Category Archives: Susan Hawkins

Artist brings new light to the Raven legend

Raven Brings the Light
By Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd
Harbour Publishing, 48 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Occasionally, a story comes along that resonates throughout generations regardless of age, belief, or cultural and national identity. How the Raven brought light to the world is one of those stories. Celebrated First Nations artist and storyteller Roy Henry Vickers has teamed up with his good friend and historian Robert “Lucky” Budd to create a book based on the millennia-old story. It belongs to the people of the Northwest Coast and has been passed along in the oral tradition for thousands of years.  This new book tells the story with text and eighteen stunning new images.

As the legend goes, at a time when darkness blanketed the land, a boy named Weget is born who is destined to bring the light back to the Earth. With the aid of a raven skin, Weget journeys to the sky where he tricks the Chief of the Heavens and steals back the daylight and returns it to Earth. The legend has been traced back at least 3,000 years and images of Weget’s journey have been found in petroglyphs along the Skeena and Nass Rivers. This version of the story was told to Vickers when he was a teenager by Chester Bolton, Chief of the Ravens, from the village of Kitkatla around 1975.

“I’ve heard it since I was a very, very young man, so it has been part of my life,” Vickers said in a recent CBC radio interview. “And now as an elder, I see that it’s not only the physical light of the sun that it talks about, but it’s a spiritual light. It’s the light of truth. And because I’m about living my life as truthfully as possible this is the story I chose to put into this book.”

Raven Brings the Light is a stunningly beautiful book, and according to Robert Budd, is only the first in a series of traditional stories to be developed by this accomplished duo.

Roy Henry Vickers unveiled his large collection of new prints at Raven Brings the Light: A Roy Henry Vickers Art Show & Book Launch with Robert “Lucky” Budd, at Madrona Gallery, Contemporary and Historic Canadian Art, 606 View Street, Victoria in May.

Susan Hawkins is completing her PhD in History in Art at the University of Victoria. 

Duo offers plant-collectors’ delight

Pursuing the Wild: The Sichuan Botanical Expedition
Guest Speakers Sue Milliken and Kelly Dodson
Sponsored by Finnerty Gardens Advisory Committee

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Gardeners in the Pacific Northwest often favour eclectic kinds of gardens. Our temperate, water-abundant environment supports a dizzying array of unusual plants, both indigenous and exotic. Recently, in the University of Victoria’s David Lam auditorium, rare plant collectors and breeders Sue Milliken and Kelly Dodson treated local plant and garden enthusiasts, a group in which I include myself, to a presentation that featured both rare and exotic. Milliken and Dodson are of that unusual breed of phytomaniacs, the plant collector. Plant collectors are intrepid explorers–men and women who traverse often-inhospitable terrain to be the first to find, document, collect and botanize previously unknown plant specimens.

Milliken and Dodson are the proprietors of Far Reaches Farm, a rare plant speciality nursery located in Port Townsend, Washington, where they grow and market a wide variety of plants that are particularly well suited to regional growing conditions. Their most recent plant-collecting excursion, joined by well-known plantsman and plant hunter Peter Cox, led them to the misty mountain ranges of China’s Sichuan region, seeking seeds and cuttings from a variety of new or uncommon species of rhododendrons, primulas and ferns. Their presentation paired over one hundred images with fascinating stories of botanical exploration and inspired a number of collective oohs and aahs from the enthusiastic audience. In addition, Milliken and Dodson work closely with the Friends of Finnerty Gardens, providing new plant stock for the ever-expanding rhododendron and plant collection.

Currently, the native habitat for rhododendrons is disappearing fast, and the status of many species in the wild is uncertain. As part of their occupation and nursery, this dedicated couple work to preserve rare plant species and their threatened habitats.  Milliken and Dodson’s passion for plants was both contagious and inspiring. Their presentation was immensely informative and conveyed an understanding of the value for preserving rare plant species and the habitats that sustain them.

The rhododendrons are currently in bloom in Finnerty Gardens; I highly recommend a visit to view some of the rare and exotic species first hand.

Sue Milliken and Kelly Dodson can be reached at: Far Reaches Farm, Port Townsend, Washington.

Susan Hawkins is a trained gardener completing her History in Art PhD. 

Poet explores Garry Oak’s vitality

Gardens Aflame
Garry Oak Meadows of B.C.’s South Coast
By Maleea Acker
New Star Books, 108 pages, $19

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

“A Garry Oak meadow is a garden,” states Maleea Acker. And, according to Acker who cites local ethnobotanist Nancy Turner  “. . . they were constructed landscapes, created and managed through use of fire and species selection, in order to enhance their productivity and maintain their structure.” This understanding has gone mostly unrecognized since the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1718 until fairly recently as the consequences of aggressive development and environmental destruction have resulted in our current ecological crisis.

Acker lives in Saanich on Vancouver Island, where she has transformed her yard into a small Garry Oak meadow. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Victoria, and is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Her first book, The Reflecting Pool (poetry), was published in 2009; Gardens Aflame is her first nonfiction book.

What can the pre-settlement, First Nations’ relationship with Garry Oak ecosystems teach us today? In Gardens Aflame, Acker explores this terrain through a combination of personal narrative, historical research, botanical referencing and regional politics, resulting in an effective overview of the remaining Garry Oak meadows of south Vancouver Island and the challenges faced by those dedicated to their restoration and preservation.

The relationship of First Nations Peoples with their environment on Vancouver Island, and globally, is indisputable. Deep soil charcoal deposits reveal that fire as a traditional ecosystem management technique has been widely utilized for millennia. But to what extent Garry Oak meadows represent “constructed landscapes” is not yet certain and remains a topic of much current research. According to Nancy Turner and Richard J. Hebda, in their 2012 publication Saanich Ethnobotany, Culturally Important Plants of the WSÁNEC People, Garry Oak meadows were “managed” in plots containing camas bulbs. Selective clearing and practices of controlled burning were limited to areas of harvest, not the entire ecological system.

Marguerite Babcock describes camas plot cultivation:

“. . . The plot from which the bulbs were to be gathered would be cleared of stones, weeds, and brush, but not of trees.  The stones would be piled up in a portion of the plot where there were no camas plants growing, and the brush would be piled up on one side, left to rot or to be burned… The brush was actually uprooted, not just cut down… The purpose of the clearing, said Christopher Paul, was to make the camas easy to clear [sic: dig?] when the camas was gathered intensively.”

The history of oak-prairie ecosystems throughout North American is inextricably linked with fire, both human and lightning generated, and some low-intensity fires have been used in Garry Oak locations. Nonetheless, in the 2001 publication, Towards a Recovery Strategy for Garry Oak and Associated Ecosystems in Canada, Marilyn A. Fuchs argues, “The efficacy of fire as a restoration tool is equivocal because some invasive plants are favoured by fire,” and ”invertebrates are vulnerable to direct fire-caused mortality.” Hence, Omar McDadi and Richard J. Hecha in, Change in historic fire disturbance in Garry oak (Quercus garryana) meadow and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) mosaic, University of Victoria, (2008), recommend adopting an approach that involves restoring landscapes to “mosaics of patches having different species compositions.” This requires “restoring patches of alternate stable states on the landscape such as Douglas-fir forests, rather than just one ecosystem variant such as a Garry Oak meadow.” Understanding ecosystems, like our relationship with nature, as Acker attests, “is complicated.”

Garry Oak meadows are one of Canada’s most endangered ecosystems occurring uniquely in the province of British Columbia on southeast Vancouver Island, adjacent Gulf Islands, and in the Fraser Valley. Urban encroachment, changes in landscape management practices and the introduction of exotic species threaten the ecosystem. A Garry Oak meadow is vested with a range of biological and cultural values conferring great significance and urgency to ecosystem conservation. Understanding and implementing Coast Salish ecological management processes along with the hard work of numerous volunteers will help insure their continued survival.

Gardens Aflame is an informative and thoughtfully written book, but it contains a comment that I feel must be addressed. Introduced species of flora and fauna are playing havoc on ecosystems throughout North America and the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is no exception. These birds found a niche in farms and towns and quickly multiplied, competing for food and nest sites, but the practice of catching sparrows, and “crushing them between two logs” is an unethical act of cruelty that should not be condoned.

 

Susan Hawkins is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria and a Landscape Horticulturist.

 

Wise Food for Urbanite Thought

Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto
By Rhona McAdam.
Rocky Mountain Books, 168 pp., $16.95.

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Rapidly increasing urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly challenges human society. In Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, Rhona McAdam takes a critical step toward a new “urban agriculture manifesto” by placing the urban human/environmental interaction at the center of new attempts to deal with the current urban food dilemma. McAdam argues that the current “culture” of imported food has resulted in the decimation of the once thriving, sustainable, and local farming industry. This has resulted in the “majority of us having no idea what the ecological consequences of our food choices are.” To remedy this, McAdam calls for a “new food ethic,” the proliferation of small, sustainable, local, urban food producing gardens, and a return to the “virtuous cycle” of producing the food we eat.

Between tending her small Victoria garden and exchanging garden tips with her neighbourhood gardening collective, McAdam travels, researches, and writes on growing urban habitation and the current global food crisis. McAdam recounts her personal journey of discovery of the “good food” and “slow food” movement and her subsequent training in ‘Sustainable Local Food’ from St. Lawrence College. She reports on current food-safety issues, describing the historical sources and the issues around food production. As well, McAdam spotlights such new directions in the field as urban allotment gardens, edible landscaping, kitchen gardens, urban fish farms, meatless Mondays, and vertical farming, while providing an insightful analysis of the negative environmental consequences of the mega-agro industry.

Throughout, she is both thoughtful and informative, as evidenced in her final chapter, The Future of Urban Agriculture, in which she urges us to look beyond the immediate and envision “the future of food secure cities – and food production in general.”

You don’t need to be a “Guerrilla Gardener” to enjoy reading Digging the City. The book is appealing for its personal narrative, informative analysis, and for its contribution to the growing literature on the sustainable food movement that seeks to change the way we eat.

Susan Hawkins is completing her History in Art PhD and is a trained gardener