Ever since we started the Butterflyway Aymer project I look at spots around our town with an eye filter of transformation possibilities. Every little strip of lawn I pass in a public space I imagine turned into a pollinator garden. It doesn’t need anything more than willingness, imagination, and plants. The cool thing is, along along the way of this project, I’ve discovered just how easy it is to ask.
One such space that I have eyed week after week watching Remi grow for the past several years has been the patio at 5e Baron. For anyone unfamiliar, it is our local micro brewery in the heart of Old Aylmer, and a remarkably child-friendly place that we frequent at least once a week, and enjoy adult conversations and cold beer on their patio while our child happily entertains herself playing around the courtyard and with other semi-feral children whose parents are also largely enjoying adulting, interrupted only by occasional bathroom accompaniment requests.
5e opened during COVID, when Remi was a few months old, and we have been loyal patrons ever since, largely because of their patio, but also because of their rotating beer selection.
Back to the patio, back to the Butterflyway Aylmer project, you can probably guess where this is going. On each such visit I have eyed the full shade garden children use as a playground, covered in river rocks creeping bellflower (invasive) and not much else. With each of what I’m sure are hundreds of beers I’ve consumed- in moderation throughout the brewery’s 6 years- I have stared at the shady spot and envisioned transforming it into a woodland garden that the children are somehow still able to trample while shade friendly pollinator plants grow.
On the opposite side of the shade garden lay an abandoned looking raised ornamental garden bed made of bricks and covered in a decade’s worth of periwinkle, backed by 2 overgrown thorny barberry bushes.
When we officially formed our non-profit, we held our first official board meeting at the brewery. It naturally followed that without an office, 5e Baron became the most natural place for planning meetings for our board.
One day, I asked Jacob: How would you feel about us transforming areas of your patio into pollinator habitat? All it took was that one question. He was in from the beginning, still in when we vehemently insisted that the beautiful periwinkle blanket had to go, after we explained how it devastates local ecosystems; still in when we added that the giant bushes offering patio privacy needed to go, because their roots were intertwined with the periwinkle and we had no hope of eradicating the periwinkle if we left the shrubs in.
We were given carte blanche and a small budget to transform the patio into stop #15 on the Butterflyway Aylmer.
We picked a date, dropped off a load of arborist wood chips, and managed to collect a lot of cardboard from the library by accidentally being there at the right time.
Two of our volunteers spent a morning cutting out the branches of the barberry, which we then delivered to the giant branch cemetery on our friends Andre’s property.
The remaining stumps from the bushes were gigantic, and those of us that saw them were a little stumped as to how we would ever manage to remove them. Their mass and immovability threatened to derail the planting, until Gabrielle messaged our group chat to let us know she was going to attempt removing them on her own using a new type of shovel.
I don’t know how many hours it took her, and I don’t know how she managed to remove them since each of their mass and wait is probably larger than hers, but her patience and determination paid off as she managed to remove both stumps in a torrential downpour, with time to spare before our planting event was scheduled to begin.
Next came the weather. We had imagined a breezy Sunday evening, children running around, helping plant and painting little caterpillars onto rocks, parents helping us pull buckets full of periwinkle roots with one hand, sipping beer with the other, listening to the musicial soundtrack of my youth (seriously, I don’t know who comes up with the mixes for the brewery, but Digable Planets, Portishead, Tribe Called Quest and Erykah Badu each bring me back to a much, much younger and far dumber version of myself I both miss and despise).
That is not what we got. The weather forecast for the weekend was nothing but rain. The night before a freak storm downed trees all over town, and we lost power the entire night. That morning the forecast was dubious at best. Hour by hour rain was expected heavy in the morning lightning slightly in the afternoon and then continuing to drizzle all through the evening.
We pondered what the right thing to do was in our volunteer group. We decided to proceed thinking the plants would actually be quite happy and the rain will be light. We confirmed with the brewery, when Jacob asked if we want to postpone to a different day, or wait until later to make a call of whether we would do it or not.
The plants were ready, we were ready so we said ‘nah… It will be just a misty sprinkle by the time we plant. Let’s do it!’
Dominique came over and helped me load all of the plants, as well as my little wagon full of fancy compost dirt mix from Meristeme. We stopped off at Sarah’s place with the orange trailer to fill one more trailer load of wood chips. Sarah had received a free load of wood chips from Chipdrop, a free service that connects arborists looking to offload your woodchips with interested parties willing to have a truckload of wood chips dropped somewhere on their property.
The challenge with Chipdrop is you need to be prepared to accept up to 20 cubic yards of wood chips dumped in the place you specify. Most people don’t realize how large a pile of 20 yards of wood chips actually is. Sarah now gets it. She used what she needed and has been actively sharing the excess with anyone in the community willing to take it.
This is where the wood chips from 5e came from. We wanted a second load to ensure we really layer everything we have onto any remaining periwinkle roots to smother them completely.
We ended up filling the trailer in the rain, and got pretty soaked in the process. Our hope was by the time we reached our planting site the rain would taper off. Alas, that Is not how the evening went. The rain continued in alternating spurts of anger and contentment, throughout the evening.
We were prepared for no one to show up, but our Pollinate Aylmer volunteers kept coming. We forgot a wheelbarrow, Suzanne brought one. We forgot large pots, Gabrielle brought those. We didn’t have enough shovels, Dominique came to the rescue. We needed extra hand tools, we knew we can always count on Jim to come prepared. He brought a rake a giant pick tool thing, and many other tools I can’t recall. Two of PSA’s senior Acti-Leaders came to help with the planting. 1/2 of my family and part of Suzanne’s joined us, and Jacob greeted us with pitchers of beer, proper gardening shoes and a willingness to see the planting through, in the rain.
I had brought plants separated by zone which made it a little less chaotic preparing the different areas. We let the Acti – Leaders focus on the woodland shade Garden, while the rest of us took shifts removing periwinkle and it’s Web of roots from the front garden bed. That’s probably what took the longest, and we know there are still roots there, and we have no hope of ever removing every one of them. We definitely got closer though.
To help suppress the ability of remaining Roots to create shoots that pop back up through soil, We used cardboard. We knew one layer wasn’t going to do it. We didn’t trust that two layers would so we decided on three. Our hope is the cardboard itself takes a minimum of 2 years to fully break down by which point the offshoots have suffocated and died a slow, banal death, never to be seen again. Realistically even with this much cardboard covering, we will have to keep an eye out for escaping shoots and remove them one by one. This means someone’s going to have to come and visit the brewery on a regular basis. I’ll take one for the team here.
The cardboard was still a little bit stiff, and this is where the rain began to come in handy. The giant puddles on the sidewalk helped us soak the cardboard, and Remi gladly stomped it into the sidewalk, the way I might push bread into an egg mixture to make french toast. We brought the soaked sheets over to the garden bed, and what started off as stomping on the cardboard turned into an impromptu dance party on top of the periwinkle graveyard.
Once three layers of cardboard were laid, we began bringing over the remaining wood chips. We were fortunate to have very finely chipped chips, which I know from experience will break down fairly easily into rich, nutrient-filled soil, with time. We laid about 6 inches of these woodchips over the soaked cardboard layers, and this is what became our planting medium.
Over on the other side a similar wood chip spread was made, with no cardboard needed, as there were no weeds to suppress where we were planting. The acti leaders is removed the hostas, and we actually place them on the curb, free for the taking.
Rocks were strategically placed around the young shade plants, in the hope we can give them a head start becoming established before they get fully trampled by little feet.
Back over to the raised bed, we brought several stepping stones with us, and let Remi dictate where to place them as optimal walking / jumping paths for little feet. Thanks to our dance party she came up with a brilliant idea of placing them so that the existing spotlight illuminates her feet while dancing, for the times she is there with us after dark.
We also decided to plant a few strategically placed plants around the 5e sign, removing the depressed looking irises that previously occupied that space.
With mulch placed in all of our intended planting places it was time to arrange plants. I encourage you to come visit the brewery and watch them grow.
For those of you interested in what we planted here is the list by planting zone:
The woodland shade Garden
- Maidenhair Fern
- Foamflower
- Canada Anemone
- Bishop’s Cap
- Jack in the pulpit
- Wild ginger
- Canada columbine
- Golden Alexanders
- Zig Zag Goldenrod
- White Wood Aster
- Bottlebrush grass
- Tufted hairgrass
The raised bed / part sun garden
- Highbush cranberry
- Kalm st. John’s wort
- Virgin’s bower
- Purple Clematis
- Blue Lobelia
- Black Eyed Susan
- Upland White Goldenrod
- Dwarf Skullcap
- Heart Leaf Alexander
- Foxglove beardtongue
- Hairy beardtongue
- Narrow Leaved mountain mint
- Spotted bee balm
- Blue grama grass
Front Sign & Walkway
- Bowman’s root
- Purple love grass
- Creeping Jacob’s ladder
- Wild ginger
- Little Bluestem Grass
- Black Eyed Susan
We had some wood chips remaining and a few plants, and decided we could remove even more hostas from along the pathway, and use that narrow strip of space to plant more plants for pollinators. After chipping alongside the path, we added large patches of wild ginger, interspersed with little blue stem grass and black eyed susans, hoping those two can mature and root themselves enough before the wild ginger reaches them.
By this point the kids kids had taken refuge from the rain inside the brewery and decorated some of the painted rocks Suzanne had brought. These rocks became the finishing touches on the garden, and we left markers behind the counter hoping some of the children that frequent the brewery will enjoy decorating them as well.
Completely soaked, with puddles inside our rain boots, mud smeared across our faces, and some glasses, the mood was one of celebratory shivering, as we posed for a photo of our latest masterpiece.
The transformation looks amazing, and we can’t wait to watch the plants grow into themselves, as pollinators find them and refuel.
Thanks Jacob and the entire 5e team for your trust in us, and for being there to help, every step of the way.
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