Soon-forgotten Remains of Hedgerows and Farm Fencing

Vaughan, Ontario. Soon-forgotten Remains of Hedgerows and Farm Fencing Approximately 43°50’28.15″N 79°34’36.39″W, facing East

Nearly a century before this project—Elegy—a forestry graduate, Edmund J. Zavitz, toured southern Ontario much of which was succumbing to desertification as a result of colonial clear-cutting. Topsoil blew away threatening its inhabitants with local food shortages, and meanwhile massive sand dunes blocked roads and buried houses. From his survey, which he reported in Reforestation of Wastelands in Southern Ontario, 1909, Zavitz recommended the planting of hedgerows and forests to halt erosion. Zavitz—who would go on to become Ontario’s first provincial forester—implemented his plan and recovered the Wastelands, ensuring local food security for an evermore-populated core of southern Ontario; that is, until recently. The rest of this site—clear-cut once again—and its adjacent fields, like much of the best farmland in the province, will be scraped bare of topsoil and excavated for a residential housing development.