Forks and Flowers

'Lets fight the filth with forks and flowers.' 


-       Richard Reynolds, On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries. (London: Bloomsbury, 2008)

“Often... visible outdoor areas are homogenous, cookie-cutter spaces, where neatly-trimmed grass or a few well-placed flower pots are admired and appreciated by the neighbors. But for some revolutionary gardeners, a feast for the eyes is not enough. They want something edible in return for the hard work, the water and the expense of tending a landscape. These food revolutionaries are maximizing their cultivation area by converting their landscapes, patios, and nearby vacant lots into productive edible gardens. In the quest for more space to grow food, even conventional front lawns are being transformed into maverick, and highly visible, vegetable plots.... the rise of modern vegetable gardeners who are cutting against the grain of current landscape fashion to grow food out in the open once again”

                   -Kari Spencer, quotation from Squidoo article Ground-Breaking: Making the       Switch from Lawns to Food.

My place is the place of guerrilla gardeners, I have found. On walking home from my bus stop one stay, I suddenly stopped at a yard, realizing what I was looking at. I have passed this front yard many, many times over the course of the summer. But now, in the month of growing things coming to harvest, I am cognizant of looking, not at trimmed bushes, boring lawn, and flowers that behave themselves in neat rows, but VEGETABLES!

It is not lawful for people to grow vegetables in their front yard. If this garden-grower’s neighbors were to complain, they could be made to dig their vegetables up. But I can see that the people here have taken great pains to keep the garden tidy. They have added certain aspects that make the produce attractive, not just utile. The sunflowers, for example, or the boundary hedges of lavender. Clever! The sole tomato plant occupies the middle of the lawn, its heavy red globes almost ornamental amongst the furred leaves. It could be mistaken for a hydrangea, or some such, if one doesn’t look too closely. Perhaps that is the idea. Clever!

Fly in the face of suburban mores, I say! Thumb your nose at being just another of those ticky-tacky boxes. Do you remember that old folk song – “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, back in the 1960’s?

Little boxes on the hillside,


Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside,


Little boxes all the same.


There's a green one and a pink one 


And a blue one and a yellow one,


And they're all made out of ticky tacky


And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses


All went to the university,


Where they were put in boxes


And they came out all the same,


And there's doctors and lawyers,


And business executives,


And they're all made out of ticky tacky


And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course


And drink their martinis dry,


And they all have pretty children


And the children go to school,


And the children go to summer camp


And then to the university,


Where they are put in boxes


And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business


And marry and raise a family


In boxes made of ticky tacky 


And they all look just the same.


There's a green one and a pink one


And a blue one and a yellow one,


And they're all made out of ticky tacky


And they all look just the same.

Clever!

Hums and Songs in the Wire

“Power lines are great places to hang my clothes—especially since my closet is full of birds. I make love like I have wings and know how to fly.”

― Jarod Kintz, Love quotes for the ages. Specifically ages 18-81.

My place is a place of overhead power lines. When I was a child in England overhead power lines served the role of laundry lines. Wet laundry secured by wooden pegs on lines that looped from tenement to tenement. Probably dangerous, though there were never fires, nor electrocutions.

When we came to Canada, power lines were the relief, the differential in the prairie landscape that provided a reprieve in mile after mile of loneliness and barrenness, mile upon mile from horizon to horizon. The wires sang in unison with the grasshoppers and, in the winter, the power lines creaked and groaned with the weight of snow.  Every spring in small town Canada, about the time of high school graduations, the power lines were bedecked with tied sneakers, urban legends of one sort or another, shoes swaying on power lines along with the vertical traffic lights.  Sometimes the wind, ever constant, made both the sneakers and the traffic lights horizontal. Actually, in that kind of wind, horizontal traffic lights would have made more sense. I wonder if they have realized that yet.

Here, in my place, power lines tangle with trees. They dance with the wind and threaten power outages. Because of the lost streams running under my neighborhood, underground lines are not an option. But that doesn’t upset me. Overhead power lines provide me with a degree of nostalgia. Memories of a childhood in England, and growing up with Prairie winds.

Because of the wind, or heavy rains, or the lines tangling with tree branches, our power is always at risk. But I feel we should always be at the mercy of nature. It keeps us humble. Spiders love the power lines as a base for building the most amazing of spider webs that routinely drape across my face in the morning as I go to the car. That’s cool. But I think, too, that the wires above me, serve to underline and emphasize the sky, like the emphatic line or two that we excise under an important word.

Mountains to Mole Hills

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...”

                                                                                                              ― John Muir

My place is a place of mountains that still hold onto their skirts of green, their mantles of fir and pine – but only just so. But a very short distance away, in a nearby place, the mountains, with their tenacious stone and gripping tree roots, no longer withstand the larger strength of development.

 I stopped on the way to work this morning at a Starbucks in a village between my own small town and my work atop a mountain. When I came out, coffee steaming in hand, and juggling car keys, I looked up to the sound of a crow creaking softly and sorrowfully like an old farm gate sighing in the wind.

The light was still soft and hazy on the mountains on the other side of the sound, the tree line indistinct and velutinous. I lost my breath in a shocked gasp. Because not so very long ago, the green on the mountainsides was thick and impenetrable.  The mountains wrapped around this little village like a fortress. They seemed inviolable – holy.

Now I noted houses built in clear-cuts, right of ways cleared for power lines. Development is creeping up the sides of the mountains like flood water up the side of a levee. Creeping up to where the bears are, the elk and the deer. Taking from them the only homes they have.

Dr. Jacques Diouf, an environmentalist, calls mountains the ‘water towers of the world”. According to him, one of every two people on the planet, every day, quenches their thirst with water that originates from mountains.  Don’t even those people in those new, over-large, fancy houses need the water that the mountain creates? But as strong as we think mountains are, they are also fragile.  Geologically, mountains are dynamic, not static. Disruption like these houses I see up on the slope, change habitat. As humans move in, life is wrung out.

I took my over-civilized (and over-priced) cup of coffee to my over-civilized car and took one last look at the mountains emerging out of the early morning haze. What happens to the creatures who live there, I wondered, when there is no more ‘up’ to go to? When we have made of the mountain, a mole hill?

A Disguising of Birds

“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”

                                                                                                                              - Robert Lynd      

“What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.”

                                                                                                                - Thomas Bailey Aldrich  

My place provides me with a plethora of birds. And throughout the year, I collect feathers on my walks. Or my husband brings me gifts of feathers that he and the dog have discovered on their walks. The feathers live in a pile of colour on a table in my studio. The feathers are like messages left in secret places where I am meant to stumble upon them.

In the spring downy woodpeckers and flickers hammer their silly heads on our chimney, making a sound that reverberates throughout the house for all the world like it is coming down about our ears. A group of flickers is called a ‘guttering’. Appropriate, since the metal gutters are also an attraction to them. This year they graced us with a brood of four to five awkward, raucous, flapping chicks. A tall, dead tree in the very back has become the site of tutoring that, next year, will progress to the chimney.

In the summer great flocks of tiny bush tits descend habitually on a bush in our front yard, that we have never been able to identify. The bush has a strange, alien habit (but that’s a story for another time). The bush tits are so very tiny, like little fairy birds. They twitter constantly as they swarm like bees over the bush. The twittering sounds like baby breaths through tiny chimes. I’ve come across, once or twice, their strange hanging nests made of moss and spider webs. What else but a fairy-blessed creature would make nests out of spider webs.

Nightly, in numbers more copious than the bush tits, crows crowd in the evening skies in waves and waves of discordant cacophony. They are going to trees to roost for the night, cuddled bum to beak along branches and briar.  They build incredibly messy nests and chase the song birds from the neighborhood, jealous of their melodic voices compared to their own hoarse and jangling racket. But I love crows. I admire their temerity.

Now is the time of year when the Canada geese change their pattern. Throughout the summer we rarely hear them, but now that it is approaching autumn, they are flying over our roof – so low you can see their webbed, black feet tucked up under their bodies. My place is on the flight path between the river and the train yard. Now that the food is getting scarcer at the river, they fly over us early in the morning to feast on the grain at the train yard throughout the day. In the evening they fly back the other direction to sleep on the shores of the river.  They fly in separate families, undulations one after another. I have come to hear that each family has a different honking sound, much like families of whales in the sea.

But, ultimately, my place graces me with the sweetest of birds – the mourning dove. It’s gentle call of  cooooOOOOO-woo-woo-woo  greets me in the quiet of the morning and calls softly in the night. It is like a solemn hymn. I found several of their nests fallen to the ground this summer. They are the flimsiest and most delicate nests I have seen, shallow, soft bowls made of pine needles and grass stems. Even more delicate than that of the bush tit. A group of mourning doves is called a dule – which means pitying. Perhaps I love them best because pity, though sorrowful, is also merciful. We could all do with more mercy in our lives.