basketry

Finding space to grow vegetables, flowers and medicine on the lawn would have been impossible if I would have approached the landlord through criticism of the lawn, saying that the whole patch should be garden.

I would have ignored the desire of the kids who live here to play, sit and throw frisbees.

Instead I took posts from black locust thrown from an ice storm last year and marked out a garden that fits with the current design and occupies a boundary between the lawn and the four lane road.

The garden was then woven, with the landlords, using leftover willow from making baskets and fences, seed collected in my wanders, and compost from the back yard.

This small space is now yeiding scarlet runner beans, calendula, red clover, winter squash, self seeded tomatoes and borage from last year, Swiss chard and arugula.

The garden around the Siberian crabapple planted in every lawn when these houses were built over 50 years ago has sage, Wild Ginger, oregano and native woodland strawberry.

Maybe in the fall I will place another woven bed taking up another patch of the lawn, foot by foot, until it is all garden.

after purchasing bulk willow from a supplier in southern Ontario who buys from landowners in Quebec, i collaborated with evergreen learning grounds and andreas merker to deliver a three hour workshop in Cassandra public school in NE Toronto where we built a 15′ living willow tunnel. during the workshop i took half of the twenty associates who consult for school boards (installing natural play spaces across the country), and walked over to a stone theatre with a horseshoe boardwalk above out-of-cycle willow shrubs of multiple varieties. we harvested much of what was in the way of lunchtime monitors being able to see the kids through the brush, a.k.a. to improve sight lines. this brush was full of willow whips of purple and yellow, green and red, each cut multiple times (to improve sight-lines) in the past, and so were rendered useless as living fencing or tunnel material, and indeed for baskets as well. after spinning little circles in some leftover pencil-lead thin stems, i had the idea to sculpt these malformed specimens into little representations of bugs and animals, eventually embarking on monstrous living deer and eagles, etc.

these specimens were stored outside in the cold winter we’re having, and were brought indoors to defrost before being woven into these distinct patterns which emerged (again from being trimmed in a specific way over multiple years). each cut by pruners in years past, trying to see the children through the willow, produced uniform deformities, which evolved through the careful priming and bending with my hands, into about 150 little critters, which can be seen at: http://www.foolishnature.org/homely/environmental/wood/wood.html under the heading: Living Knotworks.

If one takes a dormant willow sculpture, and entices it indoors into a bucket of warm water for two weeks it will produce large catkins and then leaves, and can then be kept indoors over the last few months of winter to learn and observe from as it grows out its knots. I have been potting these works in glass vases, and they are currently for sale @ cafe Belong located at550 bayview- evergreen brickworks in the don valley; Ossington Ideal Coffee-ossington 1blok S of Dundas, W side, and soon also available at Broadview Expresso, broadview 1blok N of Danforth, E side.
Pay them a visit if your in the neighborhood.