Seeds and the Future
I’ve just been reading Thor Hanson’s delightful book, Seeds, which delves into the unanswered questions we have about seeds. Why some of them are crazy large and impenetrable, like coconuts or brazil nuts, while others are almost too small to see: petunia seeds, arugula, amaranth. They have touched human evolution in every possible way. No question they have, as the subtitle puts it, “conquered the plant kingdom and shaped human history.”
So, mulling this over and with Victoria Seedy Saturday coming up in less than a week, I’ve been thinking about seeds a lot. Not just the seeds of wisdom I’ll be sharing in my talk (Superfoods in your own backyard) but the overarching importance of seeds in our lives.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over the years is how important seed-saving is. And like everything in this beautifully complex life, it’s a complex business. Or maybe a simple one. You can take it to any length you’re up to – from isolating and hand-pollinating squash flowers to simply shaking the yield of a leek’s seed head into a paper bag to sort out later.
In our neighbourhood we have a community seed bank. It’s a collection of seeds that we’ve grown for several years in this area, harvested and deposited into containers that a couple of our neighbours hold onto for us. It’s food security for times of disaster. It’s also a living record of seed evolution in this microclimate, which is changing as surely as all the others on this planet. And it’s a bond between those who grow and eat and keep our back yards fertile today with those in generations to come.
So many heritage varieties of garden vegetables and fruits have been lost as the seed companies seek to narrow their offerings down to profitable and popular lines. Our work with the community seed bank helps to maintain and develop our local seed stock. And our gardens help to maintain the soil that nourishes those plants, because that is part of a culture’s heritage too.
For as much as we know our farmland is being steadily lost to development, so are our backyard gardens, as houses are torn down to make way for multi-occupancy dwellings. You’ve seen it as you walk around your own area. The topsoil is scraped off and taken away, and what’s left is clay, gravel and fill. Mostly that’s covered with concrete. That irreplaceable topsoil is sold off, its unique and localized fingerprint lost along with the micro-organisms that give it life and nourish the plants that have grown in it for millennia.
We can’t do much about the scale of development and population growth, we individual home-owners and gardeners. But we can look after our soil while we have it, and encourage others to do likewise. Some of that wisdom, some of those seeds, will follow us down the years to feed future generations.
Dead Poets, Living Words
I am looking forward to Sunday’s installment in the Dead Poets Reading Series in Vancouver, when I will have the delightful task of reading Maxine Kumin’s work. Here she was, back in 2008, reading three of her poems, including one of my favourites, Apparition.
Art & Poetry Walk
Last weekend was a busy time for me, with my Saturday in particular fully booked. I was part of Poets Converse with Street Art | A Walking Tour – a cultural recreation organized and led by Victoria’s poet laureate Yvonne Blomer, and featuring Victoria’s youth poet laureate Zoe Duhaime, plus local poets Wendy Morton, Daniel G. Scott, Garth Martens and me – all asked to write poems in response to our choice of public art within a walking radius of the public library. There were also readings of Victoria poems by Carla Funk, John Barton, Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling and Michael Kenyon. Here’s how it looked on a day of all weathers:
Poets & poetry back in YYJ
I’ve been to a few poetry (& other) readings since my return to Victoria, and even given one, and time to report on a bit of that with more on the horizon.
But first, I recently found this generous and thoughtful review of Ex-ville, from the online UK arts-zine London Grip, lurking in my inbox via Facebook, and this lovely one on GoodReads via Twitter. Social media seems to be kicking in to take the place of our print reviewing platforms, shattered as they were in recent years.
It’s gratifying to have the recognition: most of us are small fish in a small pond and it can make for a life of overcrowded isolation. These were the first reviews in any 
media that I’d had for the book, and I’m delighted. Not least because my last collection. Cartography, of which I remain very proud – a dozen years in the making – garnered not a single print review, nomination or mention since its publication in 2006. That is, until social media struck most kindly again in December last year, and then out of the blue this month with a warm and thorough online review.
So. Returning to Victoria after the infinite literary delights of London… I have been more regularly attending Planet Earth Poetry, our local weekly readings series, than I had been able to over the last couple of years while travelling up and down Vancouver Island in search of nutrition training. We’ve had some great readers passing through from near and far, among them Christopher Levenson from Vancouver, Cathy Ford from Sidney,George Szanto from Gabriola Island, and Julie Paul from Victoria.
Swiftly ollowed by Lorri Neilsen Glenn who took a cherry blossom break on the West Coast from a truly ugly Atlantic winter in Halifax to read us a mixture of poetry and memoir; and by Alice Major, taking a green break from a prairie winter in Edmonton, who read mostly new and unpublished work.
For my own part, I gave a local reading back in February, in the friendly performance space at Gorge-ous Coffee. The place is fully booked with events of all kinds, musical, poetic and beyond, so was delighted to find an open slot.
Coming up soon: April is National Poetry Month, and I have three performances booked for that. The first is billed as a Read Local BC event, Poetry Without Borders, and takes place on Wednesday April 8 at the very lovely Munro’s Books in downtown Victoria. I’m reading with local poets Patrick Friesen, Beth Kope and Inge Israel. Next up is Poets Converse With Street Art – a poetry tour organized by Victoria’s own newly crowned Poet Laureate, Yvonne Blomer, which will be a poetry tour of Victoria, with poets strategically placed to read works inspired by public art; look for me beneath a sculptural streetlight, as I’m engaging with a pair of hands that were part of The Hands of Time, a project that marked Victoria’s 150th anniversary in 2012. That takes place on Saturday April 25, with morning and afternoon strolls planned. On Wednesday April 29 I’m part of a Food, Farming & Fishing Poetry Potluck at Haliburton Community Organic Farm, with Brian Brett, Linda Rogers and Dennis Reid.
And that’s the poetry bulletin for today. Next time I’ll do a little food security/urban agriculture update. My interests and involvements are like a spreading pool, so I have to keep track of the rivulets and my inner librarian is trying to create order in all this. You’ll find most of my hands-on, face-down food writing taking a decidedly nutritional vein, over at the Go Local Nutrition site. I’m also tweeting @iambiccafe and @golocalnut, and Facebooking at Digging the City, Go Local Nutrition, and Rhona McAdam (my writer page) (please Like these pages rather than trying to Friend me if you don’t know me personally).