Hello again everyone! It's Magali and Lauren here. We're happy to be here!
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Magali:
Common sense: the ability to think and behave in a reasonable way (Britannica dictionary). Our life should always include a large amount of common sense, because it’s comforting, empowering, reassuring. But today, we did something fascinating: we defied common sense. Today, we took the elevator to go garden outdoors :)
“Roots on the Roof” is a UBC club in charge of taking care of a beautiful garden located on the roof of the Student Nest. Carly, a young and determined freshman at UBC, introduced us to the beauties of this elevated garden where buttercups and dandelions grow together with garlic and kale, unaware that their roots are located 6 floors above the surface of the earth. In this garden, we also discovered purple lupins, milk thistle, spearmint, radishes, Swiss chard and grass. It is hard to tell who’s the weed… it depends on the perspective. The bees definitely enjoyed the thistle more than the Swiss chard! Bringing soil to roof gardens can be challenging, especially when the budget for the garden is very limited. But Carly showed us how the club produces soil right there, on the roof, composting weeds in large bins. I was surprised to learn that it takes only 12 months to make soil from weeds and branches; what a cool way to teach sustainability to our students! Next to the classic “soil garden”, we found an experimental hydroponic garden, where a few plants didn’t just grow on the 6th floor of the building, but also grew in tubes without soil…. Gardens are magic!
While weeding the garden beds, we talked about universities, immigration, English tests and philosophy. We discovered that the philosopher Simone Weil was one letter close to becoming another great woman (the one who legalized abortion in France). This might have been considered an old historical issue, if only some recent sad events with our Southern neighbours had not turned it into a contemporary question that exists at the very center of freedom and equality for 50% of the human race. Gardening is growing, for the plant… and for the gardeners!
Lauren:
In the afternoon we also engaged in lots of hands-on work: watering the garden, preparing and planting the dye bed, transplanting raspberry bushes, and planting spinach and bok choy (which, as we learned, can also be called pak choi). The time seemed to fly by!
Something I have really appreciated about being in the garden is that it works over both the body and mind. Many of the tasks are physical, certainly, but also require great creativity and imagination: the alchemy between seed, soil, elements, and environment is a delicate one, and is best led with an open mind, keen eye, and gentle hand.
Strangely enough, I have a special affinity for weeding; it keeps the hands busy, but leaves the mind free to wander and daydream. As Magali mentioned, while weeding one bed at Roots on the Roof, Magali, Chris, and I had a wonderful conversation about poetry, as well as the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose work we both love. (Curiously, one of her most famous works is entitled L’enracinement, or The Need for Roots!)
I asked Chris whether he thought that poetry was more external––a visual and acoustic event proffered by the writer––or rather more internal, something that takes place in the mind upon reading or hearing a text. It occurs to me now that a garden is also a phenomenon experienced in two directions: how we interpret a plot of land depends as much on what is already there (whether it is heavily overgrown with “weeds” or carefully planted with rare species, for instance) as on our own attitudes or orientations to that land.
As someone who has taught creative writing in a wide variety of contexts, I am wont to believe that literature is an orientation––that even a cereal box might be considered poetically, in the right hands. The same is true of our approach to flora and fauna: I am much more likely to see the possibility in a heavily overgrown patch in my own backyard, than in a heavily overgrown patch along a highway.
In that sense, plants respond to the attention we pay them. Watering, weeding, planting, transplanting––all of these activities are a form of conversation, of attending to. In fact, Simone Weil famously wrote that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” almost akin to prayer.
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