Heritage designation for 'trading tree' at root of ClearWater project

YorkRegion.com
June 13, 2017
Heidi Riedner

A 200-year-old sugar maple at the heart of ClearWater Farm in Willow Beach has been designated as an Ontario Heritage Tree.

In celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial, Forests Ontario is mapping and telling the stories of 150 heritage trees across the province.

Recognition is based on distinctness in size, form, age, rarity or their connection with historically significant events, individuals or locations.

At the heart of ClearWater stands the Old Trading Tree, a 200-year-old sugar maple where once Chippewas and early settlers met to trade and tell stories on the south shore of Lake Simcoe.

Located at the Lake Drive entrance to the farm, today the old maple is the focus of a new project.

It will be the centrepiece of a rain garden designed and built by kids, for kids.

Leading the project are 38 students and six teachers from both the Waabgon Gamig First Nations School of Georgina Island and Sutton Public School, as well as four volunteers.

Once again, the Trading Tree will become a place for storytelling as well as experiential hands-on learning, said the Farm’s Annabel Slaight.

"The Trading Tree being about exchange, so are the students activities: exchanges of ideas, of stories, of cultures, of customs, of processes and methodologies, of school curriculums and professional/expert knowledge."

June 12 was the second of four sessions to be held this year in the garden being created to honour the Trading Tree, with students working in teams to design six different gardens; hummingbird, butterfly, pollinators, edibles, wildflowers and bog (frog).

Determining how people would interact with their gardens and how their “rain” gardens would capture water flow from the roof of the farmhouse and filter and clean it as it makes its way down to the lake were part of the process.

The project is supported by the Great Lakes Community Guardian Fund and the TD Friends of the Environment.

Landscape designer Lorraine Mennan of Pathways to Perennials is contributing knowledge and plants.

The story of the Trading Tree garden is being filmed by local filmmaker Peter Sibbald.

An event to celebrate the historic Trading Tree will be announced later this summer.