Hi, everybody. It's Joe Lampel, the Joe Behind Joe Gardner, and welcome to the Joe Gardner Show.

Today is the first in a three-part series. It's a good time to take a little diversion from whatever the hot topic is at the moment on what we need to know or do in the garden right now.

There's not much going on in the garden right now. So for each of the next two weeks,

you will hear the personal stories from two dedicated gardeners, each who cares a lot about the

environment and nature, and they just want to do what they can on their own little patch of

earth in their yards to plant and protect more of what's being lost all around them.

And to be clear, it's one story per episode. And while it sounds harmless enough and certainly

a good thing to be doing these days, each of the featured guests that I will be speaking

with ended up in the fight of their life, simply because they wanted to unlawn some of their

yard and replace

it with native plants and trees. As you might assume, when you have neighbors or live in an area that

has something on record in the city or municipal documents that addresses even vaguely, as in this case,

what you can and can't do in your yard yard as each of my guest encountered, it can become

a long, humiliating, emotional, and expensive nightmare. These are the heartfelt stories from

the gardeners themselves, describing what they went through, starting when the bylaw officials

first knocked on the door. So let me start by giving you a little of the back story

on today's story with my guest Craig Sinclair. He and his wife Beth and their three children live in

Smith Falls, which is a growing and vibrant community in eastern Ontario, Canada. As you'll hear,

Craig is deeply and emotionally involved in their efforts to create more of a native habitat of plants and trees on their property.

For Craig, unlawning and restoring his yard to a more native setting was as healing for Craig as it was for the land.

So having bylaw officials giving orders to cease and desist when Craig knew the law was on his side was a battle he and his family were willing to fight.

And a couple of points to note as we get started with this one.

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