Four hundred acres with a zoo, a lake, an oak savannah that burns on purpose, and a cherry blossom that shuts the roads.
At around 400 acres, High Park is Toronto’s largest downtown park. Most of it was the estate of John George Howard, an architect and surveyor who gave it to the city in 1873 on condition that it remain free to the public and that he receive a pension.
He is buried in the park, behind a fence made of iron railings taken from St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The cherry blossoms
Around 2,000 sakura trees, the original 1959 planting a gift from the people of Tokyo in gratitude for Canada accepting Japanese-Canadian refugees after the war — a period during which Canada had also interned its own Japanese-Canadian citizens and confiscated their property, which the gift’s history sits alongside.
The bloom lasts about a week, usually late April to early May, and it is a very large public event. The park closes to vehicles, the TTC runs extra service, and the paths around Hillside Gardens are packed.
The city runs a bloom tracker with webcams. Use it.
The oak savannah
A third of High Park is black oak savannah, a globally rare ecosystem of scattered oaks over prairie grasses, which once covered much of southern Ontario and now survives in fragments.
It requires fire. The city carries out controlled burns each spring — closing sections of the park for a day and producing a smoke plume visible across the west end — because the ecosystem depends on periodic burning to suppress invasive species and release nutrients.
Indigenous peoples managed this landscape with fire for thousands of years, which the city’s programme explicitly acknowledges.
The rest
Grenadier Pond, a 14-hectare kettle lake, named — the story goes — for grenadiers who fell through the ice, which is not documented. Fishing is permitted; skating is not.
High Park Zoo, free and open year-round, with bison, llamas, capybaras, peacocks and a small herd of highland cattle. It has been there since 1893 and it is entirely unglamorous, which is its charm.
Shakespeare in High Park, run by Canadian Stage since 1983, plays in an amphitheatre through July and August on a pay-what-you-can basis.
Colborne Lodge, Howard’s 1837 Regency house at the southern end, is a museum.
Practicalities
Free and open dawn to dusk.
High Park station on Line 2 is at the northern edge; streetcar 506 runs along the south side. Parking inside the park is limited and closed during blossom season.
The park has genuine hills, a rarity in Toronto, and the paths down to the pond are steep.
More Parks & Outdoors
Trinity Bellwoods Park
Thirty-eight acres of grass where the west end drinks in summer, with a white squirrel that has its own following.
The Scarborough Bluffs
Ninety metres of eroding cliff along fifteen kilometres of lakeshore, holding a geological record of the last ice age.