I frequently visited The Nordheimer Ravine in the late 1930s and early ’40s while I lived with my Grandmother on Rathnelly Avenue. The ravine east of Spadina Road had been part of “Glen Edyth,” the Nordheimer estate. There were originally twenty-three acres of gardens. In the ravine bottom, Castle Frank Brook had been dammed to create ponds and a waterfall. After the Nordheimers died in 1912, their son Roy lived at Glen Edyth until 1924. His executors offered Glen Edyth to the city as a park, but the price was too high and the house was demolished 1929. The property was subdivided, but the bottom lands were open to the public. I remember the paths, ponds and bridges were still there, though not in very good repair.
The ravine west of the Spadina bridge was wilder and to my mind more interesting. St. Clair Avenue crossed the ravine on a bridge, but I was not able to walk further up the ravine, as north of St Clair, it had by that time been filled with soil and waste. I did once find my way to the upper ravine (Cedarvale), but it was filled with burdocks and other unpleasant and, to my mind then, uninteresting vegetation so I gave it a miss. I do remember walking up Bathurst Street and over the bridge over The Cedarvale Ravine and that there was plowed ground on the west side.
Once, during my first year at university, when visiting this ravine with some classmates, honing our skills at tree recognition, we came across a small brown snake that was quite pretty. I put it in a box and took it to our zoology lab a couple of days later, where I learned that it was a Decew’s Snake. That might have been the end of the story, but this episode broke one of my gender stereotypes. The one that boys and men like snakes and girls and women do not. One of the young women wanted to pet the snake and one of the men jumped over a laboratory table to get away.
The construction of, first the Spadina Storm Trunk Sewer and later the Subway (west end only), destroyed the valley bottom, both the landscaped eastern end and the wildlands of the west.
I was introduced to many other natural and interesting areas around Toronto as a junior member of the Toronto Field Naturalists. We gathered fossils along the Humber at Thistletown and in the Don Valley Brick Works. Security was quite slack in those days and I was able to wander in without any problem. I tried to find a giant beaver without any luck and the only wood was what I later determined was a piece of hemlock. I did find quite a few shells. When they began to break-up, I preserved them by coating them with shellac. Dr. Madeleine Fritz helped me identify some of my finds.
When I was in grade 10, I had the good fortune to join a group of classmates who were taken on outings by Dr. Fred Urquhart, the scientist who discovered the migration route of the Monarch Butterfly. He showed us how to collect and mount insects and explained some of the methods of the science of entomology. He told us how he banded Monarch Butterflies and that at that time he had traced their migration across Lake Erie.
When I was studying Forestry at U of T in the mid 1940s, there were still many undeveloped wooded lots in the Lawrence Park area. This was one of the practice areas used to demonstrate timber estimating. I recall running cruise lines down the middle of a couple of blocks with a fair stand of White Pine.
PJH