April. Winter’s back. Skiffs of snow outline the mornings, the ground starting each day hardened again. Crouching over my rows in this yard in Nogojiwanong, “the place at the end of the rapids,” wearing a parka and sneakers with holes in the toes, I note the start of my second full growing season in this small Ontario city: the first Grand Rapids lettuce and a few of the China Rose winter radishes are somehow, miraculously, up, slowed but not stopped by this late freeze, a half-dozen new stems elbowing aboveground. I was told by the farmers at the market that such cold this time of year is unusual, just as last year’s cold spring was unusual, all their crops about three weeks behind, humanity sending the polar jet stream wobbling, the Arctic air diffusing, spreading south, getting buried in the depths of the Great Lakes. I’m still new to these lakes, and all the rivers and creeks that feed into them; I can count on fingers and toes my growing seasons near them. For the past month I’ve been jotting down each day’s weather conditions, along with notes about what I’m planting, in a small notebook my nephew embroidered with his earliest approximations of the English alphabet when I was back home one Christmas. This is the most successful I’ve been at keeping a journal, this noting of the wild turns of weather. No matter where I live, I manage to raise some sort of flora, be it in a rented yard, a community plot, a hodgepodge of balcony containers, or in one instance, a derelict raised bed on an expanse of land in the process of being sold to a developer. I wouldn’t classify the gardening I’ve done within the realm of need, though that’s certainly where it comes from. Not so far back in my family history a garden held a more vital role: my grandparents grew food to sustain themselves and their families through each year, as did their parents before them, settling about a century ago to homestead land advertised as cheap and plentiful in what they surely were not told was the existing territory of the Nehiyaw, Métis, Dene, Niitsitapi, Anishinaabe, Dakota, Lakota, Nakoda: Treaty 4 and Treaty 6 territories, Saskatchewan and Alberta. They’d be left to their own to fathom the scope of this firsthand—a precarious, unguided education—the mass sell-off of Indigenous plains and parkland to immigrants willing to buy it, clear it, and farm it, this theft that still bounces around in that phrase coast to coast to coast, this the reason I’m standing here, in this yard, on this continent, three thousand kilometres away from where my forebears settled, the weather so different in this watery place, humid always and so much hotter in the summer (though lately that’s changing), taking notes, noting weather, its widening fluctuations, fingers stiffened by cold. I don’t know what they knew of the places they immigrated to before they arrived from small towns and rural places in Northern Ireland, on the Kintyre peninsula, along the heaving border between Ukraine and Poland. I know that in all but one case they weren’t the first to arrive, that other family members preceded them and perhaps sent word back about what life on this continent was like. They came and then acted as sponsors for other relatives, as a contact on a form. In all but one case they came in groups, as throngs of relations. In only one case has there been passed down a recounting of how the situation here was explained by those preceding relatives: You can work for yourself. You don’t have anyone over you. This from a great-great-uncle, Prokop, as translated and paraphrased to me by one of his grand-nieces, one of my great-aunts, who has also told me the Ukrainian word for garden: город (pronounced horód). I’m trying to gather up more remains of the stories of why my families came here and set to work farming, and what they were leaving, what precipitated this near-complete break, a new story supplanting an old one, founded on leaving home, crossing an ocean, clearing land in a new place far away—an immense undertaking, permanently changing the land—preparing soil, and planting seeds in it. And becoming instruments of erasure, of nation-building, in the bargain. I stand in this yard, beside this garden I had to clear to be able to plant, in this place I barely know, not yet sure of the names of the villages they left to come here, barely starting to grasp what these coming seasons will bring, living out a derivation of their near-complete break—like some sort of genetic inheritance, these things I couldn’t really explain at the time but just carried out, just picked up and left home, seeking adventure, seeking the thing I wanted from my life but couldn’t find at the time in the place I was. This is one way to explain it. using hindsight. It might be that my great-grandparents couldn’t fully explain it either. My forebears’ emigrations, their diminishing frames, live on in me, define me, guide my thinking. I have been working at undoing the deleterious effects, learning to see when I’m being mindlessly destructive to life, when the poisonous aftermath of working for yourself, not having anyone over you starts being less about escaping oppression and more about delusions of primacy. My progress plays out in microcosm in the garden bed. If a garden contains “human information,” as Michael Pollan1 describes it, it is never more clear than when I’m working in my plot that I’m not of the place I live. At root, I still do as my forebears did: I clear what’s there, I prep the soil, I plant seeds in it. I do it without asking permission. I insist on the flourishing of seeds that originated on other continents to make food from plants that don’t always get along well with others here. A strain of desperation has filtered down to me, a series of responses and behaviours I understand as inherited, the particular amalgam of panic and defeat when a crop fails, the compulsion toward rows, the kneejerk eradication of “weeds” and bugs. The grand experiment—to lift the yoke of poverty through very hard labour, toward a future of plenty predicated on owning cheap, stolen land on another continent, then poisoning that land, that water and air and other-than-human life, via pathological disconnection—seems now to be reaching a sort of zenith.
I love being in the garden. It calms me. It stills me. It makes me restful and mindful and clear. I love thinking about gardening. I love tending to the things that need tending to. I like doing it gently and piecemeal and letting the plants change my mind. I love how it exhausts me. The need, the desperation, the myths of self-sufficiency are receding. The connections to where I am, to where I come from, strengthen. This, too, is inherited. I am much more self-aware, and aware of where I live, for having paid sustained attention to plants and soil and weather, and aware also that the language I use is still steeped in such commodification, that colonial program still sputtering away in me: to “pay” in attention, to have been made better for it. Another way to put this: my need is of a different sort. The milkweed seeds I pulled from a pod found on the sidewalk last fall and started in a damp paper towel in a plastic baggie on top of the fridge, a baggie which has suddenly assumed the shape of a pillow. The Cherokee Trail of Tears beans, Hidatsa Shield Figure beans, scarlet runner beans, orca beans, Grandpa Ott morning glories, Cascadia sugar-snap peas, these seeds I save and grow every year, that have become “my” seeds, or I’ve become theirs: we have a relationship. The goldenrod and aster patch in the northeast corner of the bed, which seeded itself before I moved here and, when in bud and in bloom, is hectic with pollinators. The invasive buckthorn I’m trying to chop back and the native Virginia creeper I’m helping to fill in along the fence. “This is our work, to discover what we can give,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer.2 The manner in which I give these plants the opportunity to grow says much about me and who I am. And the manner in which they use me to help themselves grow, and the manner in which they give, says much about them and who they are. I breathe into my hand to warm my fingers, and I add to the map in my notebook of where all the sprouts are going to live. As Benjamin Vogt writes in A New Garden Ethic, “For a species to evolve and grow, it must constantly be challenged from within and without; not conforming to social norms will help us foster healthy and necessary biodiversity.”3 This means nothing less than a profound ideological shift on the part of the settler. And it means nothing more than one shoot, from a seed planted with care, pushing out of the ground, seeking light.
Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Grove Press, 1991, p. 18.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013, p. 239.
Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future. New Society Publishers, 2017, p. 11.