One year, with the kind of gusto for tidying up that’s endemic across cottage country in early July, my husband, Steve, and I set out to clean up an abandoned woodpile. It had been festering in an overgrown tangle of trees by the shore. I lifted up one of the rotting logs and jumped—there, looking at me, sat an equally startled Eastern red-backed salamander. The small, dark, rust-coloured creature darted away. Steve and I looked at each other, and shifted more pieces of wood, catching glimpses of another, and another. We could hardly believe that inside this eyesore, just steps from the cottage, there was a secret world under our rotting logs. So we left it and its neighbouring firepit to fall apart in peace.
In life, it’s a natural desire to tidy up. It’s how we take care of a place. Opening up at the cottage means cleaning up mouse droppings and wiping winter grime off deck furniture. That desire to bring order to our surroundings extends to the forest; we see a tree that fell over the winter and want to chop it up, we see fallen leaves and want to rake them. That would make sense if the forest around your cottage was a movie set, placed just so for maximum aesthetic impact. But long before you got there, the forest was home to plants, animals, and living processes—and guess what? It still is.
Forests bring a bevy of benefits: they reduce the effects of flooding and drought, they supply shade, they capture toxins and excessive nutrients, and they provide habitat for wildlife. All of which make them a key part of the fight against climate change.
It may feel like our tiny part of the forest is inconsequential in the whole of Canada. What difference does it make what you do on your small lot? In fact, even the tiniest waterfront properties support a whole lot of life—70 per cent of land-based wildlife and 90 per cent of aquatic life will depend on vegetated shorelines at some point in their lives.
Beyond these reasons, many cottagers take on forest revitalization with succession planning in mind, wanting to promote a healthy forest for when they hand down their property, or because they’re losing land to erosion.
Only about 12 per cent of land in Canada is protected, as of 2022. “The whole world is in a biodiversity crisis,” says ecologist Cara Steele, who is the program coordinator at Abbey Gardens, a learning and community hub in Haliburton, Ont., that promotes sustainable living. Helping people appreciate the benefits of a healthy forest is one of the things that happens at their rehabilitated quarry site, which is home to demonstration gardens that feature cottage-country landscapes and low-impact native gardens.
That kind of diversity comes with complexity. That can mean patches of lowlands where trees grow happily with wet feet, alongside dry upland forests. You might have an area where a big old tree died, and the plants that had been patiently growing in its shade now make a break for the light, each sapling vying to be the tallest, shading out the others. The roots of blown-down trees sit sideways in the air and spill over with ferns that take root in the newly exposed soil. The constant change brings vibrancy.
A healthy forest also has structure: layers of foliage, starting with the canopy—which provides a sort of protective cap on the forest—the sub-canopy, the
shrub layer, and down to the ground covers. A fully layered forest will have birds and mammals nesting throughout—in treetops, cavities, and on the ground—depending on their needs. In our fight against a warming climate, all this structural diversity gives more shade, more microhabitats, more species, and more species interactions. Plus, it slows rainfall as the water filters through the many layers of leaves and needles, which go on to enrich the soil when they fall. Not to mention, trees have the superpower to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. They turn it into leaves, wood, and roots through photosynthesis, which releases oxygen.
First ask yourself: do I need to do anything at all?
Preserving forest—especially at the shoreline—is a priority for Chris Earley, who is an interpretive biologist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum. “At our cottage, there’s a slope to the shoreline where we can see the lake through a canopy of hemlocks, but it’s not an open view.” Instead of clearing a vantage from the cottage, which they call The Tree House, they embraced what’s there. “We’re trying to keep it as natural as possible.”
For some property owners, the benefits move beyond the land to their bank accounts; there are tax advantages to maintaining your forest more actively. The Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program in Ontario is a provincial program that encourages owners of 9.88 acres or more, minus any buildings on the lot, to steward the land by developing a forest management plan. Doing so involves hiring a managed forest plan approver to map the different forest types on your property and identify different activities you can do to maximize forest health over a 10-year period. Participants can then pay reduced property taxes on forested portions of the lot. Other provinces, such as B.C., New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador, also offer reduced tax rates for properties with managed forests. P.E.I. will lend owners money for forest management work, and Quebec offers tax deductions and subsidies. (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta do not currently have programs in place.)
If your property is less than 10 acres, consider a micro-forest or a site assessment
If you don’t have a large lot, there are benefits to actively cultivating a small forest too, as demonstrated by the burgeoning movement of micro-forests. Also called mini-forests, Miyawaki forests, pocket forests, or tiny forests, these small, densely packed, multi-aged stands of trees mature in a few decades rather than a century, take more carbon from the air than a similarly sized area just covered in grass, and provide a rich mix of composition and biodiversity. Plus, with fully developed layers and a robust root system, the trees are more able to weather the extreme flooding and storms that climate change brings.
Largely used to restore habitat on urban and suburban sites, micro-forests—which can feature 20 to 40 local native species and yet be as small as 16 square metres—are now being used all over the world to recreate natural forests using intense soil preparation and about three plants per square metre. As Steele explains, Abbey Gardens’ two, 100-square-metre plots were densely over-planted to induce a high level of competition between the trees, forcing faster growth upwards instead of outwards. It would be impractical—largely because of costs—to use this intense technique over a large area, she says, and it also requires a fair bit of maintenance for the first few years until it is established, such as routine watering and pulling out any weeds that shade out the new plants. But if you want to reestablish a small portion of a degraded site (say, after construction), this might be an option to consider.
Many cottagers know that promoting forests is something they want but they need help figuring out what they can do and how to start, says Steele. She is also the owner of Meadowsweet Naturescapes, a service that specializes in installing ecological gardens and shoreline naturalization. According to her, ideally cottagers would have at least three quarters of their property at the shoreline vegetated— whether with forest or with shrubs and wildflowers—with no more than one quarter dedicated to patios, gazebos, docks, or grassy areas.
Through a service Steele offers at Abbey Gardens, land owners can hire her to do a site assessment with the goal of revitalizing upland areas and shorelines; she will even set up a micro-forest. She creates a plan based on their budget, and then plants native species on-site. She follows up with a summary report and maintenance advice. All in, costs for customers in the area typically start at $800, which includes the base cost of $495, plus mileage, extra planting labour, and materials. Steele notes that she welcomes cottagers who are willing to work alongside her, which can help offset labour costs. For those who are more DIY-inclined, she also sells plant kits for $200 tailored to pollinator gardens, open shorelines, and forests. “I work with cottagers so that they can still have their sitelines, their paths, their lawn, but let’s add some plants around it,” says Steele.
And finally, take the time to really see your forest
Look at the habitat features around you. Start to learn your plants, your birds, your insects, your mammals. Look at field guides, and use apps such as iNaturalist and Merlin, which can help you identify the species around you. Take a guided walk or a hike through a nearby provincial park, which is likely a similar environment to your cottage landscape. You’ll see what the forest on your property wants to be. Augment, rather than destroy, the natural habitat. Sometimes, at cottages, we don’t need to plant forests, we just need to leave the one that already exists alone. Stake off a bit of lawn near the woods, for instance, and stop mowing it, then watch what plants grow back and which birds move in. Watch as your shoreline gradually converts from a Canada goose pooping area into a vibrant forest zone, filled with pollinator plants that give cover to mammals darting to the lake.
When you want a clearer view to the lake, can you prune a window through branches of the tree that are in your way rather than cutting it down? When Steele advises cottagers, she asks, “Where do they like to sit? What do they look out at? If sitelines have to be vegetated, we consider wildflowers and shorter species.” Or as Chris Earley asks, “Can you change your practice about where you’re going to sit at sunset, and instead work with your land and your environment?” At Earley’s cottage, if they want a clear view, they take a stroll down to the dock. But, he notes, “The photos we take through the canopy at sunset are stunning too.”
“If you’re taking down a tree for a non-disease reason, can it just lie there?” he asks. “If it’s in the way, can you incorporate it into the landscape by creating a sitting area, or something else creative?”
Sometimes, the forest provides its own solutions to other problems. At Earley’s cottage, there were native tree seedlings growing on the septic bed, which would eventually cause damage if left. He didn’t relish taking them out; however, there was also a slope that was in danger of eroding. So they transplanted some mountain ash, white birches, and raspberries from the septic area to help stabilize the hillside.
Learn to love the forest. “Visit your forest in different seasons,” says Earley. While you may not have a cultivated garden bed of daylilies or impatiens that will bloom all summer, “what you have instead are trilliums that are here for just a week-and-a-half,” says Earley. “But that’s what makes them special.” Whatever native plant grows in your forest is successful there because it’s perfectly adapted for that spot.
Caring for your forest is about more than the trees, and it’s certainly about more than a tax incentive. Our family has been formally managing a nearby woodlot for years. Having a healthy forest is something we notice when we walk through. We see it in the wildflowers on the ground, the flycatchers nipping in and out of the hemlocks above, and the towering beech trees with claw slashes showing where bears have climbed up into the branches in search of nuts.
For the plants, the birds, the salamanders, and the bears alike, that piece of forest by the lake is where they find everything they need, just when they need it. It’s home. And when we can learn to see it that way, we understand more deeply how to take care of it.
Liann Bobechko is the former deputy editor of Cottage Life. She is the co-editor of Bluedot Living Toronto, a newsletter that shares sustainable climate ideas.
This story originally appeared in our June/July ’24 issue.
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