#giftsfromplants III
“Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?” Rainer Maria Rilke
Gifts from Plants 3: Spring growth, change, and embedding in place
It's the middle of Spring here and I've now been living on this property and working in this garden for a year. I've had the privilege of being part of one whole annual seasonal cycle amongst this verdant community and the realisation of that has been a visceral one. It’s been one of those complex reactions where the feelings are ambivalent, very strong and a bit tricky to unpack. The garden makes me feel unsettled but deeply comforted at the same time.
I have vivid memories of the floral friends that first showed up and made my acquaintance a year ago. Who could forget their flamboyant attempts to convert me from a staunch utilitarian urban gardener confined by limited space to one that might appreciate and even find romance among the beauty and unknown, intricate relationships and roles of the plant communities that occupy this new spacious landscape. And now one year later those friends are back.
It was a stunning, clear, calm morning and I rounded the corner into a favourite section of the garden and was confronted with nothing short of perfection. Sounds dramatic - it was. My breath was put on hold. I've taken a million photos but there is no way to capture the completeness of what I entered. It was a sensory overload. As I tried to take it all in I was also then hit like a slap in the face by the ephemeral nature of what I was seeing and experiencing and like a slap in the face I didn’t really enjoy it. This gift no longer felt like a gift in the realisation it wasn’t going to last and I wouldn’t see those friends for another year if I was lucky. I was almost bereft and had to manually shift the gears of my mind to be present and find the lesson and beauty in this, just this.
I repeat the words of Rilke
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
By the time I post this, those flowers will have wilted and the perfume from that lilac will have long disappeared and that green... those greeeeeens will not be experienced for another year. We must journey entirely around the sun and return to this point before I get to be immersed in that scene again and even then it won’t be the same. This bittersweet realisation of impermanence can be a hard pill to swallow but with so much to gain from it lets go there.
As ecoliteracy educators what does this gift of the temporary, cyclical beauty of our gardens have to offer our students and us?
The emotional roller coaster ride that is the three week journey from your joyful first sweet, crunchy bite of asparagus to the last teary mouthful is a glorious and devastating insight into the realities of local seasonal availability and the absurdity of the industrial food system. There are so many lessons to be drawn from that experience and it's made deeply personal through your taste buds. Food is everything in our program - hence the word play on our name Foodweb Education. It provides an intimate and meaningful exploration of the key ecological patterns we use: energy flows, matter cycles and systems. I’ll go into this in more detail in another post as there are so many lessons and gifts the seasonal cycle of your edible garden provides.
Taking a broader lens here, when you boil down our Foodweb Education approach it is essentially about making connections and understanding change. Change is the only constant and the better we become at accepting it and comprehending it’s catalysts and impacts the more resilient and adaptable we are. I just made that up but it feels like it's true…?
These changes can begin to be understood by asking some questions drawn from these key ecological patterns. We use these patterns to generate questions to help uncover the stories that are hiding throughout the garden. Questions like: Where is the energy coming from to initiate and propel these buds to burst, seeds to sprout, lizards to move? What effect does it have on the local water cycle? What are the impacts of the cherry blossom flowering?
This is the perfect time to explore or revisit our physical and energetic relationship with the sun. Learning to recognise and understand our orbit around the Sun and the angle at which we do it is key to having a solid foundation for understanding energy flows. The increased day length and intensification of the quality of the solar energy reaching our planet around Spring triggers and drives many changes. As this energy flows to our patch of Earth the soil temperatures increase and the plants receive their cues to move their stored energy reserves while reptiles literally have enough warmth to regain bodily functions. . I make no claims to know the answers to these questions but these are the types of questions we rely on to generate inquiry, reality based speculation and conversation. And asking the right kind of questions is key.
Ecoliteracy is the ability to understand the organization of natural systems and the processes that maintain the healthy functioning of living systems and sustain life on Earth.
The flow of energy drives the cycling of matter through living and non living systems. You can literally see the plants pumping water out of the moist winter soils and transforming it into leaves (especially if you get your students to try and squeeze a droplet of water out of a squished juicy leaf). Spring really provides a great opportunity to experience the flow of energy in real time and capture the stories it is writing right before our very eyes, noses and ears.
Through modelling and providing time and space, another wonderful gift plants provide at this time is the opportunity for us and our students to experience the sensory appreciation that flows through you when you're privy and present to the glory Springtime offers. Allow that inspirational flow to drive creative expression and inquiry and forge me neural pathways.
Thanks to the beautiful Jennah Felix for your gifts from plants Instagram @felixartflow https://instagram.com/felixartflow?igshid=g93tdt5qzszo
This appreciation also becomes a moment to pay attention, to notice things. I'm noticing things. I'm getting acquainted with this place and all the beings that live here. I'm attuning to the subtle (and not so subtle) clues of what to expect and when.. and I'm starting to build an awareness of relationships - who shows up when the catmint blooms and creates vast caves to hide in under its luscious growth? The lady birds are mating in the green gage plum while cockatoos are busy digging up and devouring the bulb of some paddock grass as the dung beetles are excavating the inside of the sheep poo and burying it underground. Is August 15th always the day there’s a 2 degree increase in soil temperature? Do the swallows always arrive September the 1st every year ? - why? I'll have to keep paying attention to collect more puzzle pieces and start putting it together.
When our students get to regularly observe and interact with and be part of their gardens in an ongoing way they get to know the patterns and pulses of it. As Tyson Yankaporta discusses, this is part of embedding in place, whatever habitat you are part of start noticing the interrelations, connections, patterns around you. This awareness lays the foundations for the critical first steps to becoming effective custodians. “Paying attention, knowing what the weather’s doing and the patterns that you’re seeing in the weather. Seeing that when this tree is flowering these things also happen in that season. Going around and around. Even if you’re living in a city, looking at what the pigeons are doing. The hawks and eagles that are nesting up in skyscrapers, when are they nesting? When are they mating? All those kinds of things… the example I used in the book is that when the Tea tree is flowering, I know I can get lychees and cherries at the supermarket. So it’s finding all those connections and extending your awareness out and actually trying to interact naturally as a node in that complex dynamic system, as much as possible”.
I've started imagining how rapidly we could build this awareness bank if we had the means of sharing the ‘noticings’ of our local bioregions - anyone know how to build an app to do this? or maybe it has to be experienced? Either way start taking a moment yourself or with your students to notice and appreciate and discover what’s happening around you and document it! Using the ecological patterns of energy flows, matter cycles and systems provides a simple yet broad and reliable framework to help explore and then connect the dots.
It's so this point I say thank you to the new growth of Springtime your clues, vibrancy, vulnerability, promise and impermanence are my perfume at present - breathe it in!
Links to resources:
Working with the Seasons - a presentation by Benny Thatcher provides an effective and truly beautiful example of ways you might start building these habits of attunement, connection and understandings of place with your students. It's available to view through the Aboriginal STEM Suite
Little Yarns Honey Possum in Noongar - energy flows and relationships audio story
Seasonal cycles in Australia Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program
The Essentials of Nature Journaling
Applying Ecological Principles Centre for Ecoliteracy
Earth science teacher’s guide with simple big ideas breakdown
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World Tyson Yankaporta
Books:
Tu Iz Tak
https://www.booktopia.com.au/du-iz-tak--carson-ellis/book/9781406373431.html?source=pla&gclid=Cj0KCQiA7qP9BRCLARIsABDaZzjruyrGvV4E80Ae8TbtrjRHQhFIobo3x_FPDAbTHDH2mbVdJqvFLBkaAqEqEALw_wcB
Foodweb Education is gratefully living, learning and working on and with Country, Aboriginal land, land that has never been ceded. We acknowledge and pay respect to the Aboriginal communities as the enduring custodians of these lands, seas, air and waterways on this continent now called Australia. Our ecoliteracy program observes and is strengthened by the traditional ecological knowledge, worldviews and protocols of the First Nations culture where we are teaching as well as the wider Indigenous protocols of First Nations people and land based cultures across our planetary home, Earth.
