Illustration: Marlena Zuber

Trinity Bellwoods is a vibrant park. On a warm summer's day it teems with people: dog-walkers, frolicking children, parents pushing strollers, lounging hipsters, and bouncing tennis players. It's hard to imagine that this urban park with its many amenities was at one time a lush ravine with a meandering creek that emptied into the lake near where Bathurst Street is today. Shortly after European colonials arrived, they named the creek and ravine the Garrison after the Fort York garrison they had built at the creek's mouth. In the early 1800s, the land, ravine still intact, was part of a 100-acre parcel of land owned by the Provincial Secretary Duncan Cameron, who built a large brick Georgian house he named Gore Vale in honor of Sir Francis Gore, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario between 1806 and 1817. In 1852, the lower 20 acres of land were purchased for £2000 to become the grounds of Trinity College, for which the current park and neighbourhood is named.

When the College was built, Queen Street was a fashionable strip with large estates that overlooked the harbour. Over the next 60 years, the area surrounding the park was developed, with many of the Victorian houses being constructed during a short period in the late 1880s. During this development, the meandering creek was straightened out and encased in concrete, becoming a sewer to serve the neighbourhood, a common practice as the city grew. The ravine exists today only in traces — evident in bowl at the centre of the park and the dip at its south-east corner — much of it having been filled in with soil displaced from other large city building projects to create an unbroken, expansive green space.

The park was initially planted and cared for as an arboretum. Many of the original trees are still standing today, including sugar maples, elms, oaks, black locusts, and willows. But by the 1950s the neighbourhood fell into decline, the Trinity College buildings were demolished, and the arboretum was not kept up.

In recent years, the park has begun to receive much needed attention. Friends of Trinity Bellwoods, a group of neighbourhood residents committed to improving the park, formed in 2000. So far its members have organized a weekly farmer's market, an adopt-a-tree program, done seasonal park clean-ups, and built a website. They will soon complete an inventory of the park's trees in cooperation with the City of Toronto Urban Forestry Department, a necessary step towards the healthy management of this much enjoyed green space. New trees have been planted, and with the information provided from the inventory, more plantings will follow to ensure that the protective canopy of this park is preserved.

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Tour stops

1. 1The saddest tree
2. 2Development's give and take
3. 3Buried over past
4. 4Comparing maples
5. 5Howl at the stump
6. 6Adopt-a-tree
7. 7Big old bitternut
8. 8The gates anew
9. 9Dawn of the dead
10. 10Towering elm
11. 11Horsechestnuts
12. 12New wave trees
13. 13Graffiti flowers
14. 14Dense it up

Contributors

Writing: Liz Forsberg, Todd Irvine

Photography: Liz Forsberg, Vincenzo Pietropaolo

Local history provided by: Anna Hill, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone, Jon Harstone

Community Partners

Friends of Trinity Bellwoods, St Christopher House