The plain or level ground lying between the Niagara Escarpment to the north and Burlington Bay to the south is endowed with a well-drained, fertile sandy loam soil that is almost ideal for market gardening. The slopes above the plain, with good air drainage, are suited to apple and pear orchards.

Aldershot market gardeners and orchardists prospered here until very recently. The sloping land at the toe of the Niagara Escarpment underlain by thick layers of erodible till and ancient marine clays gives rise to numerous gullies and ravines created and maintained by heavy rainfall associated with major storm events. Because the gullies are unsuitable for either agriculture or as building sites, they have remained in a heavily wooded natural state.

Some of these gullies are occupied by permanent creeks and they cross the coastal plain and extend as far as the Bay itself, transecting the settled areas with wooded ravines. The built landscape that now occupies the farmland, the natural landscape, and land in transition from agriculture to either urban or natural states, are interleaved in complicated ways in Aldershot, a feature that many would say gives the district its particular beauty.

If geography has favoured the Aldershot region with an interesting and varied landscape, it has also conferred some problems: The area is transected east to west by major rail and automobile routes, pipelines and electrical transmission lines. Furthermore, growing urban populations above the escarpment, under a different regional administration, seek north-south access to and from these major transportation routes, their links to the economic and cultural amenities of the Golden Horseshoe. Unlike other established urban areas, Aldershot (with other parts of Burlington) is still very much in a state of transition from an agricultural area to a fully urbanized form.

Thus the land development industry is very active in Aldershot and with that, the inevitable tensions between competing visions of what the future landscape should look like, what limits if any should be placed on private initiative in order to meet present and future public needs.

Dealing creatively with these tensions is very much public business; it is not just the responsibility of elected officials and professional public servants. It is also the responsibility of the citizens who occupy the ground to consider the needs, take stock of the options, and generate the broad, informed democratic consensus that should guide development/land use and set the standards for the environmental stewardship of their inheritance.

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