Understories: A Staging Grounds Listening Experience is a series of short audio works that invite you to tune into the unique ecological, environmental, and design elements of The Bentway’s Staging Grounds – a public space pilot under the Gardiner.
Engage with the features and functions of Staging Grounds like never before through a mix of meditative, musical backdrops, onsite field recordings, foraged sound effects, and storytelling from Ojibwe and Black Canadian farmer, landscape horticulturist, and Staging Grounds collaborator, Isaac Crosby (Brother Nature).
This three-part audio series deepens our awareness of the urban environment and offers a moment of pause and reflection in a fast-paced city. Listeners are invited to learn more about the interconnectedness of site-specific native plant species and their remediation qualities, the local waterways and possibilities of stormwater management, and Staging Ground’s role in supporting urban ecology.
Project Acknowledgments:
Sound Design and Production by Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam
Featuring Isaac Crosby, Brother Nature
Music and Sound Mix by Kevin Ramroop
just be nature
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Just Be Nature: A Significant Place
Understories: A Bentway Staging Grounds Listening Experience
Saroja Ponnambalam:
My name is Saroja and you’re listening to Just Be Nature: A Significant Place, a conversation with Isaac Crosby and I about the Bentway Staging Grounds, a public space pilot under the Gardiner Expressway.
Isaac Crosby:
My name is Isaac Crosby. I come from the Ojibway of Anderdon from Southwest Ontario. I am Ojibway and Black Canadian mix. And when I say Black Canadian mix, that means that I am descendant of runaway slaves or enslaved people both in America and here in Canada. When it comes to me being part of the nature system, we want to call it, or doing horticulture or farming, I come from two great peoples who cared for the Earth. The Africans cared for the Earth, they took great care of Mother Nature and so did the Indigenous peoples, without the mixing of those to two cultures, those people, I wouldn’t have the knowledge I have today.
If we’re going to talk about the original wetlands or shorelines Toronto or by Lake Ontario, we have to realize this: Where we are now used to be underwater. And then they started to build more. They more they built, the more they added water and added soil to the water and pushed the water back to where it is now, in 2024. And you look out and you look at this, you look at Lake Ontario and you see a lot of buildings and park space [where] wetlands are coming back. But not fast enough. I came here in the 90’s. Where the spot is right now, when I first moved to Toronto, none of this was here. It was all like vegetation and rocky hills.This was a place where they put all the backfill from where they are building these buildings, where they are building the restaurants, the condos, apartment buildings, they didn’t know where to put all of the excess soil, so they put it down here. And so for a while, all this down here is like man-made hills. Human-made hills and we used to come down here, run around down here, hang out down here. I knew the street kids, they lived down here in a little cave, a little hole cave in the ground. It was completely different. But when it comes to more of the wetlands and wildlife down here, yes, it’s down here. Yes, you see remnants of it., but we need more to come back and that’s going to be hard. It’s easy to take a wetland away. It’s hard to put it back because now you have to start being like Mother Nature right now.
You’ve got to start thinking like nature. You can’t think like a human when it comes to building the wetlands back. You can’t think that way, because when we start thinking like humans, we start putting plants and plants here, that shouldn’t be here. Mother Nature, she basically just, you know, threw the seeds out, let them have a go and said do what you got to do, survive if you can. The birds, tons of birds down there. Snake today saw birds. I saw yellow finches. It’s all sparrows. It’s all cardinals. OK, birds are here, which is great, because I teach people that no matter what garden you build, no matter what farm you have, if there’s no wildlife in it, you have a chemical field.
My other name is Brother Nature, right? And so whenever I’m in my brother Nature mode and type of talk with Brother Nature. I always tell people at the end of it: Be nature. Be nature. Yeah, that may stand for Brother Nature, but at the same time, it stands for this: If you want to have a successful farming, successful forest gardening, then you two-legged human must think like nature, you must be nature to be make sure it’s successful. Because when you look at nature, now nature’s long term. Don’t be afraid to stand up and push the envelope on accounts of farming to gardening to take care of the water, take care of the soil, because if you really, really, really loved your children, your grandchildren and love the future of the Earth, you would be doing something now, not 10-15 years later from now.
native plant understory
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A Native Plant Understory
Understories: A Bentway Staging Grounds Listening Experience
Saroja Ponnambalam:
My name is Saroja and you’re listening to A Native Plant Understory, a conversation with Isaac Crosby and I about the Bentway Staging Grounds, a public space pilot under the Gardiner Expressway.
Isaac Crosby:
My role was to be the plant guide, plant expert. It was to help them choose plants that would benefit underneath the Bentway Staging Grounds. We have basically just three sites, there’s 3 sites to it. On the south side, there’s more full sun, which is, those columns at the south side are full sun.
In the middle, the middle columns are all deep shade, like deep, deep shade. Well, the whole site is like a tree canopy. That is basically my basis.Is to look at the plants, see what can grow there, and how they will affect what’s there. It’s like going into a forest that has basically a lot of trees and it gets dark. Right, that’s your deep shade.
One of my main reasons for all these plants was actually to bring in the Carolinian forest underneath there, because the Carolina Forest, for me, that’s what we grew up in the Carolinian forest. So looking at the structures having deep shade, having the part shade, and a full sign like this, this is this is a forest that just happened to have cement above it. That’s all it was. So I viewed it as a concrete forest if you will. And what can and can I not do?
What’s your understory? All right, my understory are strawberries, wild ginger, pawpaw trees or ground nut, or the grasses and… just plug them where I saw fit. What I learned from the site is there are plants out there that we think need sun or full sun but they can still thrive in part shade. I mean, look at strawberries, right? We are always told that strawberries need the full sun. They need this. They need that. So I put some strawberry plants in the deep shade and some strawberry plants in the full sun and some strawberries plants in the part shade. They all fruited. They all had flowers.
Saroja Ponnambalam:
This one’s special to me because I planted these plants with your sister.
Isaac Crosby:
You did?
Saroja Ponnambalam:
So it’s really cool to see how much they’ve thrived and yeah.
Isaac Crosby:
They have thrived. I mean, this is beautiful. When it came to me picking the plants and realizing what they were actually doing down there, it dawned on me that wait a minute, wait a minute– here’s a chance to use native species plants to do phytoremediation on under the Gardiner, which means that every plant that I picked does something. Strawberries, cedar trees help take care of take the salt out, help take the lead out. Because it’s the Gardiner, it’s an overpass has all a lot of cars on it, right? You know there’s gonna be salt in it, in the winter time. You know that some of those cars up there are leaking gas or oil or something like that. So I had to pick the plants that would do something with all of that.
We have a pawpaw tree, another native food source as well. If anyone has never had pawpaw before, trust me, you want to have a pawpaw. You want to try it. All I can say is that it tastes like a cross between a mango, pineapple, a little bit of lime, very, very creamy. But it’s such an. amazing food source. That food source, when the settlers came over here, one of the first things they did was to cut down our food sources. So cut down our fruit trees, our nut trees and pawpaw trees as well.
We also have cedar inside of here. It’s one of our sacred medicines, the cedar tree, which is also great for pulling out cadmium and fossil fuels and gas and stuff like that as well, instead of planting plants that are annuals.
Non-natives, we should have these in our ground and have these on our land so that we as individuals are to doing what we have to do to take care of the water source before it goes back to the lakes and the streams.
We must realize that water is life. Life is water. Without water, we’re gone.
where the stormwater flows
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Where the Stormwater Flows
Understories: A Bentway Staging Grounds Listening Experience
Saroja Ponnambalam:
My name is Saroja and you’re listening to Where the Stormwater Flows, a conversation with Isaac Crosby and I about the Bentway Staging Grounds, a public space pilot under the Gardiner Expressway.
Isaac Crosby:
You see these numbers? Yellow numbers. On the concrete above you, and right near those numbers, you’ll see this teal green filtering system at the top.
What happens is this: the first stage of filtration starts at the very, very top. What that does is captures all the big stuff. As that’s moving down with the water, it hits another filtration system, the medium stuff, I want to say, and then that filters that out. So that pipe that’s actually going directly down into the bed, that’s a whole other filtration. So that water is actually going directly down into the water into the bed and coming from the bottom up.
Which means that, as it’s going through the soil, it’s being filtered as well, and so that means your plants are getting deeper water from the bottom up when you look down on the front of it, you’ll see a circle, another another teal green circle, which has rocks in it. But inside that circle there’s a little spout, which is all the filtered excess water is coming out of the container. So it has all these all these steps of filtration. When you’re looking at the Beltway Staging Grounds, and especially when it’s raining, you’ll see it in action.
We just had torrential downpour last week in Toronto, which caused a lot of major flooding in the city of Toronto. And then you find out that when the water overflows in the sewage system, there’s no separate pipes. It all goes together. It’s all headed back out to the lake. Look over there. There’s basically a waterfall coming off the Gardiner! See?
Saroja Ponnambalam:
Oh my God. It’s humongous. OK, we gotta go there.
Isaac Crosby:
We got to go there.
This one, so one of the beds which is 114, you walk down the pathway to the right, the whole bed that’s full of water is now emptying out. At the bottom of it, there’s a spigot with all the clean water coming out of it, which is so cool. I’m finally seeing this in action, which is amazing. What’s not being cleaned out of the water? Seriously.
It’s the Gardiner Expressway. Think of people who are still littering. They shouldn’t be littering, I mean — or people who smoke are throwing cigarette butts out the window. I mean, cigarette butts are disgusting, right? So, you got your cigarette butts. What’s in your cigarette? Not just tobacco. Bunch of chemicals and a bunch of those add up together is going to change that water somehow.
Now, you have cars that are leaking oil, leaking gas that are going by there. So now that’s on the Gardiner. So when it rains, now it’s being rehydrated it and being washed down into the beds. So that filter system is getting rid of all the big, chunky stuff jackets, backpacks, stuff like that. Then the smaller stuff or the medium stuff, which could be like cell phones or maybe medium sized bag, or maybe a piece of glass, then the smaller stuff which is going to be filtering out the chemicals going through the soil, filtering out that lead, filtering out those fossil fuels, that cadmium, that salt.
How I see this experimental garden helping to deter climate change? Is by redirecting our water. It Is by cleaning our water. Is by picking plants that will help us do that, because there is no doubt, there is no doubt we are in climate change.