The Audaciousness of April
Exploring the abundance offered to the body, mind and spirit through the month of April as seen through my lens.
April is a month of blossoms opening, rain showers nourishing, foraging for spring greens and beginning to acclimatize my new tree seedlings and heirloom veggie plants that were started inside to be ready to set down roots in the living Earth so that they can achieve their true potential.
Here in south western Ontario, we also sometimes get surprise snow storms and ice rain in April from time to time which is a reminder to work closely with resilient heirloom plants, native perennials and hardy trees in our garden designs.
In April the forest floor comes to life with an array of verdant foliage and colorful blossoms providing food for the soul and nourishment for the body (to those who pay attention and are ready to receive those gifts and reciprocate).
During the month of April we are gifted opportunities to gather seeds, tend seedlings to grow onto their highest potential and align our time and energy with the immense and irrepressible regenerative capacity of the Earth.
As the acorns in the leaf litter germinate and spruce and pine trees audaciously send out their new growth tips and open their purple and red flowers to receive the life giving pollen and create seeds with the potential to create entire forests, we are reminded how big changes and abundance can result from small things tended with love and persistence. As the green shoots push through the leaves and weather the frosty nights to gather the sacred sunlight and transform it into nourishment for their flowers and food for other beings we are reminded that nothing can stand in our way if we align our will and intent with life and give our energy in service of life.
The audaciousness of the seeds, the sprouts and the seedlings in the forest and in our gardens are teaching us how to be effective agents of regeneration, satyagrahi and contributing members in an ecosystem. They invite us to open up our hearts, our minds and our eyes to perceive the intricate wisdom imbued in nature’s design and the resplendent abundance and beauty that is all around us.
I hope you enjoy this journey through the month of April as seen through my lens and I hope these pics inspire you to get out there and explore, appreciate, forage, reciprocate and cultivate.
Wild Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) are sometimes referred to as “Fairy Spuds” or “Fairy potatoes“. They produce edible, starchy tubers that you can cook like potatoes. They love to hand out with ramps, ginseng, trout lilies and blue cohosh in the few forests left here with intact soil structure (places where large machines have never been in there with tracks to clearcut the forest and till soil, annihilating loamy old growth forest soil preferring plants like these).
I love the patterns in the bark of mature Butternut (Juglans cinerea) trees. They look like they were sculpted out of clay and stone using a trowel
Gonna be planting some of these in a community food forest project this year
Larch (aka Tamarack) trees (shown below) have tiny pink flowers that become the seed cones once pollinated. Most never notice them but I like to look for them each spring as I love the geometry of conifer flowers and cones.
Larch buds, new growth shoots and foliage can be used to make a nutritious and delicious tea. I recommend combining with yarrow, mint and nettle for a lovely nourishing blend.
In spring time when I see the decomposing leaves breaking down and nourishing the next generation of beauty and life to spring up I am reminded that even death can be beautiful.
I stumbled across some evidence of a coyote’s dinner whilst foraging for ramps.
The strikingly beautiful feathers grabbed my attention and spoke to me of both the seamless weaving of the lives of winged and rooted ones in the living fabric of the soil (nourished by leaves, feathers and bones) and the untapped potential for regenerative animal husbandry within a forest (that already produces copious amounts of protein in nuts, acorns and mushrooms).
Witnessing these American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) flowers, blue kohosh, ramps trout lillies, bloodroot, trilliums and ferns shown below that are indicators of the ecological health of deciduous forests of the eastern woodlands gives me glimpses of a time when these forests would have stretched from horizon to horizon.
In a time when the only blue sky you would have seen from under the canopy would have been speckles of blue through the 150 foot high canopy of green, a time when giant trees that have seen multiple centuries before the human witnessing their grandeur was even born was the norm, a time when food rained from the sky in the form of hickory, beech, butternut, walnuts and chestnuts covering the forest floor with a bounty that fed both humans and our elder kin.
I am grateful for these glimpses of the ancient past that are gifted to me by my photosynthetic teachers. They speak to me of potentials for unwritten stories for the future. These vigilant and wise rooted beings remind me that as a human, with hands that can heal, create or destroy, I can become an author, not just of books, but of stories written in the language of life. I can tell stories in words that empower humans to take action yes, but I can also tell stories spoken in a language of trees, forest medicine plants, soil depth, fungi and species distribution that can echo across centuries to millennia.
Video clip above showing wild Ontario Ramps emerging in the Carolinian forest where I share some of my thoughts on what American Beech trees can teach us.
“The beech told the farmer where to plow. Limestone underneath, covered in the best, darkest loam a field could want.“ - Richard Powers (The Overstory)
“Plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people. He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise. People have no corner on curious behavior.
Other creatures-bigger, slower, older, more durable — call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.
“It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.”
He teaches her to tell a shellbark from a shagbark hickory. No one else at her school can even tell a hickory from a hop hornbeam. The fact strikes her as bizarre. “Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash.
Are they blind?”
“Plant-blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain’t it, kiddo?”
Her father has a little trouble with Homosapiens himself. He’s caught between fine folks whose family farms are failing to subdue the Earth and companies that want to sell them the arsenal to bring about total domin-ion. When the frustrations of the day grow too much for him, he sighs and says, for Patty’s impaired ears alone, “Ah, buy me a hillside that slopes away from town.”
They drive through a land once covered in dark beech forest. “Best tree you could ever want to see.” Strong and wide but full of grace, flaring out nobly at the base, into its own plinth. Generous with nuts that feed all comers. Its smooth, white-gray trunk more like stone than wood. The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter —marcescent, he tells her— shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods. Elegant with sturdy boughs so much like human arms, lifting upward at the tips like hands proffering. Hazy and pale in spring, but in autumn its flat, wide sprays bathe the air in gold.
“What happened to them?” The girl’s words thicken when sadness weighs them down.
“We did.” She thinks she hears her father sigh, though he never takes his eyes off the road. “The beech told the farmer where to plow. Limestone underneath, covered in the best, darkest loam a field could want.”
They drive from farm to farm, between last year’s blights and next year’s vanishing topsoil. He shows her extraordinary things..
“We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”
He teaches her how to see a tree, the living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man has yet figured out. He drives them to a copse of spared hardwoods in the bottoms of a slow stream. “Here! Look at this. Look at this!” A patch of narrow stalks, each with big, drooping leaves. A sheepdog of trees.
He picks up a thick yellow pickle from the ground and holds it to her. She has rarely seen him so excited. He takes his army knife and cuts the fruit in half, exposing the buttery pulp and shiny black seeds. The flesh makes her want to scream with pleasure. But her mouth is full of butterscotch pudding.
“Pawpaw! The only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics. Biggest, best, weirdest, wildest native fruit this continent ever made. Growing native, right here in Ohio. And nobody knows!”
They know. The girl and her father. She’ll never tell anyone the location of this patch. It will be theirs alone, fall after prairie-banana fall.
Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.“
- Richard Powers (from “The Overstory”)
For more info on the medicinal properties of this old growth forest ecology dependent Carolinian zone plant, check out the link below.
Like Blue Kohosh, Ramps and Ginseng, Bloodroot is another being that offers us a lens of perception to know the history of the soil and forest where she grows.
She is another indicator of soil health and only thrives in areas where forests were never clearcut/tilled for monocrop farming nor exploited with heavy machines (where soil structure and mycorrhizae are still intact and there is sufficient tall canopy cover from deciduous trees)
These are not stories for the inflating ego of my human life, no, my name will likely not survive in human memory as along as these food forests I am creating have the potential to, these are stories expressed to enrich the lives of the 7th generation after this life is complete. These are stories that offer food for the soul and I am honored to be gifted with the opportunity to share them.
In the midst of all the Malthusian doom and gloom propaganda we are bombarded with online, I find clarity, hope and remember the truth our ancestors understood in that humans can be a medicine for this world through the simple act of planting a seed.
This little gal shown in the picture above is the result of another seed intended to find a home in one of my bio-cultural Refugium projects which germinated early inside and is reaching out her first set of leaves.
This little seedling could become a tree that lives for over 1400 years, building the soil, providing bird habitat, enriching the air with life giving oxygen and providing medicine for many generations of humans at the same time.
Her indigenous ancestors are endangered in their native range due to statist industrialism and most modern day nurseries only sell clones of this species to be able to predict the sex of the tree (which is resulting in genetic stagnation/fragility in nursery stocks). However, I chose to grow this seedling and her siblings from seed so that their ancient genetic library of resilience can express itself and adapt freely.
She is a Ginkgo Biloba.
You can learn more about the many gifts of this elder of the rooted kingdom via the post below:
She will be planted along with the cold hardy Pecan seedlings you see behind her (which can each live hundreds of years) in a community food forest project that is providing not just nourishment (both physical and spiritual) for humans, but also increasing biodiversity in a place that used to be an abused monoculture farm field.
Each of us can plant long lived trees in our bioregion and leave ripples of abundance and beauty in our communities long after we are gone. Even if you do not have access to land “legally” do not overlook the potential of some strategic guerrilla gardening/ guerrilla forest tending in a local park, public land or an abandoned property.
Now this here is a “social contract” I can get behind and will sign voluntarily!
“It’s about signing that contract -committing the deed of planting trees- and then carrying out our part of the agreement. It is an optimist’s manual of solutions- not easy or quick duct-tape fixes to environmental problems, but real, good, long-term answers to the question of how to be fully and vibrantly human in a world of Nature.
It is not a map to the high end of a sinking Titanic, nor a cry to bring out the lifeboats. We are not aboard a doomed ship, bobbing in a frigid sea; we are on Earth, exactly where we are supposed to be, surrounded by all that we need, in a garden that wants tending.
Akiva and I know that work well: the dirty fingers and worn hands of a planter, transplanter, pruner, thinner, mulcher, weeder. This is followed by the heart-pounding thrill of harvest-filling sacks of nuts, baskets of apples, tubs of berries, barrels of sap, boatloads of wild rice. Next comes the deep satisfaction of turning that harvest into food: bottles of delicious nut oils, golden maple syrup, cider and applesauce, fruit leather, flour. This wholesome tending to the process of life leaves a warm glow in our hearts, the deep comfort of living in a world of life-giving trees. Yes, there is work to do - marvelous work, the kind that to chipmunks and orioles is just life.
Trees beckon us to sit at their feet, humbly, and listen. They speak of the supposedly distant past, reminding us that it was scarcely more than yesterday. They link us to a future that becomes, through them, imaginable, almost palpable. Perhaps we cannot guess what the future holds, but we can plant it. We do not have to be shortsighted just because we are short. Trees are the answer to so many of our ills, and the ladder to so many of our dreams. They are the arms and hands of the Earth, reaching up to the heavens on our behalf, grasping the slippery currency of sunlight and rendering it, through their wondrous alchemy, into the stuff of life-our life and theirs. All the trees ask in return for that gift is that we live and work among them. Their leaves whisper of an alternative economy, serving different values, that will be here, scarcely more than tomorrow.”
—Samuel Thayer (in the forward for “Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Book” by Akiva Silver)
Pic above and below show the Service Berry opening up and revealing their beautiful rainbow colors and downy bud protecting hairs at the 42nd latitude in Ontario.
Picture above shows a Carolinian forest in recovery in southern Ontario (the oldest healthiest trees, which would have included 300-400 year old White Pine, Tulip Trees, American Chestnut and Oak were cut and dragged out with horses about 135 years ago).
While there are no old growth beech, oak or tulip trees left, thankfully since machines were not used to log the ancient ones, the old growth pit and mound topography/soil structure (and associated rhizomatous plants, such as the ramps you see in this picture remain intact).
Here is video footage from that same forest showing the eldest beech I found in there (recorded in october).
To learn more about Pawpaw trees, read the article below:
I love how our photosynthetic elder beings lovingly protect their blossoms with soft and warm coats of hairs and fibers. The Apple blossoms on our wild trees are furry, soft to touch, ready and resilient, capable of dealing with sudden frosts, same with these native service berry buds, same with the heirloom cannabis seedlings I allow to do their own thing self sowing in our garden. What a marvelous and adaptable thing it is, to align with and lend one's creative potential with the forces of nature.
When we receive her wisdom and gifts with open arms (growing progenitor, heirloom and native species) and reciprocate her gifts, she envelopes us in the warm hug of her protective embrace, holding us in a safe place like the downy blankets of soft fur that she covers the blossoms with. Such are the blessings we receive when we give them the chance to adapt and unfold through successive generations of growing from seed.
I was paying attention to a woodpecker that was making his presence known with his rhythmic thumping and song the other day and he drew my attention to an Austrian Pine tree that was apparently full of tasty bugs that he was snacking on. This brought my attention to the pine sap that he had been encouraging to flow out of the cambium layer with his foraging efforts over the weeks and months prior to my working on that site resulting in pine sap gathering on the bark, dehydrating, crystalizing and becoming hardened pine pitch that broke off into large orange/amber colored crystal looking pitch pieces.
Pine pitch has been used by indigenous peoples and survivalists for millennia to help seal and disinfect wounds in the wild. It is also a universal burn remedy among Native Americans of the Eastern forests. They use sap oozing from damaged coniferous trees or melt down hardened globs of pitch or resin to create a medical superglue. Pine sap contains about 20% alpha-pinene, which has both anti-inflammatory and bactericidal properties.
I collected some of the pine pitch (shown in my hand in the pics below) so I can experiment with making a variation on my Sacred Seven Salve which will be melted down, filtered and made with bees wax/cacao butter to stabilize the consistency to be more solid and shelf stable (for adding to the camping/herbalism survival first aid kit).
It’s also used as an impromptu glue and firestarter.
Pine pitch or resin can also be used for waterproofing!
You can use waterproofing for a variety of things, patch up your canoe, tent, tarps, waterproof the seams on your boots, use it as glue if your building a shelter. There are just so many things that you can waterproof.
You can even make a lamp using some moss and a rounded out rock!
Pine resin is used medicinally for a variety of issues, both internally and externally. Externally, it’s made into a pine resin salve that is very effective against rashes, but “It’s also an effective healing agent on cuts and bruises, helps to draw out splinters, and can be rubbed on your chest for congestion.”
It’s naturally antibacterial, so pine resin has been chewed as a gum for mouth complaints as well as sore throats.
Such are the blessings we receive when we give our attention and pattern recognition awareness to our winged and rooted elders. Through getting to know our neighbors (whether winged, rooted, four legged, myceliated, finned, scaled) and learning to recognize them, their gifts, receive them and reciprocate them, we tap into an ancient decentralized gift economy where we discover that we are actually surrounded in food, medicine and wisdom being shared by our elder species 24/7.
Then I steep it for an hour, then strain, compost the solids (giving them back to the Earth and saying thanks). I fill up my thermos and I like to share and sip on the potent tea as I work out in the elements with other tree tenders and landscapers.
I collected this germinating acorn shown in the pic above from the base of a 170 year old + red oak.
This tree saw a time before internal combustion engines and the existence of a thing called "Canada".
I am honored to be able to save one of her acorns from the mower and give it a chance to grow onto it's true potential.
May this single acorn grow to be a 300 year old elder and may her acorns create yet thousands more.
May these Mother Trees become the hubs of biodiversity and nourishment that can sustain, provide habitat for and protect countless generations of winged, four legged and two legged beings for millennia to come.
So it is, and so it shall be.
Below are some pics from a few years back when I did an experiment with seeing how fast and how much food one can grow in a small space by throw sowing a mix of seeds (intended to be eaten at several stages of growth, continuously ‘snack thinned’ until either a viable final spacing for a poly-culture is achieved and/or the need for transplanting arises.)
a “fast food” garden experiment
I gathered all my oldest seeds from my collection (three years old plus, so they are seeds I would not feel right giving to others and getting their hopes up on viability). I then added in some 5 packages for 1$ dollar store packages of seeds which are varieties that grow quickly and can be eaten in multiple stages of growth (sprouts, microgreens, baby greens and/or mature stage).
I mixed them all up together and throw sowed them onto a little approx 4x4 section of a raised bed (on a fresh layer of compost, some triple mix and kelp meal). I lightly raked them in with a hard rake and then watered well.
I got lots of tasty kale and radish sprouts by week 2.
By day 28, (shown in pics below) I found that the fast food garden was a success!!
Though at that point, it had been providing speedy access to nutrient dense food to cardinals, sparrows and robins rather than humans haha… Oh well, I suppose I need to be more clear when I name things :)
The birds had meticulously plucked out all the sprouting sunflower seeds (despite me even going to the effort of pushing some down an inch into the soil and covering) and also have enjoyed a good number of the sprouting peas on the soil surface. What a lovely buffet i provided for them.. sprouting seeds, worms working in the compost.. they certainly seem happy when they visit each morning and evening.
On the bright side I did seem to have managed to convince these birds to come back and visit regularly with the feast i provided them, so they came back and helped out with caterpillars and other critters that try to munch on our tender leafy greens once it warmed up.
The Brassicas (kale, mustard and radishes) in the fast food garden mostly survived bird raids and came along nicely, carrots and beets too. A few snap peas survived the onslaught of ravenous beaks and rooted in well enough.
I ended up doing a bunch of transplanting of the super dense clusters of beets, carrots and radishes and add some in different areas of the yard after they were battle hardened (having been snowed on 4 times in a week and were still going strong).
I ended up snipping microgreens from the brassicas 3 times before allowing some thinned out ones to mature. So it resulted in a pretty solid amount of greens within a month of planting and then lots of radishes, carrots, beets and kale later that season.
Over all a worthwhile experiment that could be honed and improved on for emergencies/ using up old seeds.
For more info on the nutrition and medicinal benefits of Goji berry leaves and fruit check out the article below:
It went to minus three C early on the 24th of April, 2024 so they had to run the Irrigation system at work in the middle of the night to surround the plants in a protective shield, this was the result…
The next two pictures show a singular snow flake I managed to capture a picture of with my Nikon Camera as it landed on the soil in our garden in April. The next picture is about 2 seconds later when the 3 dimensional structure of the crystalline snowflake had already begun to turn back into liquid water.
magnolias..
For more info on Tulip trees in the food forest and regenerative garden read article linked below:
And when the Tulip tree leaves are emerging that means there is a plethora of ephemeral ultra nutritious spring greens to harvest on the forest floor, empty lots and in my own backyard! :)
I decided to combine all those with some fresh veggies, spring mushroom harvests and preserved/dried garden harvests from 2023 to make something filling, vibrant and nourishing to keep me warm and super charged during the long word days and weeks that often fill up my April days.
I used some spring harvests of Ramps, Nettles, Garlic Mustard, Goji leaves/shoots, Morels and combined it with dried beans, frozen garden tomatoes as well as Goji Berries, freeze dried garden peppers, some fermented fire roasted hot peppers and dried spices/herbs from our 2023 harvests (with some wild rice and schisandra berries) and made a batch of fun and extremely delicious Spring Chili. (I will share the full recipe in May as a stand alone post).
For more info on Nettles:
The picture above and the next few below show female cones or "flowers" on various types of spruce trees, ready to receive pollen and transform into cones filled with seeds.
Okay that is all i`ve got for April everyone!
Now that our exploration of the nourishment for the soul that is offered in the month of April has come to an end I hope you will take some time to go out and experience similar moments of magic in your local area. Each moment we spend in nature opening our heart, our eyes and our other senses to what she is communicating to us offers us a chance to gather spiritual sustenance and enrich the eternal part of one’s Being.
Giving our attention to the beauty and wisdom inherent in the natural world around us is an act of reciprocity and in doing so our hearts are compelled to take that act of reciprocation a step further to actively engage with and tend to increasing the beauty and biodiversity we are blessed to be able to experience so that future generations may share in the same blessings.
Wishing you all bountiful spring harvests in the forest and in the garden, and may the seeds you plant set down strong roots and produce a bounty of food for your spirit and nourishment for your body as well.
Just this morning, I noticed that the Japanese Dappled Willow by my back door has begun her spring budding. Takes my breath away every year. It's literally medicine for the soul.
A lovely tribute to Mother Nature in bloom, Gavin. Thank you! 🌸🌸🌸
That Elder Polar. What a magnificent structure. We rarely see such a broad canopy. Thanks for sharing all the woodland beauty.