fencing

Reclaiming the Lawn

  
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. 

sandarchy

sandarchy, graphite on paper, 10

A story from the corner store…all the way into a Mongolian sand storm.

At the platform created for passengers to wait and be picked up by buses, they have no bathrooms. Not anywhere that I have seen do they have bathrooms on the ttc (not like in the UK where you pay 50p to take a pee). After waiting for what seemed like 30min but was probably 8, I had to pee so badly that all I could do was image getting off the bus 10min later and running to the house over the ice. The bus finally came, loaded and disembarked north along Broadview ave, and I was bursting by the time I was dropped off beside the corner store. For an inexplicable reason I chose to go in, instead of running home. George was particularly talkative, and began unwinding what he remembered of strong winds blowing all through his childhood in China. I was fascinated, but had to run and told him why.

The next day I went back, and asked, what were you saying about Mongolia?

“It was china but bordering on Mongolia in the north. In the winter, nevermind the wind-chill, it was normally -50c. But the wind was always blowing, it would blow you over. We had summer storms as well, but instead of snow it was sand. Sunglasses would do nothing, we would have to wear goggles just to walk, nevermind riding a bike. ”

George was looking out the window at the chilly winter wind.

“When I visited the small town I grew up in, equal distance from Mongolia and Korea, there were these old walls I remember from being a kid. It was wall after wall built to hold trees to protect the city from the ever-approaching sand, trying to wash away our town. These trees were not so big though you see, maybe up to here, ”

Indicating with his hand about 5′ tall.

“They were not tall but they were old right? Like the trees I saw by the tree-line in the arctic.” I broke in.

“Yes, yes, incredibly old, 40-50 years, but they would not grow bigger than me.” George continued, “when I was visiting this town in the 70’s I found, horribly that the fences we built to keep the crops alive had decayed, since by the fourth tier of trees you can dig a foot and find water for the new saplings. That was the saddest part, that every 5-10 years the dead trees would have to be replaced, and were then used to rebuild the fences, but people had forgotten that this was our responsibility. The fence used to run through the whole north, northeast and northwest of the city. It was immense. I cannot imagine how it must be on the interior plain, where the wind is much worse, and they have larger cities like Shanghai.”

When I arrived home the image was so strongly drawn in my mind, I put it on paper.

the right wood

To try and find the right wood that is 4-6′ long in pencil to pinky-finger thin in almost branchless shoots that will weather the sun and rain for more than a year or two for outdoor building and sculpture does my head in!

Growing here there are dogwoods, of the striking reds and pale yellow greens, though they have usually been planted stem by stem in the few trca plantings that the city can afford and are anything but branchless. They will outlast willow birch and poplar, especially if the bark is intact, though I have the feeling that their color will bleed to a mordor black.

There are, cultivated in a few hundred ultra manicured front gardens in toronto, multi-stemmed hazel trees. They shine almost golden, and I am enamored by the beaked-hazel, which I have seen but twice in and around the don in the last five years. Most of the hazels you see are horribly pruned out of season and above the ground, since it is somewhat counter-intuitive knowledge that this short beauty will not last twenty years without being cut back down to the ground.

Here grows the principle problem with finding stems of the length I need to produce useful garden fencing and furniture; that without pruning to make the stumps more competitive and multi stemmed, they tend to divide oddly. If I could run around at night, in the right season mind, and bring these beautiful trees back ‘into cycle’ it would solve the problem of the right wood.

Another more capable and equally as water/sun resistant as hazel is the locust. There certainly is an incredible amount of work involved in removing the paired thorns of the black locust. Many days I have set out with grand schemes of processing this tree, and have switched to more useful tasks within the hour. This tree, the black locust, is unfortunately brittle, and does not take to twisting into rope to secure corners of fencing or whathaveyou. The bark is amazing, though mildly toxic, and has similar qualities to cherry or elm barks (used for chair backings, leatherlike).

Though I love the willows, unless they are planted as live structures (putting 8″ of the stem in the ground in late fall early spring, and caring for them well over the first year) I think they will rot out in 5, depending on how much sun they get to degrade the bark.

This problem evolved out of trying to make animal enclosures, and you would not invest in a massive amount of willow hurdles unless they were going to last. Hazel can buy you another 5-10 years, and I would assume locust is about the same. This is of course without treating the wood, which could be done with a turpentine produced as a byproduct of traditional charcoal production.

The list grows short, though maples, ash and others like chestnut or even yew would do beautifully, though I would prefer, in most cases to leave these tall competitive saplings intact for the most part (except for some singling or light thinning).

When I built the fence at belong, I harvested roughly 200 8-12′ thumb sized sugar maple stems per acre. This provided the uprights, numbering around 160, for the 1000 pussy willows that were then woven to make a 155′ fence. I would not have harvested more, since there was 3′ of snow and it looked like the deer and rabbits were doing enough thinning of the stems, and had their own version of forest stewardship well in hand (so to speak). Also it pays to be selective in material, since I was almost selecting to the mm to create something that was thin enough for willows to bend around but thick enough to withstand being upright. Regardless this abundance of young trees does not exist in the g.t.a. Obviously.

It seems to be a long road, enculturing the use and stewardship of branchwood to create an alternate economy in outdoor fencing, charcoal, living structures in todays urban cityscape.

One stump at a time.

http://www.foolishnature.org

on the left native red osier dogwood with invasive crack willow, leftovers from the fall in z middle

on the left native red osier dogwood with invasive crack willow, leftovers from the fall in z middle

braching dogwoods on the left and willow center n right

braching dogwoods on the left and willow center n right

why living knotworks?

living pussy willow

living pussy willow

This knot was harvested in cassandra public school while the snow was blowing over a workshop on planting a living willow tunnel for the evergreen all hands in the dirt forum. In four months I have woven around 150-200 knots mostly from the material harvested at cassandra.
Since I was 12 or so I have been drawing celtic inspired knotworks mostly drawn from the book of kells and similar, though I would get through a letter sized knot and lose patience after 3-4 hours, because the drawing had a predictable end.
As I have said elsewhere the willow knots are waste material because of the way the were pruned or chewed in years past, and are not prime for fencing or basketry. Each break in the leader shoot produces two or more off-shoots which are the structural basis for each knot, and there are few options for weaving and tying these knots other than in the configuration I have made them. The only limitation to this statement is that I have noticed through time that as I become proficient and evolve different means of attaching willow to itself, different patterns evolve.
This, coupled with the awe-inspiring male or female catkins (or in the case of the dogwood I am working with now rosette style flowers) followed by leaves, brings the impetus to continue making knots far beyond my early drawings.
I am not sure if you have looked at the book of kells, but many of the illuminated knots represent animals, people or other symbols, and in this practice I will continue to create increasingly representational forms.
The first experiments have taken forms of insects, but recently I made a small beaver out of red osier dogwood.
Literally every day I am learning from the progressive revelation of growing stems and leaves, which I think of as knots growing out, like problems solving themselves.
I will post more revelations as they progress, hopefully into massive scale living representatives of animals subsisting on willow and dogwood in the don (like the beavers living in the mud banks of the don-1.5m long!).

One knot at a time though. 🙂
Morgan Zigler.

willow also from cassandra public school

willow also from cassandra public school

http://www.foolishnature.org

finding a way to make a fence from the land

Image

this is a 6 month project, which may seem a little extreme for a smallish fence, but it was all harvested by hand through connections with landowners @ http://algonquinagroenergy.com near mattawa, Ontario, and build with hand tools. This 150′ fence was designed from British hazel ‘hurdles’ which were 6′ high and were staked into the earth as garden or sheep fencing for at least two thousand years. This patio for Cafe Belong is instead sunk into rough cedar logs with sugar maple upright to make it modular and portable.

to begin, in February to harvest from 400 acres north of Algonquin park was ambitious, but to find the necessary connection to a piece of land, o be able to visit and understand it, who lives there what has grown where and why is half of what is important, and without the pointers to understanding, there is little inspiration to continue creating things that i harvest.

this willow was cut off of a five acre site which had been entirely graded 5 years ago, and even though we had access to gas powered machinery such as the infamous ‘brush hog’ it did not seems to help, the process of selection being so slow and refined, taking only those saplings of a certain age or width meant that we could not just cut the entire thing down, but picked the trees one at a time. there is no machine more efficient than the head, heart and hands for this.

6

 

4 months later in June i am still installing fences, benches and arbors out of the leftovers. above is Access Alliance Children’s Garden, installed in May of 2012.

i even went so far as to construct a fence in two dimensions as a bench for Merchants of Green Coffee, though as the season progressed the material, pussy willow, white ash,  and sugar maple, would progressively dry out and become harder to work with.

please see the story as it evolves in its natural habitat:

http://www.foolishnature.org/homely/environmental/wood/wood.html