto” by Charlize Alcaraz | The Eyeopener | September 2020
“‘What kind of barbarian would mow buttercups?’: The city tried to rip up a local ecologist’s natural garden. Now she’s fighting back” | The Toronto Star | October 2020
“This ecologist was told she could keep her natural garden. Here’s why she’s fighting city hall anyway” by Angelina King | CBC News | October 10, 2020
“The ‘No Mow May’ Challenge is on” by Agnès Le Rouzic | Greenpeace Canada | May 13, 2021
“Barriers, by-laws, and the biophilic city” by Bonte Minnema | Ryerson University | 2021
“Stand your constitutional ground” by Kate Harries | Return of the Native | 2021
“Interview with Nina-Marie Lister” by Adele Weder | Canadian Architect | April 4, 2022
“The Connected Landscapes of Nina-Marie Lister” by Alex Bozikovic | Azure Magazine | November 16, 2021
“Nina-Marie Lister builds cities the way you care for a garden” by Alex Bozikovic | Globe & Mail
“Gardens have become battlegrounds in the climate crisis” by Lorraine Johnson and Nina-Marie Lister | Toronto Star | August 13, 2023
“It shouldn’t be illegal to rewild your yard” by Jessica Wei | Rewilding Magazine | January 12, 2023
“How does your garden grow? As cities and towns continue to expand into our wild landscapes, conservation gardens can provide refuge for Canada’s plummeting biodiversity” by Michela Rosano | Canadian Geographic | November 25, 2022
“Saving an oak forest – from bylaw enforcement” by Lorraine Johnson | Spacing | June 18, 2024
“Canadian Gardener’s Guide” edited by Lorraine Johnson
“A Northern Gardener’s Guide to Native Plants and Pollinators” by Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla
“100 Easy-to-Grow Native Plants for Canadian Gardens” by Lorraine Johnson
“City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing” by Lorraine Johnson
“Grow Wild: Native-Plant Gardening in Canada and Northern United States” by Lorraine Johnson
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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.
