School uncovers buried stream, transforms its schoolyard

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Buried under cities across Canada, in culverts and tunnels, are networks of rivers and streams that once nourished the surrounding landscapes. Now, there are efforts to uncover or "daylight" some of them, restoring habitat for plants and animals, while helping prevent urban flooding. 

One challenge is that many of these waterways pass through a variety of urban landscapes, both publicly and privately owned, from parks to residential and commercial developments to school yards.

But a Toronto school shows that it's possible for at least some of those to coexist with streams and enjoy the benefits of resurfacing lost waterways.

A daylighted section of Burke Brook, part of Toronto's Don River watershed, meanders through the schoolyard and under bridges between the Junior and Senior schools at Havergal College, a girls' private elementary and secondary school in a mid-town neighbourhood.

For decades, a section of Burke Brook lay buried in a culvert at the bottom of the ravine that runs through the school yard. 

When the school decided to build a natural playground and outdoor learning space in 2013, it hired landscape architect Mike Salisbury to design and carry out the project. He soon realized that daylighting Burke Brook wasn't just possible and beneficial — it was necessary in order to do the grading, terracing and slope-side planting to build the playground and a mini-amphitheatre, while protecting the ravine and flood plain and allowing for more habitat restoration.

"That project was able to happen because of the work we did in restoring the stream and putting in a bridge," he said, adding that he believes it created more learning opportunities for the students. "They could go in and safely play with the habitat that was created at the bottom."

Daylighting involved temporarily damming a section of the brook and pumping the water around it so the culvert could be removed.

It's part of a much bigger ravine restoration project, as well as the learning program and opportunities at the school, said Heather Schibli, the landscape architect who has been working on both those aspects for the past four years. 

She was originally hired to help re-naturalize the schoolyard but "there was so much synergy between what the teachers were covering in their curriculum and then when we were doing … the school was happy to kind of combine efforts and have the students engaged in doing the restoration planting within the ravine."

Today, she's also involved in hikes through the woods with the students, showing them bones and feathers from local wildlife and some of the native plant species thriving there, such as choke cherry, alternate leaf dogwood, sugar maple and trilliums.