On Wednesday the bumblebees were going crazy over these currant blossoms at the MOP. MOPARRC had a meeting with the EYA staff and we discussed the placement of the two new honeybee hives that will be installed in the garden soon. I can't wait!
Our tea party this Sunday has a pink theme, but yellow was the dominant theme here.
The fruit trees are really starting to bloom now.
These hanging blossoms are Indian Plum.
The plum trees along seventh are just starting to fade.
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.
Yesterday was the April full moon, known by early American settlers as the Full Pink Moon because of the masses of wild pink phlox blossoms blooming low to the ground at this time of the year. Vancouver is pink too, with cherry and plum blossoms, the smaller magnolias, the red-flowering currants, camellias, and even some of the hyacinths creating a spectrum of all shades of petal pink.
These grade five students are writing down nature observations to write haiku. We start by discussing some of the plants that are beginning to bloom, and which ones provide important food for bees. We outline the seven components involved in writing a haiku and I explain that writing a haiku is like fishing: an active form of contemplation where you cast your net to catch a "haiku moment", which you then craft into a poem.
The students were incredible enthusiastic and I was impressed that many of them found a way to have their own space instead of using our walk as a chance to get silly, as we all know sometimes happens in these situations.
I had to take a photo of this kite stuck in a tree. There was an eagle soaring high above it. That was my haiku moment.
I explained that it is better to be specific in your poem--not just a tree, but a white magnolia tree, for instance.
I encouraged the students to use their senses--touch, smell, hearing to really get a total impression of what's going on around them.
When we got back to class we made collages of the haiku, careful to double-check the spelling as much as possible. Haiku uses as little punctuation as possible, and lower case lettering is generally used as well. I told the students that they could could choose to capitalize the first person pronoun or leave it lower case if they wished.
I tried to talk to the students about the ephemerality of the haiku moment--the poignancy of it's "here today, gone tomorrow" quality.
Some students wanted to write haiku about the destruction of natural rainforest habitat. This haiku reads:
This Tuesday Lois, Ullie and I marched in the UBC Farm Trek. It was a gorgeous day with many creative souls bearing handmade signs and wearing funky costumes. With 2000 people attending, it felt like we were a group of people who could make the change happen and we could save UBC Farm.
Hats off to the dedicated organizers who pulled this off. They are incredible.
Lois designed an amazing sandwich board with photos of the indoor gardens she grew at the Banff Centre. You can see photos of it on her Garden Gnomad blog here and there are more photos on the Friends of the Farm blog with an address by David Suzuki and another by Gregor Robertson.
Yesterday the temperature really soared and the male mason bees came out to play. I kept seeing them land on the sunny south side of our house. This event seems to correspond with the forsythia being fully in bloom, which could be a phenological correlation. Did you know that one is supposed to prune one's roses when the forsythia is in bloom?
I was hardening off some seedlings yesterday and when I picked up one of my pots to take back inside I found a mason bee having a nap. I apologized for disturbing him and let him crawl up onto my hand to have a closer look at his white powdery face. It looked as though he'd stuck his face in baking flour.
These mason bee homes were a gift to me and I love the way they are designed so you can take them apart to clean them. The males keep peeking their heads into the holes as if to say, "Yoo Hoo! It's warm out here, so come out and join us...."
The rhubarb is poking rudely through the soil, proclaiming it is indeed the season of the botany of desire. The yellow jacket wasps have also hatched and so a darker side of spring commences: predation to feed the young. As I was doing my morning exercises a small hawk landed a few feet away from me in my lilac tree, then did a low dive through the neighbor's yard. We have a lot of starlings in our hood which are experts at mimicking other birds. I kept hearing a red tailed hawk over and over, thinking it was a juvenile delinquent starling getting a kick out of scaring the bush tits. I didn't get a close look at the hawk that visited today. Maybe it was the real thing.