High Park and Cherry Picking 2023

After endless months of bitterly cold winter, on Monday, April 24th, VWAT organized a field trip for 83 seniors to view the cherry blossoms in full bloom at High Park. Despite the cool, drizzly weather, our seniors enjoyed the magical beauty of pink sakura petals along High Park Trail and around Grenadier Pond. The fun quizzes asked by Ms. Hieu To, VWAT Settlement Worker, about the Sakura Cherry Blossom Project history in High Park, brought them back to the year 1959, when Japanese Ambassador to Canada, Toru-Hagiwara, presented 2,000 Japanese sakura trees on behalf of the citizen of Tokyo, Japan as a gift to the citizens of Toronto for their support of Japanese-Canadian refugees after the Second World War. This helped wrap the field trip up on a more meaningful note.

With the weather warming up, on Thursday, July 6, 2023 VWAT organized our second field trip for a large group of seniors to pick cherries just outside of the city. Attendees met at our main office to be picked up by school buses. Sitting in the school buses brought back memories of excursions that used to take place before the pandemic, and left an air of excitement and anticipation. Our seniors spent many hours out in the field, picking cherries until they were physically spent and ready to head home. It was a day well-spent, out in nature, engaging in mild physical activity and at the end of the afternoon, each senior’s reward was a basket of fresh, hand-picked cherries.

A special thanks to our funders the New Horizons for Seniors Program for making these trips possible. We will be planning one more social trips for seniors this summer.