Award

The parking lot was designed against convention as well. Instead of a normal sea of asphalt fringed by a half-dozen nearly dead trees, PMA installed a series of 12-metre-wide islands planted with a mixture of young growth. These worked like hedges, separating groups of parking stalls and turning them into intimate spaces. The larger park project featured bike huts and trails, a naturalized pond made accessible by stepping stones, and a sophisticated stormwater management system that included water-capturing bioswales. (A swale is a depressed land trench designed to channel water runoff – a bioswale goes it one better by incorporating plants and special soil mixes that allow for passive irrigation of eye-pleasing native growth.) The project itself kept getting larger, with Husky's addition of two new manufacturing facilities plus a daycare centre. All told, PMA spent eight years at work on the initiative. By the time the next recessions rolled around, at the end of the 1990s and then the 2000s, PMA was established enough to withstand any economic downturn. Municipalities now comprise the majority of its client base, with highways and school boards and a smattering of mainly high-density residential projects bringing up the rear. Indeed, in recent years, principals Melvin and Lee have worked so often on so many interesting and varied jobs that, when asked which ones they're proudest of, the list appears endless: Sibelius Square in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood; the grounds and playground at the new Ronald McDonald House, close by the U of T campus, which are not only LEED certi ied but adhere to even stricter Toronto Green Development Standards; the extensive property surrounding the famous McMichael Canadian Art Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario; the 100 per cent accessible Neshama Playground in mid-town Toronto's Oriole Park; the Toronto Botanical Garden, and so on. Toronto Botanical Garden might be deemed the most prestigious of the lot, if only because it takes superb landscaping to impress a large group of people whose lives revolve around plants. PMA had a relatively small patch of land (1.6 hectares) on which to place a variegated bouquet of a dozen gardens – the Knot Garden, the Terrace Garden, the Herb & Kitchen Garden, the Show Garden, the Spiral Mound, the Carpet Bed Garden, the Teaching Garden, the Floral Hall Courtyard, the Garden Hall Courtyard, the West View Terrace, the Nature Garden and the Water Garden. Because of the restricted size, PMA's approach tended less towards a traditional herbarium and scienti ic research facility, and more toward showing people what to do with their own small garden plots. The Herb & Kitchen Garden, for example, was designed with Toronto's broad ethnic community in mind. Each year, the backyard-like plot with its fence for espaliered fruit trees and sunken steel rings for isolated vegetation is planted with vegetables and herbs associated with a speci ic culture's cookery. "The other big thing," says Melvin, "is that everything is environmentally by the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) with a Regional Citation award at the 2012 Awards of Excellence. Wetlands also take up half of the new design for O'Connor Park in Mississauga, Ontario. Situated within a residential subdivision, the 12-hectare park neatly balances urban lifestyle with PMA's own brand of careful environmental conservation. "We re-instituted the wetland so that all park drainage goes into it," says Melvin, "and we used only 100 per cent native species." PMA's concentration on innovative materials and techniques led to the installation of water-permeable paving in the parking lot, along with a central bioswale to trap and ilter water run-off; a permeable, recycled rubber playground surface; a system of vegetated retaining walls; recycled asphalt; and salvaged logs from cleared trees set up as play features in the natural play zone. A central pathway connects the normal elements of a city park – two soccer ields; senior, junior and natural playgrounds; a shelter and large open lawn that can be turned into rink facilities in the winter – with a boardwalk that stretches around the marsh and includes three outlook areas complete with educational signage. The irm's strict attention to detail stretched so far as to include the building of bat-boxes and birdhouses to attract even more wildlife to the area. But the best bit was discovering a colony of Midland Painted Turtles living nearby. "We constructed a vegetated island for turtle nesting and put in some basking logs," Lee says. "We literally carried the turtles one-by-one to their new home, their own little island." It's the type of activity Lee never would have dreamed of when she irst decided on becoming a landscape architect. For that matter, it's not an activity one would normally associate with the principals of a renowned, award-winning irm. But that may be the real reason behind PMA's success: a basic understanding that even when you grow big, you should still champion the smallest of things. ■ Photo and above: Colonel Sam Smith Park, Toronto, ON. sound. There are water features that drain into a subterranean irrigation tank, water-capture trench drains that ilter into an underground irrigation system, recycled bottles and bricks used to build the custom Terrace Garden wall, and a green roof on the main building. In fact, we developed the Spiral Mound to give visitors an elevated vantage spot to view the green roof as well as the entire garden." Another sort of view is offered at the just- inished arti icial ice trail in Colonel Sam Smith Park in Toronto's west end. The 250-metre-long refrigerated trail is laid out in a igure-eight pattern that twines around a diverse habitat for wildlife and vegetation, made even richer with new plantings of native species. When the rink melts at the end of the season, its water run-off drains directly into the park's wetlands, which are reputedly one of the best bird-watching spots in the vicinity. This project represents a irst for PMA , as well as a irst-of-its-kind for Canada's largest city, and was recognized JUNE 2012 p.08-09Coverstory.indd 9 /9 5/25/12 11:38:18 AM

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