Gather Florets While Ye May

It's that time of the year when we switch from growing to gathering mode. I remember the tension we'd feel this time of year in Saskatchewan when we needed warm, sunny weather to dry the seed heads of the grain crops. The same concern applies to gathering the seeds of flower heads and herbs here in Vancouver. We plan to harvest seeds from the MOP bee garden to give them out to the community and create seed balls. We are also collecting and drying seeds, petals, and seed heads to create ephemeral art mosaics and mazes. This has to be done on a regular basis or else we may lose the materials because they drop to the ground or they rot.

This is an amaranth plant which volunteered from last year.

On Saturday I had a helper in the garden. K and I harvested the florets from sunflower heads that had either fallen and broken, or were in that post-pollination stage where the florets were just ready to fall off and expose the achenes. Luckily K was tall enough to reach some of the highest sunflowers that were out of my reach. We want to leave most of the sunflowers to ripen and dry in the sun to feed the birds and create a sculptural element in the winter garden. I also trimmed a few sunflower leaves back to give the beans growing up the stalks a bit more light. K harvested about eight pods of Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans. The plants will flourish now that the weather has cooled off a bit.

The anise hyssop we grew from seed is just starting to blossom.

I'm so excited about our first bitter melon! We can make tea from this for our September party. We also dug out some dandelion roots to clean and dry to make liver-cleansing tea.

Sunflower goggles!

Floppy fennel needs to be trimmed back.

Here's an immature sunflower head. Seeds should be black and the rim and back of the sunflower turning brown. The trick is not to leave the heads once the fall rains come so the seeds and backs don't rot. I pulled most of the seeds out of this head and dried them in the oven for ephemeral mosaics. Then I put the seed head in a tree in our back yard. The birds have already picked it clean.

My FIL gave me some vein-leafed verbena plants which have just bloomed on the south end of the garden.

I harvested some cerinthe and buckwheat seeds. I noticed that the dragons' head plants smell like lemon balm, so I harvested some to take home and dry for tea. The sun peeked out once or twice, and it was a perfect morning to dig in the dirt and reach for the sun(flowers).

MOP Celebration

Yesterday was the wrap-up celebration for our project with Henderson Elementary. The teacher and I herded the students onto the Fraser bus and made the slow journey down the hill to the Means of Production Garden. The kids burbled and twittered like starlings. It's the end of June. They're ready to leave the nest and fly into the long summer of freedom.

While I gave one half of the class a tour of the garden, Sharon Kallis lead the other half in a workshop on ephemeral art. She showed the color palette of the materials they would be working with and asked them to think about how an ephemeral artist's palette would change throughout the seasons.

Sharon has a long history of working with all ages of students, so it is wonderful to see her teaching in an easy and relaxed manner, with tons of enthusiasm.

The students used materials they had gathered as well as the flower heads, grasses and petals Sharon gathered. I gave them some giant pine cones I found on the Cambie Boulevard.

Here you can see one student's sensitive use of the delicate colors of the materials.

Sharon makes it clear that she doesn't want the artists to "make a picture" with the materials, but work intuitively with color and texture and pattern.


Sharon worked with the students on the sidewalk above North China Creek Park adjacent to the MOP Garden. Here's a long shot so you can see how big those pine cones really are. (The students are down below in the playground at this point, working of some steam before we head back to school.)

Taking the students to see the garden was an important part of teaching them to think about where artist's materials come from. I talked to them about the concept of a renewable resource with a small ecological footprint while showing them the stands of willow and hazel. In this way they can take those concepts and apply them to other raw materials and products they use in their everyday lives.

I can talk all I like about the ecology, when much of what the workshop was about was beauty and the rediscovery of the immediate natural beauty found in the urban environment that we often take for granted.

Creating awareness and mindfulness in students is something that helps them negotiate space on a public bus, on a sidewalk, at school and in the privacy of their own home. I believe that this way of creating ephemeral art is a great tool for teaching mindfulness to students. However, yesterday was a humbling day for me, a day to let go of my hope to influence young minds and win their approval. They are biding time until they can swoop out from under the watchful eye of an elder. The students will use their freedom this summer to have some unselfconscious time, time inside summer and play, which is more important than anything I can ever give them.

Earth Day Honeycomb

Today Madame Beespeaker lead an Earth Day eco-art activity at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre. I helped children decorate chalk outlines of hexagons with dandelions, forsythia and daffodils. I was out early this morning gathering dandelions in back alleys and the big vacant lot near our house. I found they didn't open fully until 9:30 a.m. just in time to soak up the sun. I took them home, trimmed off the ends of the stalks and headed to the Community Centre.

Children and their parents and caregivers drew pictures celebrating the earth in the inside of the kiddie pool and we created this corridor on honeycomb on the side of the pool. I spent about 20 minutes with a girl who was about four years old. She had a great design sense and her facts about bees were liberally sprinkled with images from her imagination. She drew "k'nectar" in the honeycomb with chalk and explained to me how the bees were going to gather it for their babies which would then turn into caterpillars. When I said "Did she mean larva?" She said, "Yes, of course, larva."

One child just came and put his hands on each soft patch of dandelions--a simple performative gesture.

I'd forgotten how dandelions smell. Have you? And do you remember how the milky goo in the stem gets on your fingers and makes them sticky and coated with dirt?


And who do we find at the end of the yellow honeycomb road? Lois Klassen as Garden Gnomad!

A mobile solar-powered photo booth that places your image in a garden.

An art piece that connects people to gardens...

And gardens to people.
We had a lovely time meeting other people who were passionate about gardening, exchanging e-mails, writing down the dates of plant sales and gardening workshops. Children came by and proudly showed us the seeds they had planted and the next generation of gardeners begins to grow.

Ephemeral Art Lesson

On Wednesday snow fell on the plum tree blossoms outside the school windows as students made art with twigs, pussy willows, petals and various organic materials I had gathered over the past few months. I talked about some of the commonly used patterns in ephemeral art: spirals, checkerboard, circles within circles, and the radiant petals of the lotus blossom.

The students worked on individual pieces first, which I photographed. They were free to make as many pictures as they liked.

Next the students worked in groups of four, creating collaborative works.


Today I solarized some of the images in Photoshop and I love the rich colors of the results of this process. We'll print the images out and hang them in the classroom.

Spring Fling: One

This is a great time of the year to launch our seed balls. The students had fun tossing them into a vacant lot and marking the area as pollinator habitat with ephemeral art.

I showed the class pictures of natural art using patterns such as spirals, circles, webs, and checkerboards, which they could draw inspiration from.

I brought along organic materials for the students to use (rhododendron leaves, pusywillows, twigs, and dried flower petals) and they picked a few things they found on the site, such as the occasional rock or feather.

This spiral is accented with weeping birch twigs.

Here the teacher uses rhododendron leaves and hydrangea petals to decorate her spiral.


Some of the students used the sidewalk chalk on the plants themselves. Here, it reveals the delicate texture of the leaf.

These students chose to create a 3D sculpture in the grass and created "snow" by grating the chalk.





Some students created homages to the bees by drawing their images and wishing them well.

Others created more abstract signs.