Wednesday Ginkgo Walk Pandora Park

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:

across the long street
there aren't many trees
near me
it's not very free

UBC Farm Trek Rocks!

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.

Thanks to Lois Klassen for taking all the photos above.

They're Back! Mason Bees are out to Play

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.

The outside temperature is currently 21 degrees Celsius. Hopefully it will hold for the UBC Farm trek tomorrow.

Je Vous Presente Pissenlit

Dandelions are popping up through cracks in cement parking lots relieving the monochrome green of monoculture lawns. Boys and girls wear soft grey baseball uniforms, and everyone else sheds layers of clothing in the sun.

Currants bloom on a St. Catherines Street curb.

A variety of Mahonia blooms at the upper corner of North China Creek Park, its imitation muguet de bois fragrance attracting common houseflies to sit a spell and preen.


Gaffer's tape marks a plot of future spinach watched over by leeks.

Trees drop some of their spring party favors on the ground.


Cherry blossoms everywhere.

Currant Events

The red-flowering currant blossoms are opening at the MOP just in time for bee-foraging weather. I saw a few honey bees out yesterday and at least one kind of syrphid fly. Oddly, I haven't seen any bumble bees out yet. I saw a dead queen on the sidewalk. Be very nice to bumble bees at this time of the year! Almost every bumble bee you see will be a queen. The species depends on the queens working alone to start her nest over from scratch.

The Oregon grape is opening up nicely too.


I love the living willow fence that volunteers built at the learning party. The catkins are putting out pollen. Bees are very dependent on pollen sources for their brood at this time of the year. Wouldn't it be great to have living willow fences all over the city to provide pollen for bees? These days I have been creating a speculative city in my mind: a Vancouver designed for pollinators. How do you think Vancouver could look if it was designed in collaboration with ecological entomologists and ornithologists?


Soon the chives will be blooming too.

Three daffodils soak up the glorious sunshine.

The Wasp Nest Demystified

As part of our ephemeral art lesson I brought a wasp nest into class for the students to take apart and study. I wanted to put an end to the confusion between a feral beehive and a wasp's nest.

The nest was attached to a branch in a rhododendron bush is our back yard. We watched it grow over the summer as bald-faced hornets came and went and never bothered us at all.

The students pulled open some of the cells that were closed on top and found wasps in various stages of decay. Some had been hollowed out from inside by parasites. There was a mass of spider eggs and a few tiny hatched spiders living in the defunct nest.


The students cut and tore the paper and added it to the ephemeral material piles.

The teacher and I talked about one of the quintessential sounds of summer--wasps scraping wood off of fence posts to use to make paper .

Each student had a turn at having a close encounter with a wasp's nest. Hopefully this will help turn fear of wasps into respectful curiosity.

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.