How you can get your hands on one of the rarest trees in Canada

As a forest restoration ecologist, Ben Porchuk walks the talk. His home garden is like a museum of rare and endangered Ontario plants.

He has flowers and trees of every size and description, from the ultra rare cucumber tree (one of the last 100 of its kind)to a chinquapin oak.Almost all of them are native to the Carolinian zone, a thin humid sliver of the province that stretches across Ontario's southernmost fringe.

Among some of his most prized species is the pawpaw North America's largest native tree fruit.

"The taste is out of this world," Porchuk said. "It's like a banana, mango, custard combination."

• The Ontario fruit that sounds 'too mythical, too bizarre to be true'

Rare pawpaw once abundant in Ontario

Porchuk works for Carolinian Canada, a charity dedicated to preserving, protecting and restoring Ontario's Carolinian forest.

Hundreds of years ago pawpaws grew in abundance in the Carolinian.Because of its rich taste, Indigenous people planted them near their communities and along many of their trade routes.

Today, the tree only grows in about a dozen places and is one of the rarest species in Canada.

"They're extremely limited now and extremely rare," Porchuk said, noting today's population of the tree is less than half of a per cent of its size before Europeans arrived.

In fact, it was Europeans who nearly wiped them out. Porchuk said settlerstorched the landscape, clearing out vast sections of rare Carolinan forest, whether they intended to farm the land or not.

"They wanted to change the climate to have it less humid and warmer and drier to have less mosquitoes," he said.

'It's cultural repair'

Today, the Carolinian zone, which includes Toronto, the GTAand southwestern Ontario,is one of the heavily populated areas of the country where 95 per cent of the land privately-owned.

"Bringing these species to urban areas is critical," Porchuk said."Without these our ecosystem really struggles"

Porchuk said planting the trees in home gardens will help restore native plants, which will in turn attract native insects and promote native biodiversity in an area where often people don't appreciate the fact they live in one of the world's truly unique ecological zones.

Ecologist Ben Porchuk on planting pawpaws as an act of reconciliation:

5 years ago

Duration 0:57

Ecologist Ben Porchuk explains why pawpaws are so important for First Nations rediscovering their past.

"This is an opportunity to join people," he said."This is an opportunity to connect the zone, which really doesn't consider itself a zone like Prince Edward County or Prince Edward Island."

For help,Porchukhas enlisted his neighbour, retired school teacherSteve O'Neil and his gas-electric hybrid Hyundai. Together, the men in intend to log more than 1,200 kilometres, visiting 16 communities on Monday and Tuesday, including six Indigenous communities where the trees hold special significance.

"It's cultural repair," Porchuk said. "This is a really big piece of the puzzle that helps rebuild what was taken away from them."

Porchuk said while most of the 100 trees are spoken for, there's still a chance to get your hands on one for free.

All you have to do is write to Carolinian Canadawith the story ofyour of your garden and why you want a pair of pawpaw trees.