‘City Within a Park’: Natural Heritage Around Toronto

Toronto is home to outstanding natural heritage, and each site below is accessible by public transit. As we increasingly spend time in our outdoor surroundings this year, these green spaces are a reminder of Toronto’s vision of a City Within a Park.

In Rouge National Urban Park, the largest urban park in North America, learn of the Indigenous land upon which Toronto is located. Human history dates back over 10,000 years and the park is home to over 1,700 species of animals and plants.

Sculptures and architectural fragments are scattered across the unusual Guild Park landscape, with facades and relics sitting like ancient ruins atop of the geologically significant landform of the Scarborough Bluffs.

At Todmorden Mills, adjacent to the group of buildings that were once part of the small industrial community of Todmorden, is the beautiful Wildflower Preserve. Native trees, shrubs and wildflowers are being reestablished, and eleven rare species of native plants have been recognized at the site.

Next to one of Toronto’s ravine systems, the Necropolis Cemetery is a leafy, quiet and beautiful space in Cabbagetown. Among the names here are Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, who arrived in Toronto via the Underground Railroad and established the city’s first horse-drawn cab company, the first Canadian-born Black surgeon Anderson Ruffin Abbot, and Alice Eastwood, a self-taught botanist credited with building the botanical collection at the California Academy of Sciences.

In the grounds of Colborne Lodge, former home of John and Jemima Howard, is a 19th century ornamental and kitchen garden planted with guidance from the Howard diaries and journals. The museum site also sits of the edge of High Park’s Black Oak savannah, a delicate ecosystem maintained by First Nations groups for thousands of years through controlled fires.

 

 

 

 

Places

Road Map

Markham, Ontario to Toronto, Ontario

Popular VisitLists

Isle Madame – The Explorer’s Island #CanadianVisitList

Arichat, Nova Scotia 9 places
History and heritage awaits!
View VisitList

Parks Canada #VisitLists for when you can’t get away

Saint Lunaire-Griquet, Newfoundland and Labrador to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia 5 places
Parks Canada’s ReCollections podcast will take you all over this great country.
View VisitList

Invaluable Gains from One Coast to the Other #CanadianVisitList

Victoria, British Columbia to Halifax, Nova Scotia 5 places
Everlasting memories guaranteed and inspiration too!
View VisitList

‘Revealing History’ • A Journey of Montreal’s Parks & Monuments Sites #CanadianVisitList

Montréal, Québec 22 places
‘ A Corridor of Discovery ‘ • Discovering History through Montreal’s Parks
View VisitList