Check out Cathy Renwald’s column in today’s Spec. We are the “highly motivated” Crown Point Garden Club! For people who are curious about our connection to the Monarch Awards, it started after a Crown Point resident won the very prestigious “Red Trillium” award in 2015. I visited that garden and, yes, it was flawless. But it was also full of hardscaping, fences, and very dependent of foliage and a limited number of plant species. Not an inviting place for butterflies or bees! Why couldn’t we have an awards program that would recognize naturalized gardens? Why not exuberant gardens that were diverse, healthy, and buzzing with life? Gardens that looked past the tidy constraints of curb-appeal to an environmentally conscious aesthetic and an awareness of sustainable, water-wise, low-impact gardening practices? So I pitched the idea to the staff at the Pollinator Paradise Project (a joint program of Environment Hamilton and the Hamilton Naturalists Club). We had a meeting and, to our delight, staff from Royal Botanical Gardens came out, ready to work to make a new garden awards happen in 2016. The media release goes out tomorrow. The web site is live and you can enter your own garden. Come out to the garden club meeting on Wed. April 27 for details. There will be a reminder email and blog post today or tomorrow. – Bev Cathy Renwald’s column in April 21st Hamilton Spectator