It's a blessing, says Judit Kenyeres to be able to escape among the wildflowers.

Much to my surprise, however, I found that 19 hectares at Todmorden Mills have been transformed by the City of Toronto into a wildflower preserve. There's a path 500 metres long wandering through the preserve that takes a step back in time, to when the Don Valley Parkway wasn't proclaiming the need to rush somewhere in a constant, guttural whine of tires and engines.

As I dallied along the path, trying to identify what I was seeing, I spoke with Judit Kenyeres, who lives in a high rise just steps away near the corner of Pottery Rd. and Broadview.

"I love this place," she said. "It's an oasis. I have to spend so much time in the concrete and hurry of the city that it's a blessing to be able to get away and walk among wildflowers." It restored her, she said, and I could see why.

The path runs beside an oxbow, a crescent-shaped sliver of water that eventually dribbles contentedly into the Don. I saw a blue heron in one of its ponds, where the surface was constantly being dimpled by (what I later learned) were brook stickleback and creek chub.

Dragonflies and butterflies were still there; asters, black-eyed susans, and goldenrod were still blooming. I discovered later that there were six species of native asters, and to my surprise, five types of goldenrod — blue-stem, zig-zag, tall, late, and rough-leaved.

In a clearing that I was crossing as I approached the trail, I happened to kick a lime-green seed pod half the size of a tennis ball. "My God," I thought, and looked up. There, stretching 20 metres high, was a black walnut tree.

Southern and eastern Ontario used to have lots of them. In fact, in the 1800s, when Quakers were leaving the United States for Canada, in protest against the newly-adopted U.S. constitution which gave citizens the right to bear arms, the cautionary directive was to "Follow the trail of the black walnut." Where it was, they were told, there would be good farmland.  However, black walnuts were eventually stripped from almost all of Ontario for the furniture industry.

When I visited the preserve, volunteers were busy rooting out invasive plants that are threatening native species, especially garlic mustard, a low-lying leafy plant that can cover the ground like a carpet, and pale swallow-wort, which has the evocative alternative name of dog-strangling vine.

To get a glimpse of what the Don Valley used to be like, I bought a memoir written by the late Charles Sauriol, who grew up near the river around the time of the First World War. He and his friends caught string-loads of fish in the Don, drank from springs, camped beside the river, and gloried in the woods that still were there.

His book, Trails of the Don, is available at the Todmorden Mills museum ($16). It, and the wildflower preserve, suggest what still is possible — not that the past can be returned, but what the future might accomplish.

He was an old man when the book was published in 1992,  and there's a haunting sense of loss in one of his paragraphs. "It saddens me," he wrote, "that no one knows who we were or what we did, people being in too much of a hurry with the present to have concern about the past. Every day now, the GO trains run up and down the valley, past... the old swimming hole, the sugar bush and the pine grove, and although I have never been on one of those valley trains... it may be that the time people spend on them goes to reading newspapers, or dozing off, completely unaware of the Valley's history... (that) had a very special meaning for us."

Perhaps, but places such as the wildflower preserve are now creating special meaning for another generation.