Toronto's built heritage can be thought of as extending beyond literal shelters and structures. Some of the city's long-cultivated and stewarded landscapes have as much heritage value as its grandest institutional buildings. Having first developed around 4,000 years ago, High Park's Black Oak Savannahs fit this description perfectly.

Characterized by being in perpetual mid-transition between grassland and forest, savannahs are extremely rare in Ontario, where they’re at the northernmost limit of an ecosystem range that extends southward into the midwestern and southern United States. Their in-between existence is typically maintained by consistent ground fires that prevent the transformation from completing. Due to the intense longevity of High Park's savannahs, and to the close proximity of the millennia-old Toronto Carrying Place Trail to the west, it's very likely that local Indigenous peoples performed controlled burns at these sites throughout the ages, making them human-made landscapes.

There are around ten different areas of savannah in High Park, each consisting of black oaks towering over tall grasses, wildflowers, briars, and other bracken-like ground covers. After the British began settling the area encompassing present-day Toronto in the late 18th century, controlled burning of the High Park Savannahs ceased for two centuries and local administrations actively practised fire suppression. It wasn't until the 1990s that the City of Toronto began restoring them and has since carried out regenerative burns throughout the park.

(Research and text by Alessandro Tersigni.)