Wild Strawberries, the First Reds of Summer
The Honourable Harvest Week 1
As I create the guide called Sharing our Nature, meant to help people wanting to start their own seed libraries in Eastern Canada, I notice many overlapping movements converging towards a greater appreciation of our native plants. We are starting to recognize how much they feed our wildlife, but also make our life here possible. In this, there are principles we should all follow that were well-known by our ancestors, no matter where we come from. They happened to be well-put together by Robin Wall Kimmerer at page 180 of her book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
This weekly column, stretching into October, will tell of stories I have around those principles, and the way I see my own involvement in this societal shift. These principles are evidently meant to be lived, not solved with quick answers.
Here is the first principle.
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
I feel knowing how our parents have raised us, knowing our teachers, is just as important as knowing ourselves. It sort of reveals more of our backgrounds, traumas, but especially lived experiences.
But the teachers we often forget are the non-humans, or our more-than-human kin. Animals. Plants. Fungi.
As strawberry season comes to a close…
Everybody has tasted strawberries. Wild ones surprise us, for nobody asked them to be there. They just are.
They feed the bees in the spring, and feed us mammals and birds, in the early summer.
Everybody remembers times in our childhood, when our sight is filled with little red dots under our feet; the June surprise. In the fields and lawns of July, they start to fade away as wildlife eat them, people mow or trample them, or fungi rot them away.
It is also possible to think of them as a gift from nature, to us.
Kimmerer has a whole chapter dedicated to them in her book (p. 25), a section called The Gift of Strawberries.
« Gifts from the Earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive and to reciprocate. The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries »
- Robin Wall Kimmerer
To help them, she would see the runners, the shoots that strawberries sent out to root new plants, and she would weed the plants around the little rootlets they created.
A lady I know from Nova Scotia, a true native plant lover, gave to me an idea to create a catchphrase that reads « Save the Wild Strawberry » on a t-shirt.
I have it written down on me and wear it around town. With « Ask me how! » written in the back, I gather comments, questions and strawberries. I also mean by these responses I give, to make the space for those discussions in our everyday life.
Because plants are not only the best gifters, they are the best teachers. They take care of us, so we should take care of them.
Have a great week and don’t forget to ask before taking! In your life, how do you express your gratitude for your caretakers?
Note : Do not eat strawberries from strangers’s lawns. We never know what they have been through.