Category: Toronto

Late spring flowers

Flowers are coming up gloriously across Toronto. I have been enjoying the rich red and alien shape of Canada Columbine and, in the last few days, seeing the pink of Common Milkweed flowering, with flowers emerging in clusters. Black Cohosh cultivated on campus is already producing flower wands, just still green instead of white, and it is spreading in rhizomal clusters around where flower wands appeared last year.

I am checking iNaturalist daily for when the Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) bloom begins, at which point I will be leading a city-wide search to improve the data on where this plant is present.

Looping Toronto

Yesterday, Albert Koehl from the Toronto Community Bikeways Coalition led about 50 of us on a loop around Toronto, from the central waterfront along the lake to the Humber River, up the Humber to the Finch Hydro Corridor, across the city to the Don, and back along the waterfront:

We did 79 km in 8 hours, and I met lots of nice people. The theme of the ride was ‘filling the gaps’ — calling on the city to remove the awkward parts where we had to leave the bike trails behind for fast roads and, in one case, an active construction site where we had to help each other through fences.

This could be a fantastic season for cycling, and I am looking forward to when the Neon Riders start meeting weekly again.