November General Meeting
Monday, November 10, 2025
Speaker: Clement Kent
Topic: Challenges in Making a Pollinator Garden
The talk focuses on the challenges encountered when making larger public gardens and how to solve them. Some of these include
• getting and keeping permissions, and dealing with towns, municipalities, or counties
• finding funding not just for installation but for multi-year maintenance
• getting and keeping neighbours involved as a team & dealing with burnout and turnover
• making big gardens on top of turf or weed patches and keeping them free of weeds
• challenges of maintenance in the first month, the first summer, and later years
I’m a gardener, re-greener, scientist and plant lover. Although I’ll try growing almost anything for fun my core interest is using gardens, parks, and other public spaces to re-green the ecology of where we live. I’m the author of “How to Make a Pollinator Garden” (2011), and practice what I preach. I’ve helped create many pollinator gardens in front yards, city parks, and roadsides.
I have a particular interest in what it takes to make grassroots re-greening initiatives successful. I was on the Advisory Board of the City of Toronto’s Pollinator Protection program, and I do workshops with groups wanting to create green oases in their
neighbourhoods.
I study insects scientifically – their behaviour, their genetics, and the “big-data” area called genomics. Among the insects, bees are a special focus. I’ve been a member of the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (honeybee professionals) and
received the Canadian Pollinator Advocate award for 2011 from the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign. I’m an adjunct professor at York University. I helped found the Horticultural Societies of Parkdale & Toronto in 1987 and Project Swallowtail in 2019.