What If We Planted Something There? - Aug 10, 2026
This isn't my typical blog post.
Usually, I'm talking about photography, wildlife, nature, or some combination of the three. This one went a little sideways.
But stick with me, because I swear there's a connection.
Photography, especially wildlife and nature photography, is really about 'the art of noticing'.
You learn to pay attention. To light. Movement. A tiny bird buried in a wall of branches. The mushroom everyone else walked past. The suspicious rustling in the bushes that turns out to be absolutely nothing after you've stood there holding a very heavy camera for ten minutes.
You notice things.
And sometimes noticing leads to a photograph.
Sometimes it leads to an entirely unnecessary research rabbit hole at 10 p.m.
Guess which one happened here.
Recently, I was walking through the forest with my cat. As one does.
Part of my brain was doing its usual photographer thing: scanning the trees, looking for birds, watching the light, wondering whether anything interesting might appear.
But what I noticed that day was much more obvious.
We were cooler.
We'd been walking in direct sun, and as soon as we moved under the trees, the temperature difference was immediately noticeable.
Yes, I am aware that I have just discovered ''shade'.
I'm available for speaking engagements.
Obviously, I already knew trees provide shade. I've always believed trees and vegetation are incredibly important for keeping our cities cooler. But there's a difference between knowing something and actually experiencing it.
This time, I really noticed.
And then I couldn't stop noticing.
I started driving around my city looking at everything differently.
That would be a great place for a tree.
Why is that just grass?
You could put a pollinator garden there.
That corner could be so much better.
And then: I wonder if the City would ever do that?
This is where things became dangerous.
Because apparently I can't just have a thought and move on with my life like a normal person.
I started researching.
I went looking for stories about people who had noticed something in their cities and decided to make it better. People planting trees. Creating pollinator gardens. Caring for neglected spaces. Basically, people looking at sad little patches of urban nothingness and saying:
No. We can do better than this.
I loved them immediately.
Then I discovered guerrilla gardening. Oh boy.
If you've never heard of it, guerrilla gardening essentially means planting things on land you don't own and don't necessarily have permission to use.
So... illegal gardening.
Naturally, this appealed to me.
I like action. I have a mild rebellious streak. And if I see a problem, my instinct is generally not to form a committee to discuss the possibility of eventually considering a solution.
I want to fix it.
Preferably now.
But before anyone from a BC municipality starts circulating a description of my vehicle and watching for a woman driving around with a shovel and 47 native plants in the back, I should clarify:
We're doing this legally. I know, bummer, right? Hahah. I kidd, I kidd.
Apparently society has rules.
Fine.
So I hauled myself out of the guerrilla-gardening rabbit hole and back into the proper lane.
Instead of asking: What could we plant there?
I started asking: What are we actually allowed to plant there?
And that's when I discovered something genuinely exciting.
Vancouver has the Green Streets Program.
Victoria has Boulevard Gardening.
Did you know about these?
Because I DID NOT.
And frankly, I feel like somebody should have told me.
Vancouver's Green Streets Program allows residents to volunteer to care for gardens in traffic circles and corner bulges around the city.
Basically, Vancouver is saying: See that little garden in the middle of the street? Want one?
Well, sort of.
You can't actually take it home. That would create some fairly serious traffic issues.
But you can adopt one.
Volunteer gardeners weed, prune and care for their little piece of the city throughout the year, following City guidelines to make sure nobody accidentally creates a botanical traffic hazard.
And here's something I really love: the program itself has grassroots beginnings.
Back in 1994, residents in Mount Pleasant, with support from the Mount Pleasant Community Centre Association, started a pilot project where people adopted landscaped traffic circles and corner bulges.
People liked it.
Other neighbourhoods noticed. They wanted in.
And the idea grew into Vancouver's Green Streets Program.
Someone had an idea. Other people saw that it worked. More people joined.
That's my kind of conservation.
Then I found Katie Berlinguette's story.
Katie lives in Vancouver and wanted somewhere to garden. There was just one tiny problem. She lives in an apartment. No backyard. No patio. And community garden plots can come with lengthy waiting lists.
Then she discovered Green Streets.
Katie adopted an overgrown traffic circle at Glen Drive and East 10th Avenue.
And she went to work.
She added plants including native red-flowering currant and lupine, along with strawberries, herbs and other flowering plants.
What could have remained a slightly sad piece of traffic infrastructure became a colourful little neighbourhood garden and a place where pollinators can find food and habitat.
Photo Credit: Vancouver is Awesome | Author - Brendan Kergin
I LOVE THIS.
One woman.
One traffic circle.
One official City program giving her permission to make something better.
Is Katie's traffic circle going to single-handedly reverse biodiversity loss?
No. That would be a lot to ask of a traffic circle. But that's not why her story inspires me. Katie noticed something. She found out what she could legally do about it.
Then she did it.
See a problem. Research solutions. Take action.
Yes.
THIS.
And Vancouver isn't the only BC city giving residents permission to get their hands dirty.
Victoria has 'Boulevard Gardening'.
You know that strip of grass between your property and the street?
That thing you probably look at primarily when it needs mowing?
Turns out it could be doing more.
The City of Victoria has more than 300 kilometres of City-owned boulevards, and residents can transform the boulevard next to their property into a garden as long as they follow the City's guidelines.
And we're not just talking about making things pretty.
Victoria specifically recognizes that boulevard gardens can increase ecological diversity and provide habitat for birds, butterflies and other pollinators.
And here's the part that surprised me:
A standard boulevard garden doesn't require City pre-approval.
You DO have to follow the rules.
Read the guidelines. Register your garden. Contact BC One Call before digging because hitting an underground utility while planting a coneflower would really ruin the whole inspirational-conservation vibe.
There are also requirements around visibility, access, plant heights and maintenance.
Fair enough.
But within those rules?
You can garden. Legally. No balaclava required.
And now I've created a problem for myself.
Because once you start looking at a city this way, you can't unsee it.
I've essentially become an imaginary urban planner who specializes exclusively in putting plants everywhere.
But here's what really stuck with me.
A small pollinator garden doesn't replace a forest.
A traffic circle isn't going to replace intact habitat.
Urban gardening doesn't mean we can stop worrying about protecting forests, wetlands and other ecosystems.
Obviously.
But conservation doesn't have to happen at only one scale.
Imagine you're a bee trying to move through a city.
There's a pollinator garden here.
Another one two blocks away.
A boulevard garden around the corner.
Native flowers in someone's front yard.
Another Green Streets garden farther down the road.
To us, they're separate gardens.
To something small trying to survive in a landscape dominated by concrete, roads and buildings, they may be useful little stepping stones.
And there's another piece of this that I love.
Someone has to start.
Someone has to look at that first sad little patch and think: We could do something with that.
Then someone else sees it.
Then somebody down the street starts one.
And suddenly an idea spreads.
Which brings me back to photography.
Photography has trained me to notice things. Usually, I'm hoping that noticing leads to a photograph.
This time it didn't. It led me here.
And now I'm going to challenge you to do something that's completely free.
The next time you walk out your front door: Look around your block. Really look.
Not at your destination. Not at your phone. Not at whatever your neighbour is doing that you've been pretending not to notice for three years.
Look at the spaces.
What tiny piece of your city could you adopt?
Maybe your municipality already has a program like Green Streets or Boulevard Gardening.
Maybe there's a volunteer opportunity you've never heard about.
Maybe there's room for native plants on your own property.
Or maybe your community doesn't have anything like this yet.
In which case... Why not?
That's what this whole rabbit hole has left me thinking about.
See a problem. Research solutions. Take action.
It sounds ridiculously simple.
Maybe sometimes it is.
I started this whole thing by noticing how cool it felt underneath some trees.
Now I'm driving around looking at empty patches of grass like they are personal challenges.
And you know what?
I feel inspired.
It's making me look at my own community and ask:
What can I do?
I don't know yet.
But I intend to find out.
Beautifully put. The potential is endless,if we look at what can be,not what is.
The best one yet.