Fifteen years under the stone

I started Hollowmere in 2011 with a used trailer, a plate compactor and a phone number on a sign in Streetsville. The first two years were mostly repairs: patios that had humped by the back door, walkways that dropped where the downspout landed. When I lifted the stone it was almost always the same story underneath. A thin layer of limestone screenings sitting right on wet clay, no fabric, no real gravel. I rebuilt them properly and kept a list of what I found.

Then the ice storm. Freezing rain started on the evening of 20 December 2013 and ran into the 22nd, and more than 500,000 people lost power. Some Toronto streets lost half or more of their mature canopy. I spent that Christmas week and most of January cutting broken limbs off fences, sheds and roofs in Streetsville and Meadowvale, and hauling them away. Nobody hires a landscaper in January. That winter they did, and they remembered the name in the spring.

The ash years came right after. Emerald ash borer was found in Mississauga in 2008 and was in every ward by 2012. By October 2015 the City had removed more than 6,800 public ash trees. In backyards the same thing was happening one tree at a time, and in Oakville most of the woodland ash died. I learned to plan a yard around a tree that might not be there in five years, and to replant with a mix of species so one pest could never empty a street again.

From 2020 to 2022 everyone wanted a backyard. A GTA designer told the Globe and Mail in spring 2021 that demand had doubled, landscape lumber was up 40 to 60 percent and plant supply was down by more than half. By August 2022 Landscape Ontario was reporting inflation at 8.1 percent, and paver prices kept moving after the quotes went out. Then the Bank of Canada raised its rate ten times, from 0.25 percent to 5 percent by July 2023. Budgets shrank overnight. I started building in phases, and I made one decision I have never gone back on: when the money is short, the patio gets smaller. The base never gets thinner.

2024 was the wettest year Pearson has recorded, 1,145 mm, with a July storm over 100 mm. My phone filled with water against foundations, and half of it came from swales filled in by somebody's patio. The next summer was the opposite: six heat waves, 14 days over 32 C and half the normal rain or less from June into August. In one year I learned drainage again, and in the next I learned which plants survive without help. Every plan we draw now carries both lessons.

The bylaws changed the job too. Mississauga's 2022 tree bylaw and Oakville's 2024 tightening mean that any work near a tree 15 cm across starts with a permit question. I do not mind. A tree check at the first visit is one more thing under the surface done properly before anyone sees the stone. That has always been the job.