Contributed by Randy Gladman

When it comes to the topic of Contemporary Art, it often seems there are only two kinds of Torontonians. There are the culture-junky downtowners who try to visit the galleries at least a couple times a year, in an effort to find unique gems for their collections and to remain cognizant of the heartbeat of the city. And then there is everyone else, the other 98% of our neighbours who don't know that there are galleries in the city other than the ROM and AGO and wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to find fresh, exciting new art if it occurred to them to look. What a shame because Toronto sports a wildly creative, at times bombastic and risque, gritty, gorgeous, and cerebral art scene.

So we're eating local, and it's delicious. But food is only one of many things that can be homegrown. Art, artifacts, clothes, notepaper, posters, ceramics. If it can be knit, spun, inked, daubed, reconstructed, deconstructed, fused or 'smithed, there's a local designer producing it.

The last few years have seen a clutch of designer collectives open in Toronto. As Shopgirls Gallery Boutique puts it, the local talent was evident, the opportunities were not. So, in true Canadian spirit, Toronto artists created their own opportunities, opening their own stores and galleries.

Come check out what the colonies can do.

Flowers weren't always the mild-mannered simile for beauty they are today. Take dahlias: harmless filler flower now, formerly the Aztec flower of war, the bloom of choice to accompany human sacrifices to the Serpent Woman.

(I feel like I just broke some unspoken rule about keeping the phrase "human sacrifices" out of feel-good flower posts. Oh well.)

Then there's tulips. Today they crowd the entrance to every convenience store, yet during Holland's Tulpenwoede ("tulip fury") a single bulb was once sold in exchange for several loads of wheat, oxen, a mess of pigs, a dozen sheep, booze, butter, 1000 lbs of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver beaker (see Torontonian Andrew Smith's excellent "Strangers in the Garden".)

Proust said he only had to think of lilacs to smell their scent. For those of us with less vivid sense memory, here is a short list of some of Toronto's best florists (which almost never trade in oxen).

Toronto's best falafel (or, as the Simpsons would have it, "crunchpatty") is a controversial topic. Falafels, like curries, can be found in a number of variations in different areas of the world.

Sampling falafels sold in Toronto often means sampling the background of the owner or chef, and Toronto's multifaceted ethnic tapestry provides falafel lovers with an enormous number of outlets, no two of which seem to serve quite the same food in the same form for the same price.

You can't swing a Danish teak side table without hitting a great vintage furniture store in Toronto. Vintage furniture can be bought as-is, refurbished, or you can get vintage essence by picking up a reproduction of a classic.

Most of the stores listed here offer a little of all of the above. But they're all good options, and they all get us out of the stores where one beige starts to look very much like another, and back into the scary and exciting world of personal style.

Tea people are just nice people. They're as knowledgeable and passionate about their product as coffee people, only slightly less keyed up and twitchy.

And, let's just get it out of the way, when we're talking about tea, we're talking places that specialize in looseleaf tea (one exception to be spotted below). Most prepacked bagged tea is made with the bits and pieces left over after sorting out the tea leaves. They take the sweepings, the tea "dust", the remnants of real tea, then they bag them, and we drink it. You deserve better than bagged floor scrapings.