Gardener helped co-op grow

[attach]1795[/attach]Armed with a vast knowledge of gardens, food and planting, community advocate Dagmar Baur helped pioneer the beautification of her adopted home, the Bain Co-op apartments.

The community activist died of cancer in April, but her legacy lives on in the award-winning gardens at the Bain Co-op, where she lived for almost 40 of her 69 years.

“She’s a really good example of somebody who was very important without having to have any special titles or prestige attached to that,” said Helen Mills, a close friend of Baur.

Her passion for gardening and food stemmed from childhood. Baur was born in Poland on March 17, 1941, to a German father and Polish mother. Her family had their own garden and she went mushroom picking with her dad.

“Growing up in a place where people were starving through the war and after, food was really important,” Mills said. “She really understood its importance and … how not to waste.”

After leaving Poland at the end of the war, her family moved around. Eventually, Baur settled in the Bain Cooperative Apartments in Toronto.

“It wasn’t a co-op when I first moved in, but I did know that I didn’t ever want to move anywhere else again because it felt like home,” Baur wrote in an autobiographical article for Heritage Toronto in 2000.

One of her successful projects was helping transform the courtyards in the Bain Co-op into gardens. In the 1970s, the outdoor space was a barren, concrete wasteland, Mills said.

Thanks to Baur’s and residents’ efforts, the gardens were transformed over 10 years. Now they compost and grow native plants, heritage vegetables and herbs. The co-op has won awards from the City of Toronto and the North American Native Plant Society. It’s a part of the Secret Gardens of Riverdale tour.

Baur wrote that she found joy in the accomplishment and the apartments themselves.

“Although I rant and rail about this and that, I love the Bain Co-op with a deep and abiding passion — the people, the process, the possibilities — those fulfilled and those that are not,” she wrote.

Baur’s passions also lay in the written word. She contributed to the magazine Edible Toronto and wrote poetry.

“She was a verbal magician,” Mills said, adding they had wonderful time playing Scrabble.

Baur had a way of speaking that resonated with people, Mills said.

“She was extremely quick with her verbal repartee and had amazing way of taking hold of a room,” she said.

Mills recalled a van trip coming back from Chicago when a man had said something “remarkably politically incorrect.”

“By the time I was still trying to get my jaw off the ground, Dagmar had got out her verbal knives and just completely took care of it
and put him in his place.”

And although the situation was funny, Mills said Baur made it obvious that such comments would not be tolerated.

Baur was also passionate about water and rivers, but her central passion was community gardens, an area she was experienced with,
Mills said.

Baur was working on a project involving heirloom potatoes. She was interested and involved in preserving heritage seeds, which are older and more numerous and diverse than seeds available commercially.

Good friend Laura Berman said one of her favourite memories of Baur is at seed exchange events.

“People would come up and they wanted to know what’s this and what’s that,” Berman said. “She basically would be giving them gardening lessons right there.”

And although Baur worked as a teacher, her teaching wasn’t limited to children.

“She had a lot of knowledge and experience about the natural world and she liked to share it with people. She really touched a lot of peoples’ lives and everybody is definitely better for having known her,” Berman said. “She’s going to be greatly missed. She is already.”