Cloud Garden Conservatory

Tucked away on Richmond Street, just west of Yonge, is one of Toronto’s hidden gems: the Cloud Garden Conservatory. It’s a tiny little garden encased in a glass house, and once inside, you feel instantly transported to the tropics.

This is one of my favourite places to kill time when I’m in the downtown core, but if you’re not specifically looking for it, it can be easy to walk right past, which probably explains why it’s never really crowded. Set on the north-eastern corner of the small parkette that runs between Richmond and Temperance, the glass house is often concealed by trees. That, combined with the fact that the glass walls don’t descend to street level, make it easy to walk by and miss it. But for those who are determined, it’s a wonderful spot to kill an hour.

Inside, there are palms and ferns and creeping vines, and a rich, earthy smell. Sounds are muted - depending on where you sit the dominant noise might be water hissing through pipes, or a fan blade rhythmically knocking a palm leaf. If you can find a seat – they’re very limited – it’s a very relaxing place to read a few pages, or just lose yourself for a bit. The high humidity usually means that the windows are clouded with condensation, blurring your view of the real world outside. But be warned – it also means you’re going to get dripped on occasionally. The only things missing are birds and monkeys. I wonder if the City would consider adding a soundtrack if I wrote to them?

The Cloud Garden Conservatory is run by Toronto Parks and Recreation and is open Monday – Friday from 10 am to 3 pm. Wheelchair access is weather permitting.

Skating

For those of you who like to get out and do stuff, even once the temperature has dipped, Toronto has lots of places to indulge in at least one favourite winter activity: skating.

The City itself runs 51 different outdoor ice surfaces scattered throughout the city. As of time of writing, all rinks were open for business, including the very popular Nathan Phillips Square rink. This year it sports a brand new rink-side building with change room facilities and a snack bar, and skate rentals are available from 10 am to 10 pm. This rink is fairly unusual among the city-owned rinks in that it is designated for pleasure skating only, which means no stick sports allowed. If you want to be sure you won't have to avoid stray pucks while gliding around, check the City's website to see if your location sports a dual pad - generally that's one rink for shinny, and another, usually smaller one, for pleasure skating only. You can also visit the very detailed City Rinks site, which posts schedules for each rink showing hours set aside for pleasure skating only. As well as lists of what activities are allowed when, the City Rinks site also includes detailed descriptions of the rink, including how well the ice is maintained, how many staff are on duty, and the facilities available. Their Rink Diaries include much more detailed experiential information for each rink, and the site also includes a map to help you quickly and easily find the rink closest to you.

The City Rinks site also includes skating rinks not operated by the City. These include the large and beautifully situated Natrel Rink at Harbourfront. Skating is free, accessible 24 hours a day and skate rentals are available. There is also a licensed lounge attached, and DJ Skate Nights are hosted most Saturday nights from 8 to 11 pm. Check their site for a list of upcoming DJs. And if you're just curious to see people skating, check out their webcam.

Another non-city skating area is the Brickworks Skating Trail, in the Don Valley. It's also free but their hours are more limited, they're closed over the Christmas holidays, and you should bring your own skates - only limited sizes and pairs are available. If you have skates you've outgrown, or no longer use, you can donate them to their skate library. To get there, consider taking the free shuttle from just north of the Broadview subway station.

The skating experience that may tempt me to dig out my skates from deep, deep within my storage locker, is the Colonel Sam Smith Skating Trail in Etobicoke. It's the first of the city-run skate sites to be built not as a rink, but as a 250 m ice trail, roughly in the shape of a figure 8. To top off the experience, the skate house is a beautifully restored 1888 red brick heating plant, with 10-metre cathedral ceilings and 3-storey windows. The trail is staffed from 9 am to 10 pm, but as the trail isn't enclosed by fencing, there's nothing but a lack of light to stop you from skating. As City Rinks puts it, "it's open for skating by moonlight". How can you resist that?

The Distillery at Christmas

Once again this year, the Distillery District will be the home of Lowe's Christmas Market. The already beautiful Victorian pedestrian district gets all gussied up with lights, a gigantic tree, and lots of additional opportunities for shopping, drinking & entertainment.

 

There's something for everyone at this event. For those looking to take care of some of their Christmas shopping, in addition to the Distillery's usual shops and artisans, small wooden chalets are set up throughout the lanes, each housing a unique vendor. Traditional foods and gift items will be in abundance. A list of vendors is available here. And as an added bonus, MasterCard is offering free gift wrapping for any purchases made at the Market which were paid for using a MasterCard.

If you plan to bring your kids to the Market, apart from the regular entertainment and fantastic food treats, there's also a ferris wheel to ride, and Santa's Lane to visit. The Lane features storytelling, a fairy tale forest maze, Rudolph's reindeer zoo, Santa's House and more.

For those just looking to hang out and have a good time, there's plenty of entertainment scheduled. A daily fixture will be the Candy Cane Carollers, who perform Christmas favourites in four-part harmony at various times throughout the day. Local choirs and bands will also provide entertainment, and on weekends and select weekdays, solo artists will perform on the mainstage. Steven Page will help open the festivities on December 2, and other performers include David Myles, David Usher and Suzie McNeil. And if you're like me and prefer to keep the cold at bay with a beverage, there are 3 beer gardens and 3 hospitality lounges serving a variety of drinks. Free samples will even be offered at select times at each of the lounge venues. And there's always the hot chocolate at Soma, one of the best things about the Distillery at any time of year.

The Market opens December 2 and runs until December 18th. Admission is free.

Toronto Public Library Part 1: Programs

Now that the weather has been begun to shift and we're faced with colder, often darker days, the nature of the city's free offerings that most appeals - at least for me - begins to change. Not a lover of the cold, I tend to move inside once November hits, no longer looking for street festivals or walking tours, opting instead for more cerebral interests that can be appreciated in comfort indoors. One organization that comes through with an incredible array of stimulating free programming is the Toronto Public Library (I've called this entry Part 1 because there is so much to love about the Toronto Public Library system that I plan to write several entries about it).

The Library hosts a number of different talk, lecture and salon series. While talks are held throughout the city at the various branches, a good number of them are held at the centrally located Reference Library, situated just north of Bloor on Yonge Street. It has many rooms available for these events, including the well appointed Appel Salon. The marquee events are held in the evenings and are generally preceded by a cash bar reception. All events are free, although depending on the series, they may require you to book a ticket in advance. Many events "sell out" well in advance, although the Library usually does offer some rush seating on the night of the talk, or occasionally makes extra space available in an adjoining room where the talk can be watched via video screen.

The only complaint I have with the Library offerings is that there are so many of them, it can be difficult to sift through them on the website. Every time you click on their home page, different lectures or events come up in the Featured Programs section, which provides a nice intro to upcoming events, but to delve more deeply, I find the Program, Classes & Exhibits link provides too many options to be clear. A straightforward calendar would be useful, but so far I have been unable to find one. Every time I go looking, I seem to find a really interesting lecture happening in an hour or two that I had somehow managed to overlook in my previous searches. So good luck with the site. I'll be listing some of the talks - mostly the evening and weekend ones - in the What's On page, but certainly not all of them, and I won't be updating them with notes as to availability.

To give you an idea of the types of people and topics you can experience, here's a brief run-down of just a few of the series:

The Appel Salon: Billed as "New Books. Big Ideas. Join the Conversation." Top notch thinkers and writers, discussing or debating the topics of their latest books. This year's guests include Jeffrey Sachs, Umberto Echo and Peter C. Newman. These talks are recorded and can be watched after the event on the Library website.

The Eh List Author's series, which as you would expect features Canadian writers. These events take place at branches throughout the city and all events are followed by book signings.

The Thought Exchange. This is the one that covers all those interesting topics that don't fit into a neat bucket, and its tagline is "Programs for the Constantly Curious". These take place at branches throughout the city.

As a final note, I wanted to put the value of these talks into perspective. The talk I attended tonight featured Wade Davis, who spoke about the early British expeditions to Everest. Davis is, among other things, the Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic. As it happens, the National Geographic Toronto Speaker Series is currently running at Roy Thomson Hall, featuring other contributors to the magazine. I'm sure the talks are deeply engaging, but single tickets start at $39.50. The event tonight was free, and at the end, members of the audience could meet Davis, ask questions and get their books signed. Artifacts from those early expeditions were even in attendance, and made available to the audience afterward for up-close viewing. I'd say that's pretty hard to beat.

Halloween

In Toronto, Halloween isn't just a day for buying candy and dressing up the kids. Well, maybe it is for some, but for those of us who love the macabre theatricality of the day, Toronto has a two-week Halloween season rife with opportunities to express your inner zombie, witch, etc., many of them free.

The weirdest event may be the Toronto Zombie Walk happening this year on October 22. This is the 9th year of the walk and it just keeps expanding - last year, almost 6000 people donned make-up and joined the shamble. Trinity-Bellwoods Park is the meeting place and location for some of the side attractions, such as the Zombie Wedding scheduled for 2 pm. The walk starts at 3 pm. If you need to travel on TTC anywhere near the park on Saturday be warned - there will be "blood" everywhere. We took the streetcar to the event last year, getting on at Parliament. The car was at least 2/3 full of zombies - so don't wear your favourite new jeans! Even without dressing up, the event can be a blast - people get so creative with the costumes, and if you're a fan of the genre, it's fun to identify all the non-zombie zombie references.

 

A less gory event is Clay & Paper Theatre's Night of Dread. This is another walk, taking place the following weekend on October 29. The parade leaves from Dufferin Grove Park and winds through the streets for an hour, before returning to the park. The dress code for the event is black and white and dreadful, and the organizers have costumes and puppets available for the public to use during the walk. As you parade, you're accompanied by musicians, puppeteers, dancers and stilt-walkers. It's quite the spectacle, and as the pace is very sedate, suitable for almost everyone to participate in. Assembling for the parade begins at 4 pm, with the parade departing at 6.

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival is also running during this time period. It begins Thursday October 20 and runs for a week. While not free, it's pretty reasonable at $13 per film, and festival passes are available. It features horror, sci-fi, action and cult movies, and also includes pub nights after the final showing of the night. All movies are being screened at the Underground Cinema on Spadina, and for Saturday night's showing, those arriving in zombie attire get a discount.

Check out the What's On page for some of the many other free and nearly free events happening, such as:

Haunted High Park
Halloween Hoot Boo Barn at Riverdale Farm
City of the Dead: Necropolis Cemetery Tour
Ghost Tracking at Casa Loma

Fort York After Dark: Ghost Tour
Variety Village's Halloween Haunted House
Spirit Walk, hosted by Mackenzie House

Discovery Walks

This past weekend was gorgeous and I took full advantage by doing one of my favourite things in the city: walking. Toronto is a great city for walking. With a little time and some comfortable shoes, you can take in the sights of the downtown core, explore some fantastic neighbourhoods, appreciate the diversity of the waterfront trails, or take in some nature in the many parks and valleys that criss-cross this city. For me, the hardest part is often deciding where to go.

To encourage pedestrian exploration and show off its parks, the City of Toronto has developed a series of self-guided walking routes called Discovery Walks. The walks are scattered throughout the city and are marked with special signage. The maps are available for download from their website. What these walks have in common is that they show off Toronto's natural elements - whether they be manicured parks or the wilder areas such as the Don or Humber River valleys - and how they integrate in to the city as a whole. So they're a great opportunity to take in some nature, without have to venture too far from the closest coffee shop or TTC link.

This weekend I decided to try out the Shared Path, the newest of the Discovery Walks. It links a series of parks along the banks of the Humber River and stretches from Dundas all the way down to the lake. I only did the portion from Bloor south, and it was pretty diverse. Some wild areas, but also some walking through residential areas, and not as many views of the river as I had expected. At specific locations, there were informative signs telling the history of the First Nations in the area and of past development and changes to the local ecology, which was a nice plus though. And the path ends at the waterfront, at the spectacular Humber River pedestrian bridge, where you can pick up the trail and walk either way along the waterfront, at what is probably the prettiest stretch.

Sunday we were back to Riverdale Farm, subject of my last post. It too is a stop on the Discovery Walks circuit, as part of the Don Valley Hills & Dales trail.While we weren't there to follow the trail, I couldn't help but take notice of the signage. Next time you're out and about, watch for the signs, or better yet, plan ahead, download a brochure, and get out there!

Riverdale Farm

Whenever I've been in the city for too long without a break I find myself craving the great outdoors. A walk up the Don Valley to the farm is the perfect quick fix. Riverdale Farm may be in the heart of the city, but its location adjacent to the Don Valley makes for a convincing country get-away. The pathways lead through woods and there's even a pond for bird and turtle spotting. For most people though, the animals are the main attraction, and for me, the pigs in particular. They don't do much, but for some reason, pigs always seem to exude contentment. They're very calming.

While the Farm is one of the City of Toronto's many parks, most of the activities on site are run by a volunteer organization called the Friends of Riverdale Farm. They run a gift shop on site in Simpson House, and a kitchen which sells baked treats and hot and cold drinks - especially welcome on blustery fall days! They also organize the Farmers' Market which is now in its 11th season. The market is on site every Tuesday between mid-May and the end of October, from 3 to 7 pm.

Other special events are hosted throughout the year as well, and fall is a busy time. Coming up soon is the Annual Fall Harvest Festival, on September 10th and 11th. Events include a corn roast, bread making, meet the farmers, lots of demonstrations, hog & chicken calling, and even a cow flap tossing contest. Not to be missed surely! At the end of October, there is the Halloween Hoot Boo Barn, an event for 3 to 10 year olds. It takes place October 22nd and 23rd.

2011 has been a difficult year for the Farm. In July, closure of the Farm was one of the recommendations listed in KPMG's review of core services for the City of Toronto. Then, in August, one of the long-time residents of the farm - Dolly, the Clydesdale horse - died of complications from old age. She had lived at the Farm for the past 19 years and will be much missed.

So now is a perfect time to get out there and show your support. If you're like me and love the Farm, show your support with a visit, by becoming a Friend of Riverdale Farm, or by signing a petition to keep it open. If you haven't yet experienced the Farm, no better time than the present. Admission is always free, and hours are 9 am to 5 pm, all year long.

Toronto Music Garden

If you enjoy music, and the great outdoors, Toronto’s Music Garden is the place for you. Located on the waterfront between Spadina and Bathurst, the garden was designed by famed cellist Yo Yo Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir. Its various sections are meant to be a representation, in landscape, of Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for unaccompanied cello, BWV 1007. To discover what this means, wander the garden, and if you need some help with the interpretation, visit the website for a description, or consider taking a guided tour. They are available free of charge on Wednesday at 11 am (until September 28) and Thursdays at 5:30 pm (until September 8). Hand-held audio players providing commentary by the park designers and featuring excerpts of music can be rented for $6 from Marina Quay West Office, on the pier directly south of the Garden. Private group tours can also be arranged but a small fee and reservations are required.

Being a Music Garden, there is of course, music to be had. This year marks the 12^th year of Summer Music in the Garden. Free concerts are held in the amphitheatre most Thursdays at 7 pm and Sundays at 4pm, and it’s quite an experience. During quiet moments, the sounds of planes taking off from the Island airport, and the rumble of streetcars on Queens Quay are reminders that this beautiful space is surrounded by an active city, but then when the music swells, you’re transported once again to somewhere magical.

The amphitheatre has limited bench seating and you’re encouraged to bring your own chairs or blankets. Myself, I like the grass, and each rise is edged with stone, so even if the day has been a little damp, there’s a relatively dry spot to park your bottom. For this year’s schedule, refer to their website, or check the Free in Toronto calendar below for the next concert date.

Woofstock

One of my favorite festivals of the year is about to start! This weekend is Woofstock, which is billed as North America's largest outdoor festival for dogs. It's a crazy weekend where dogs and their owners take over the area around the St. Lawrence Market - and every year it seems to expand further and further along Front Street.

If you have a dog, there are lots of vendors selling everything from treats to clothes to headstones, plus you can enter your dog in things like the stupid dog tricks contest, or a fashion show. Yes, they have fashion shows. No where else will you see such a concentration of dogs wearings togs. Which is one of the reasons I love Woofstock. I don't have a dog, but I love them in all their variety, and you just never know what you're going to see on this weekend. My favourite way to enjoy this festival is to score a spot on one of the many patios (not as difficult as you might think as dogs still aren't allowed on Toronto patios), order a drink, and take in the pagentry. Plus I'll probably take in one of the shows by the Purina Pro Plan Dogs Stars - what's not to love about a dog competing on an obstacle course?

A word of warning - if you don't like crowds, this isn't the event for you. Also, if you have children, especially small ones, who aren't too sure about dogs, you might want to restrict yourself to the sidelines. It's not just the sheer number of animals that will be present, but you will see some of the biggest dogs you've ever seen.

Just thought I'd add a few of my favourite pics from today. Great crowd!