The Power Plant

This summer, The Power Plant is collaborating with Waard Ward on the second edition of Smokestack Garden, an ongoing series of temporary garden commissions created for the strip of land at the base of The Power Plant’s iconic smokestack, a flue gas chimney originally built in 1926 for coal combustion. Once again, this distinctive landscape will be transformed into a garden on view to the public throughout the summer months.

Smokestack Garden provides a unique and thought-provoking setting that lies between natural and post-industrial worlds. The series revisits Artist Gardens, a five-year program of annual commissions presented across the Harbourfront Centre campus during the 1990s, which brought together numerous national and international artists. More than thirty years later, the opportunity for artists, gardeners, and researchers to reflect on ecology, climate justice, food production, interspecies care, and the lasting impacts of the energy industry feels more relevant than ever.

The Toronto-based contemporary arts collective Waard Ward has approached the project through a collaborative process, utilizing social practice frameworks and gardening to instill agency and facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Guided by garden consultant Allison Chow, the children of the collective’s members and their collaborators designed the layout and planted flowers and herbs, while learning about the properties of the various plants. The garden is organized into three sensory beds, each one dedicated to a specific theme: smell, touch, and taste. Visitors will encounter fragrant herbs like basil and lavender, a variety of fuzzy and spiky plants chosen for their distinct textures and tactile qualities, and tomato plants that will fruit later in the season. The children also created artworks to decorate the garden beds with imagery that imagines the fruitful future.

Waard Ward’s garden project complements the theme of The Power Plant’s summer exhibition season, Colourful Parachutes, which positions children as both collaborators and the intended audience. This year’s Smokestack Garden, like the exhibition, creates space for children’s agency, participation, and imagination, while encouraging thoughtful engagement with the natural world.

About Waard Ward Collective

Waard Ward is a contemporary arts collective based in Toronto that collaborates in floristry, decolonial research, and newcomer community support. Waard Ward is collectively led by Syrian florist Abd Al-Mounim, community organizers/Syrian newcomers Hanen Nanaa and Shoruk Alsakni, educator Laura Ritacca, curator/educator Patricia Ritacca, and artist Petrina Ng. They create floral arrangements, build community gardens, support mutual aid networks, and teach floristry to newcomers (in and out of classrooms)—all to embody generous and fruitful futures. Waard Ward's name evokes the idea of a diasporic flower district; “waard” is a Romanization of the Arabic word for “flower.”