In the end, perhaps the greatest genius of the Spit is the thing Robert Smithson called “the dialectical landscape”; it has become a place where the natural and artificial features of the terrain have merged. Hence, today visitors to the park admire the vistas of Lake Ontario while studying how the effects of the water have reshaped the bricks, glass, and concrete forms making up the beach. Or they are mesmerized by the ways that a tangle of rebar and the branches of a mulberry tree have intermingled over time. Ultimately there is an engagement and fascination with the collision of the natural and artificial components in a place that is physically in the city but, in many ways, feels very much outside of it. Excerpt from Robert Burley’s  essay in,  Accidental Wildnerness: The Origins and  Ecology of Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Park, U of T Press 2020