Expert says gardeners stewards of the land

“Gardens mean many things to many different people,” says Paul Zammit.

But for the master gardener known for giving advice to CBC listeners, a garden is a place to learn.

The Watford Warwick Horticultural Society invited Zammit to town. Zammit has worked for a decade at Toronto’s Botanical Garden. He’s a professor in the environmental division at Niagara College and he shares gardening advice on the CBC’s Here and Now since 2022 and Ontario Today.

Zammit pulled from his wealth of experience, as he talked nearly an hour about the power of horticultural.

Zammit said gardening is an amazing opportunity to be stewards of the land and he sees it as a gift.

He worked for 20 years in a garden centre where customers would come in wanting to start their gardens during the long weekend in May and want to put their garden to bed during the Labour Day weekend. He asked people to stop that, saying you never put a garden to bed. “Gardens are forever changing,” Zammit said.

And he emphasized the importance of not harming the environment during his talk. He said you can grow that large vegetable or that perfect plant, but there is a cost to that. “The cost of perfection can really be a challenge,” said Zammit. Getting that perfection can kill the birds and the wildlife through the use of pesticides.

While Zammit worked at the Toronto Botanical Garden, visitors would not only come there to photograph the plants, but the birds and the insects, which were living in the same space. “I took that as a compliment,” said Zammit.

He told the crowd insects and bees have a function in the life of a garden. Ninety per cent of flowered plants depend on pollinators so when the pollinators are gone, there is nothing to set seed.

Zammit told the crowd to consider why they garden adding he’s never tired of gardening, calling it a “never ending process of learning.”

And it’s a skill you can’t learn from a book; gardening Zammit told the crowd, is a skill you learn by doing.

, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Independent