Fog, fall, and failure

My dissertation writing days have begun in earnest now - days spent writing, reading, and sitting inside. Out in the garden, fall and fog transform the space into a mysterious world. It is hard to come to terms with things falling apart but even this has its own beauty.

This morning, two graduate students from an Environmental Education course met me in the foggy garden to plan their class visit next week.

"We don't have anything like this garden at our university in China," the one student commented.

"Well, we won't much longer either," I replied with sad, resigned laughter.

The final stage of my installation based PhD research project, Threads sown, grown & given was to explore the ideas and practices around gift giving, in education and in relation with land. The webs we spun as gifts in March 2013 are slowly collapsing but most still hang, bejewelled with fog dew. My hope now is to carry the energy of the garden and this installation series forward into my dissertation writing. A difficult hope that is sure to fail. But failure, it turns out, is one of the themes of my dissertation I have slowly grown to appreciate: "Just as any human enterprise is defined by what it excludes, it is a culture's failures - quickly forgotten, repressed, buried away - which have the most to say about that culture's beliefs and values" (Antebi et al., eds., 2008, p. 12).


--Julia Ostertag, PhD Candidate, EDCP

[Please search "installation" on this blog for more posts related to my research project. Comments are also always welcome!]

Fireweed dreams

Fireweed and webs

As I sit at home to write my dissertation, the installation Threads sown, grown & given continues to grow and change at the garden. Now it's the season of fireweed. At the centre of the installation, surrounded by linen webs, a circle of fireweed is now glowing amidst the regular garden crops (cucumbers & squashes). Fireweed caught my attention years ago when I first encountered it growing in northern Quebec. To plant it in a garden calls into question what we in fact consider to be "a garden." This weedy plant grows after fires (or clear cuts or other disruptions), spreading rapidly by its thick rhizomes and thousands of fluffy seeds. Beyond being a "weed" and regenerating exposed soil (important work!) it is also a beautiful flowering plant that bees love to visit. From a human perspective, it has been valued as a food plant (the young stems can be eaten), a medicinal plant, and...perfect for this installation project based on threads...a fibre plant (both stems and seed fluff can be spun). Since this final installation engages with the questions of regeneration, reconciliation, and gifts between humans and with the land, this plant spoke to me. However, it was with some trepidation that our garden team invited a weed to live alongside our regular crops.

It appears to be incontournable: This is the last year of The Orchard Garden in our current location. I am filled with sadness but dream that perhaps the fireweed will take root and regenerate the soil and our imaginations after the destruction ends.

Spinning linen memory webs & giving gifts

Student teachers becoming memory spiders, March 9

Spring has arrived and the outdoor classroom/school garden installation, Threads Sown, Grown & Given, is slowly changing and re-inventing itself.

On March 9, 2013, student teachers in our workshop series worked together in pairs to spin spider webs throughout the installation site. The linen thread came from the flax that had grown as “desks” in the grid of the outdoor classroom installation the previous summer.

Inside the outdoor classroom installation

Flax window at installation, November 2012

On November 20, 2012, a cohort of the teacher education program joined me for a collaborative learning workshop and research day. Since the class has been exploring themes of indigenous education and the relationship between land and education, it was exciting to share my research journey with the students and create a generative space to explore our overlapping questions, concerns, and hopes.

Workshop Series #6: Hands On

Our sixth Workshop Series was blessed with a brilliantly sunny day. The kind of day where you can hear the robins, smell the sweet air, and the sun's warmth on your face. We were thrilled to have sun because we spent the whole morning outdoors working in the garden!  We had three stations set up for the student teachers. 

The beauty of the garden in winter: tomatillos

Julia Ostertag found these beautiful, lacy tomatillo husks in the Orchard Garden this week.

And although tomatillos are part of the nightshade family, they are more closely related to cape gooseberries than to tomatoes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomatillo . Green tomatillos make a delicious salsa (tomatillo recipes & info here).

School gardening research events, Scarfe buliding Nov 13-30

From November 13 - 30, join Julia Ostertag in the Student Lounge of the Scarfe Building (Room #10, basement) to see and explore the themes of her PhD research project, Threads Sown, Grown & Given. On November 13 from 3-5pm, there will be a public opening of the indoor installation. Throughout November 13-30, you are invited to join Julia for daily threading conversations from 10-12, also in the student lounge. During these daily events, Julia will work with materials from the research, screen images from the summer garden installation, and invite the public (student teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, instructors, staff and the general public) to join the research process.

If you are interested in participating in the research, please contact Julia for a consent form (julia_ostertag@yahoo.ca) and bring it to the student lounge on the day you plan to attend an event.

Vielen Dank, Lena Schrieb, for the incredible poster! (http://www.lena-schrieb.de)

Flax to Linen

Linen fibre skeins: 6 hours of work, 124 grams of unspun linen

On Friday, I took two giant bags of flax plants (pulled, retted, and then dried in my living room...imagine the mess!) on the ferry to Victoria. There I met Barb and folks from the Flax to Linen project, who  - with incredible generosity - shared their tools and experience with me as we worked together to transform flax plants to linen fibres.

The steps of the process are:

A Harvest Celebration!

On Tuesday October 2, we celebrated the harvest season in the Orchard Garden. It was a great day, filled with good food and good friends. We had music by Susan and Julia, some kolrabhi carving activities, an apple press squeezing fresh cider, and a wheat weaving workshop by Brian. A good time was had by all! Some visual highlights are below...

Flax formations

One blue flower opens every morning: 30 days after flush of flowers, flax is ready to be pulled and dried (for linen)

In an earlier post, I said that I would I write later about flax. Perhaps this story is conveyed most succinctly and beautifully in a 15 minute video by Benoit Millot available on Vimeo.

Enclosures and trespassers

cut seed bolls, retting flax, September 2012

The etymology of the word 'garden' can be traced back to the word 'enclosure'. As such, it is a territory - one that, whether in imagination or in reality, may be trespassed.

On Wednesday last week, for the fourth time, I went to work with the flax at the garden only to discover that an invisible hand had cut off seed bolls and removed large portions flax from where it's been drying and retting in the field (dew retting is the slow rotting process by which the linen fibres separate from the woody "boon" or outer stem through moisture, heat, and the collaboration of a multitude of micro-organisms, click here for more on retting).

Julia's Research Installation

 

If you haven't seen it yet, stop by The Orchard Garden to experience Julia's Ph.D. research installation that changes by the day, with the light, and the hands that tend it.  Flax is such a beautiful, practical and poetic plant in all it's forms (these photos predate Julia's latest 'human forms' on her desks).  Can't wait to see what's next...

Installation harvest visits

As a site-specific installation/research project, Threads Sown & Grown, Woven & Given, is an ephemeral and transient experience. This first phase of the installation, Threads Sown & Grown, has constantly changed - from a grid of strings marking the spacing of desks and walkways, to feathery green beds of small flax plants, to a sea of waving blue flowers. However, I have often wondered when everything would come together and feel "complete." Just a few days ago, I reconciled myself that things (windows, walls, bean plants, wheat, cover crops, and flax plants) would never synchronize their "becomings" and be what I had somehow envisioned. And then, it happened.

A volunteer and I pulled the last "desks" of flax, ready to be harvested for linen. At the last moment, I decided to try stooking the sheaves of golden flax, long strands with tousled seed boll heads, and placing the stooks on the desks of their origin. Suddenly, small human forms filled the classroom, with a taller figure at the teacher's desk. The few remaining desks of flax, left to ripen for flax seed instead of linen fibre, occupy the remaining spaces, and faint green cover crops delineate the original grid of the classroom geometry.

Just as things have come together, I have left for a holiday with my family in Ontario. I'm sad to be missing this beautiful time in the garden; however, I invite you to enjoy it before Monday or Tuesday next week, when the stooks will be gathered by The Orchard Garden team and the installation changes again. Bring your camera and send me a picture!