City Parks of Canada

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

City Paths of Canada, by first-time authors and Vancouver/Vancouver Island residents Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, presents 33 major municipal parks: 17 in Ontario, 5 in British Columbia, 3 in Alberta, 2 in Saskatchewan, and 1 each in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec. The approach is historical. A two-page introduction gives a brief overview of nineteenth century parks development. Each park is then covered (no explanation is given of criteria for selection) in a two-to five-page entry: a short history of its development plus several archival photographs.

Although the histories vary in accuracy and completeness, and the text needs further editing, the book’s strength is that it brings into print materials usually seen only by researchers examining parks department records in municipal archives, and thereby provides a first look at the parallel development of many of Canada’s foremost urban parks. As the authors point out in their introduction,

The glory years for parks began in the 1890’s and lasted until about 1914-15. These years were ones of clearing, landscaping, planting and erecting buildings. So much development in such a short period has not occurred again and is not likely to do so.

A question anyone involved in parks planning should consider is how to accommodate today’s needs, yet ensure preservation of significant historical design elements and structures. Several of Canada’s finest urban parks — the Halifax Public Gardens and Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, for example — are significant as cultural and historic landscapes and, like buildings and streetscapes, should be protected from major changes.

The book records many changes these 33 parks have undergone over the years — in sponsorship, funding, and management; in size, layout, structures, and facilities; and in the nature of their uses and users. The most thought-provoking aspect of City Parks of Canada is the strongly emerging sense that, for the most part, parks have come into being and evolved more often through serendipity and political expediency than through long-term planning and design, and that their valuable historical elements are continually vulnerable to ill-considered change.

For a broader and better-documented historical background to the establishment of city parks, see also J.R. Wright’s Urban Parks in Ontario. Part 1: Origins to 1860 (Ottawa, 1983; 109p., illus., endnotes; pa.) soon to be followed by Part 2: The Romantic Period (1860-1920); and, in due time, by Part 3: From Parks to Open Space (1920-1980). Wright’s series is distributed by the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Recreation.