Smokestack Garden
A 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. This distinctive landscape will be transformed into a garden on view to the public throughout the summer months.
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Smokestack Garden 2026
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. 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.
Smokestack Garden 2025
The Power Plant partnered with Bowery Project for the inaugural edition of Smokestack Garden: a series of temporary gardens. For the first garden in the Smokestack Garden series, Bowery Project grew a variety of indigenous pollinator-friendly flowering plants, using The Power Plant’s discarded shipping crates as planters. Their project was designed in response to the exploration of gardens and botanical life in the exhibitions by Toronto-based artists Shelagh Keeley and Emmanuel Osahor inside the gallery.
