From 'The Madawaska Forest Garden'

Steven's first book: How the Garden Began

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CHAPTER 1

How the Garden Began

In 1989, I bought the parcel of forested land on which this book is primarily focused. The land was as far south as needed to still be wild, and as far north as I could imagine still being able to grow food -- located just outside of Algonquin Park, on the Madawaska River, Ontario, Canada.

At this point I’d been gardening for about ten years and had made the money to buy the land, from my eco-landscaping company Livingstone and Greenbloom. Faced with this piece of pristine land I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to grow my food in gardens, but because of my earlier experience of living for four years in the bush as a forager, I couldn’t even imagine cutting down the forest to do it.

This was the wilderness and a greater wisdom, or simply an undercurrent of con- science took over. I wanted to live, or make a living from the land, but I didn’t want the forest to be terrorized in the process. When I’d lived in bush huts and foraged for much of my food in the Muskoka area, I’d lived as sustainably as I could, and left very little trace during those years. I wasn’t going to transgress on the agreements I’d made with Her, or the peace and magic that still lived in me from that time. I felt that if I were to try to make a living from selective logging and or Maple syrup production, the only conventional means practiced in the area, it would be too much pressure on the eighty-nine acres. Farming, the other historical land use of the area, seemed out of the question as I would need to clear-cut the treed, rocky slopes that made up the land, deemed “unarable” even by those intrepid, early colonizers of the valley.

For a few years, while I was trying to figure out a way to make a living sustainably from the land, I sugared on a small scale, foraged, and cut standing deadwood for firewood. I also built a small Hogan from mud, grass and deadwood to stay in when I was there. I still worked making gardens and art, living part-time in Toronto.

When I was on the land, I lived in the Hogan or slept outside when it was warm. I did a bit of wild planting on the forestlands’ only sunny areas; the north side of an abandoned survey road. Because the roadside was sandy and the nearest water was about a kilometre away downhill, I planted herbs and perennial veggies with hearty roots that could withstand the drought -- Jerusalem artichoke, Rhubarb, Sorrel, Good King Henry, Sweetgrass, Sage, Russian Tarragon and Asparagus.

Back then, I was really just starting to practice what I now refer to as “wild culturing”. Even though I had been professionally landscaping for five years and food gardening for ten, I still didn’t have the vision, integration, or experience to let the land make the decisions. I mostly thought about the requirements of the plant, planting almost randomly over the landscape without much rhyme or reason.

The First Wild Gardens on the Land
My First Teachers

By the second and third year on the land in Madawaska, I’d found patches of much younger tree growth in the dense hardwood forest. These were landings that had been clear-cut around 1977, for storing logs brought in from the surrounding forest. 1977 was the last time the land had been selectively cut for Maple hardwood.

The young trees growing on these spots were twelve to fifteen years old at the time the first garden was made. Most of the trees were softwoods like poplars and white birch -- relative to the surrounding seventy plus years old hardwood forest. Because the landings were already depleted and had been clear-cut and bull-dozed, I felt it might be ok with the forest, or somehow good karma, to garden on these spots – to reclaim and recondition the abused areas. After meditating on a couple of these old log storage areas, I clearly received the go-ahead from the land, to put my first intensive garden in one of the areas.

I was already learning, because I took my time with this decision and used my heart, not just my reason. When I meditated at the one site, the sky was very cloudy and I smelled something musty or skunky. It did not feel good or fruitful. When I meditated at the other site, (that I eventually chose to work with) the clouds cleared, and a circular rainbow broke out around the sun. As I found out later, there was little soil and no water at the first site, even though, by all appearances, it seemed like the better choice of the two sites to start a garden.

There was also not much topsoil at the site that I chose. Both sites had been bulldozed back in seventy-seven. So, I hauled out by hand, in buckets, about a ton of silt from a creek bed one hundred metres away, to enrich the soil of the garden site, and to simultaneously create a summer waterhole near the garden. To improve the soil of the garden site I added the black silt and about ten large tarp-full’s of leaves and mulch from the forest floor (500lbs), plus a few buckets of ash I’d collected from the Hogan fire pit. I then lightly mixed and dug this mixture into the existing, thin, rocky, sandy soil. I pulled rocks as I went, which I used to hold down the outside of the chicken-wire fence. The fence stretched out on the ground a foot or so, to prevent animals from just slipping under the bottom of it. The total area was about 4m x 5m.

Slugs were a problem in that garden. I tried drowning them in bowls of beer or brewers yeast and water. I tried boundary lines of lime and ash, and the entire list of home remedies with only moderate success. They still found my strawberries.

After a couple of years of this I saw “copper slug tape” in a gardening magazine, and immediately thought of using used copper piping, which I nailed on top of 1”x 4” boards surrounding the garden. When the copper pipe is nailed to the top edge of the board, slugs are forced to cross it to get into the garden, but they won’t cross it, because copper carries a natural electric charge. I kept the vegetation back, so they couldn’t cross over the copper barrier, and the problem was solved. I could even grow strawberries.

I grew intensively in that garden for five years, and I didn’t have to till that soil again. I did add a foot or so of fallen maple leaves and a layer of ash every fall, on top of that year’s crop residues. Then, the following spring I planted plugs, seeds directly in small holes, or in lines made by parting the winter-pressed mat of leaves. The planting holes reached down to the previous years’ soil layer. I grew all kinds of heritage veggies, mostly sun-loving annuals including corn and squash, as well as beans, carrots, beets, turnips, potatoes, lettuces and different kinds of collards. I ritually harvested kale on new year’s day, digging down through the snow.

I had a cold frame made from a couple of old windows, so that I could grow from late April to early January in that Zone 3 wilderness garden. When my water hole in the creek went dry in August, I strung out my winter wood tarps in the bush, like sails on their side, to catch and funnel the quick summer downpours into a barrel.

When I started gardening for the first time in the forest, I felt that the garden was very vulnerable. Locals told me with complete authority “Gardening in the forest can’t be done”.

They said that to do it you’d need to live by the garden, have dogs, a ten-foot electric fence, traps and a gun. They put the fear in me, so I did fence off this first garden with chicken wire.

The third year after making the first garden I found another landing, and I made another similar garden, but with more integration. This garden “fit” the land better. I used more perennials. And, for fencing I just used a few wires tied to live trees encircling the garden, and then used the young trees I’d pulled out to make the “fence”, weaving the young trunks through the three wires until they formed a fence line.

To make the bottom tighter I wove together their root bases at the ground level and filled in any openings with other brush from the clearing. This made it nearly impossible for rabbits and porcupines to get in. Generally, this fence worked perfectly, channelling animals away from the garden. But once, some ripe corn was too sweet smelling and I did have to use a homemade raccoon trap. I guess that the night the raccoon spent alone inside the trap, combined with the trip down the valley and across the wide Madawaska river by canoe, got the message across to not come back.

In that third-year garden, I also made a second circle of fallen trees, about ten or twenty feet out from the garden fence line. The reason for this second circle was Deer and Moose might have jumped over or pushed through my makeshift fence, but they avoid areas in the forest where trees have fallen, because they really don’t like getting their legs tangled in horizontal branches.

With each garden, as each year passed, I learned more about the relations on the land and how to gently work with them. I also learned what plants worked with the land. After the creation of the second forest garden I started to see that there might truly be a way to co-create a “wild-garden” -- to integrate the garden with the animals and the surrounding forest ecology. Essentially, to co-create a garden that would be an intensive foraging area.

The Mayan Agricultural Revelation

In the dark cold November, during my second full season on the Madawaska land, I found myself restless and dreaming of green places. A month later, I was in Chiapas, Mexico. As is often the way, when I was open and ready for the information, it came to me. Or, in this case, I suppose I went to it.

In 1992, Chiapas happened to be a very dangerous place. But, I must shamefully admit that I was oblivious to the genocide that was being inflicted on the rural Mayan population since the late seventies. In part, my ignorance was because I didn’t have media contact when I lived in the bush. I avoided the “news” in any form. I imagined I was somehow above politics and solely focused on the spiritual and natural world. The challenges of just surviving in a non-English speaking world, as well as the fact that no one spoke openly about what was going on, kept me in the dark about the horrors that had happened; and continued to take place all around me. All I knew was that there was some “Guerilla war” going on and that there were no U.S. citizens around, and very few other Canadians, because of the disappearances and hostage taking.

Perhaps naively, I trusted that the Earth was protecting me and I would be ok, and I was. On this trip I learned about many things and met some great teachers, human and otherwise. But, agriculturally speaking, my greatest teachers were the Lacandon Mayan people.

Outside of a small village, close to Palenque, I saw traditional gardening methods that perfectly embodied what I sought to do on the Madawaska. The villagers used a method of successive polyculture in their “milpas” (small jungle gardens). They would slash and burn an area to create a fertile pocket in the jungle. Although smaller, this opening looked pretty much like the environmentally shunned, clear-cut slash and burn method used to raise cattle in the tropics. But, rather than exhausting the thin soil growing corn and or quickly retiring the land to being low grade cattle pasture, they would carefully plant by hand over one hundred plants species, all at once in the small clearing. Everything from annuals to hardwood trees would all be planted together at the same time. Over the next human generation, each plant group would have their turn in their succession over the shorter-lived plants. The Lacandon followed the natural growth successions of a clearing as it would grow, over time, back into wilderness. They had learned this from the wilderness and had perfected growing this way - following the progenerative flow of the land in a sensitive, liquid improvisation - over millennia of working with Her.

The University Experience

When I came back four months later to catch the flow of my own land’s richness, the Maple syrup season in Madawaska, I was interested in knowing if any Aboriginal people had done, or were doing this form of successive polyculture here in Canada. I dropped by Trent University, which had the biggest Native studies department in North America, and a large Native student body. I tagged along with a friend, Laura, who was thinking of doing a post-graduate degree there, and had an appointment scheduled to meet with an advisor. We went our own ways when we got there and planned to meet up later.

As fate would have it, I stumbled into John March that day. I didn’t know that John March, a renowned geographer and dreamer at heart, was the Dean of the Frost Centre for Canadian and Native studies at the time. I literally just wandered through his open door and we introduced ourselves. I told him what I had seen in Chiapas and what I was seeking. John looked bright eyed and said he wasn’t aware of Native people practicing this type of polyculture in Canada, but that he thought it sounded very interesting. After we talked for a while he seemed to decide that I was going to do an M.A., and encouraged me to do it under the rubric of Canadian and Native studies. John said that the research on the traditional plant use, that I might gather though interviews, could be used in an atlas that Trent was producing on the Haliburton Highlands. The Haliburton highlands are just south-west of the Madawaska forested land (with the same type of ecology and climate), so it seemed a perfect fit to research traditional land use in that area.

After my talk with John, I walked out of the building to meet up with my friend again. I felt a little stunned realizing I was going to do an M.A. on the topic, remembering I’d said at some distant, earlier point after finishing an honours B.F.A, “I’ll never go back to school”. I hadn’t even considered going back to school when I went there that day, but in truth, I was still floating around looking for information.

I met up a bit later with Laura and told her what had happened. Now she looked completely stunned. It turned out that she’d fallen asleep on a couch and missed her appointment. But, everything unfolds as it should, no matter how tragic or irritating it seems at the time. She later did an M.A. at NYU, and found her true home in New York City.

When I started to do the research at Trent, I found out about silvaculture, agro-forestry, ecological landscaping and permaculture. All of these forms of land use did have things in common with the Mayan polycultural gardens. Interestingly, most of these movements started at about the same time, in the 1980’s, that these ideas were first germinating in me. It was clearly time for integrated polyculture to be rediscovered. I felt as though I had stumbled into a form of secret knowledge essential for humanity’s survival. I’d found a sweet forbidden fruit, freakishly born from the ancient seed of the first garden. Eden was now flowering in my mind.

In this most grim of times, when the industrial hierarchy controls agriculture, I could see a seed of hope emerging for a future on this planet. An ancient seed had germinated in me, and others of like mind, springing up from below the compost of our dark history. I could see that, over time, Earth would favour the indigenous way of ecologically integrated polyculture. And, like a lost ancient seed emerging from the deep hardpan of pre-history, this form of and use would re-awaken and bloom in the fields of humanity, creating new forms, contours and dimension where once there was only flat monoculture. I could see the stripped Earth recovered in a living mosaic of turquoise and jade fields, adorning the Earth like jewels and hand-woven clothing.

While at Trent, I also found many environmental, artistic, and spiritual Earth movements that were equally useful references for my thesis, although not always valued by the academy. My most secure, academic reference was from Native elders. In their own words, elders told me that pre-contact, polycultural-types of gardening did happen all over Canada on a large scale. Although, the type of Native gardening that I sought in the North, had seldom, if ever, been documented. Coinciding with the rising public interest in “permaculture”, a type of polyculture, a bit more information has come out in the last decade or so, after I completed my M.A.

While there were no documented examples from the area I was studying, there were some examples of Native gardening in the North East and North Central US, and in the highlands of Central America, as well as examples of traditional gardening from other, similar climatic areas worldwide. I used these documented cases to support my thesis. I wrote a thesis on the actual design and implementation of co-creating a successive polycultural forest garden in the Southern Algonquin Bioregion -- the Madawaska Forest Garden outlined in this book.

When I was trying to pin down exactly what my thesis would be, I spoke with the heads of many departments including Anthropology, Ecology and Agricultural studies. They all advised me against writing my thesis on something that was related to me personally, or on actually doing something physical, something real. I was also told that studying something, which had not been previously studied was not appropriate at the M.A. level. Seeing my heartfelt interest they advised me earnestly against doing the thesis on something so personal, knowing I would be crushed in the process. But, being that my primary interest in going to the university was to research wild forms of gardening and forest gardening, in order to make such a garden, I ignored them and pushed forward single-mindedly. It wasn’t the first thorny patch I’ve pushed myself through. But the academic bramble did rip most of the colour and ceremonious language away from the story, which is in part why I write this book on the same topic as the thesis.

It seemed that much of getting the Master’s degree was an exercise in trying to justify or intellectually explain what I already knew. To find out what and how I knew things, I journeyed with a hoop drum. Initially the academics found this mode of research alarming and even accused me of Native appropriation. But amazingly, the faculty completely changed their minds when I got Henry Lickers, an Akwesasne elder on my committee. Henry “pulled my fat out of the fire” as he said. He told them, “This way of finding information is not a Native thing, this is a human thing”. He then proceeded to list off the different names of Peoples, from all over, who practice this type of information retrieval. Everything was hunky-dory when Henry came in. Those who had angrily accused me before were now grinning ear to ear.

The real question about drumming and journeying for information was not, who does this practice belong to, but, how does it work? Sean Kane, another special person on my committee, who supported my approach and who is an authority on Native language and myth, did ask this question, “How does it work?”, at my thesis defence. I weaselled around, explaining that it wasn’t part of the thesis but he pressed on and said “Ok, off the record then…how does it work?”. Everyone in the room suddenly looked more interested and awake than they had through the whole defense. We all became so caught up in discussing the intricacies of receiving such information, that we forgot about the land use thesis and its official defense for a good ten minutes.

During my first year, one of the TA’s also accused me of using circular arguments to justify my points. I always thought that this was funny because this is exactly what I was trying to do. I didn’t want any contrived endings or presumed legitimate starting points. The difference in our approach to life was painfully evident. He was in the West and I was the East. I was interested in exploring the present time and space for connections while not being interested in “progress”, or in going anywhere in particular. But the academics wanted me to build an argument, to start at the bottom on a good foundation and work my way up, leaving something unfinished so that the next person could add their bricks.

The problem with that was that I believed the premises of the academic foundation were shaky, and that in the big picture there is no start or end point. We can only go around in a circle, or maybe a spiral. So, I felt that where I started should also be where I ended up, or my exploration of the point would not have been finished.

Anyway, while attempting to be as holistic and interdisciplinary as possible, my MA document upon its completion still turned out to be dry and detached from the land. It ended up being more about human culture and historical agricultural techniques. This ethnographic information was easier for the University to accept than information about land use, or gardening as co-creation, or as an extension of the Earth’s agricultural continuum.

What gardening is really about is difficult to address with reason, but is actually very simple. The key is too simple and obscure for academia to study. The key to good gardening is in our hearts. It’s about deeply honouring and being connected with the heart of the Earth. It’s from this mysterious connection that culture is cocreated and knowledge comes. Evolution in human culture has always come from sparks of information, created through this primary relationship be- tween our heart and the heart of the Earth. These days the sparks are called biomimicry in academic circles. And while the details of the mimicry are carried out by our minds, the “Ah-ha” moments, where the understanding comes into us, comes from our heart.

At university I found out about other people that gardened in a similar way to people in the Chiapas region, and to myself. But perhaps more importantly, I learned that we can’t create gardens or culture from information alone. As Henry Licker’s says, “What we learn in school is like the books on the shelf. That knowledge ain’t alive. It mostly just sits on the shelf in our minds doin’ nothin’. Can’t eat books, can’t dig or hunt with ‘em. ‘bout all dar’ good fur, in this life or the next, is wipen’ your arse or kindlin’ for startin’ fire”. I should mention that Henry, who was traditionally educated by his grandparents, also has a doctorate in ecology.

Henry also made me aware of a new, somewhat problematic movement within academia called “traditional ecological knowledge”, or TEK. The problem being that academia was trying to stuff this big traditional knowledge into the smaller paradigms of ecology or historic Native studies. I felt that they were having such a big problem integrating TEK because it was areas of studies like ecology and history, that should be placed within the larger context of TEK. Henry gave me an- other great saying that I’ll pass on here, “When the traditional Native people are out in the forest measuring trees with calipers and doing basal diametre counts and the academics are out in the forest drumming for information, then we’ll get somewhere”.