Fort Calgary garden plowed over to make way for historic site redesign

Fort Calgary's long-standing organic vegetable garden in Calgary's Inglewood neighbourhood was bulldozed this week.

For the officials at the historical site, the destruction meansa step towarda larger and exciting redesign,but for members of the community, it means the loss of an important connection to the land.

Critics on social media were expressed surpriseWednesday to discover the garden's plants were gone and the ground was being re-covered with sod.

Sal Howell, proprietor of the Deane House, which is an extension of the fort, only found out the garden was being ripped up when she saw the bulldozers at work.

"It was a beautiful, well-tended and well-looked after garden," she said, adding that had she known, she would have taken the opportunity to transplant some of the plants from the fort's garden into the restaurant's.

The garden wasn't a community garden by normals standards there were no plots available for rent, and the work was done by employees of the fort and volunteers.

Linda McLean, the spokesperson forFort Calgary, said significant resources went into running the vegetable plot, which was not a heritage garden, as the heritage varieties grown in the garden came from seeds purchasedevery year.

The plan for the plot, McLean said, is to create an outdoor exhibit that connects visitors with the natural site at the fort.

"That's super important to us and it's super important that we're going to devote resources and time and energy to exhibits and attractions here that they are actually something that visors are allowed to engage with," she said.

'Growing people'

The garden was created as aSuncorEnergy Foundation millennium project in 2000.The idea was to recreate a historic garden, like the one that originally existed on the site to feed members of the North-West Mounted Police.

Sara Jane Gruetzner, the former CEO of Fort Calgary, said Wednesday she was surprised and sad to learn the award-winning community garden she created was razed.

"For me personally, it was my first project there. It was the first application for funding that I did," she said."I was extremely proud of that garden. It meant a lot to me, and the reason it meant so much to me was because it resonated so much with the community."

"I feel a great sense of loss that it's gone."

Gruetznersaid the original project evolved to provide food for local charities, educational tours for school groups and volunteer opportunities.

They also hired people from difficult-to-employ sectors, because gardening,Gruetznersaid,is"very therapeutic."

"We were growing people there, not just food," she said.

"Gardens grow, no pun intended. But they evolve. And if we had not connected that garden, if people hadn't shown up to volunteer, if people hadn't shown up to talk to us, if they hadn't written articles about it, it wouldn't have been successful. But it just connected Fort Calgary with all these wonderful people," she said.

Gruetznersaid one of her fondest memories was going to work to find a man standing at the front door with an armfulof rhubarb a plant that once belonged to his grandfather.

"He was going into assisted living and couldn'ttake his rhubarb with him and so he wanted to plant it somewhere where someone would love his rhubarb and he could come and see it. So of course we took it," she said.

Future of the plot

McLeansaid Fort Calgary had the property assessed by the Calgary Horticultural Society, which was allowed totake any "items of real value" to cultivate in their own gardens.

The actual design plan for the site is still in the works, but McLeansaid they want the new space to be more impactful than the one that existed before. In the meantime, she said, they laid the sod to prevent the plot from becoming an acre of weeds.

"[The redesign] is going to be tremendous. At the moment, the people who come into the museum, they come into the museum and leave the museum. They are not really connected in any meaningful way to the exterior site," she said.

"We don't have desired lines and pathways that draw people in to a land-based experiential visit here."

McLean said she expects the new landscaping to be done by 2020.

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