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Eric Bunnell's People: A St. Thomas in bloom

The city's parks department is getting ready to hang basket and plant flowers

The daffodils and other early bloomers are largely done in the garden.

The redbud, originally a seedling from Aunt Helen’s garden, is tall and enticing, but it is starting to leaf out and soon will be losing its annual show.

Eric Bunnell's People: A St. Thomas in bloom Back to video

The apple tree is in blossom, though I think our hard winter took its toll.

The lily of the valley is near ready to flower.

It’s that time of year.

And soon, they’ll be planting out the city’s parks.

Right now, the Pinafore Park greenhouse is a place to be – warm and humid, smelling deliciously of earth. And on Wednesday when we visited, filled with about 13,000 plants and seedlings waiting patiently in their cell packs and pots on long tables to be set out.

That’ll be in a week or two, says greenhouse boss Christina Sokay, who, even though a graduate of the horticultural program at Fanshawe College, casts her eye as if she were an old farmer, toward the full moon.

“Typically, you don’t get a hard, killing frost after that,” she says with a laugh.

Overhead, waiting to be put up downtown and at Pinafore, are 325 hanging baskets. Like last year, they’ll feature purple wave petunias and sweet potato vine again – and probably will be no less appreciated by the public who each late summer voice disappointment when the baskets have to come down.

The timing is as much a question of staffing as anything else – once temporary summertime hires return to school, there is no one to water the baskets every second day.

“You want to take them down while they still are looking good.”

The city’s parks and forestry department has 11 permanent employees but staffs up to three times that much during the growing season, when responsibilities include caretaking roughly 300 hectares (750 acres) of turf throughout the city.  (Those responsibilities are increasing as the municipality develops, notes Cody Montgomery, city parks and forestry manager – just alone, there are 15 more kilometres of paved trails currently being added to the city’s already extensive trail network.)

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