A Spring Weed Walk

Today (May 8, 2012) seventeen or so people gathered at the farm for the second annual “weed walk” or visit to (some of) the native plants with medicinal value that grow here.  We gathered in the barn around 9:30 on a rainy, gray day to meet each other and hear introductions by Cassie Marsh-Caldwell of PASA (the walk’s sponsor), James Lesher (leader of the walk, grounds manager here, and garden manager at nearby Rhonymede historical house and art garden), John and me (event hosts).  

     Wet skies and soggy ground did not dampen the enthusiastic group’s interest  in hearing James talk about native plants with healing properties.  He led us to representative plants in several locales—starting with beds created as landscaping around the house and encouraged from wild beginnings on the dry hillside across the creek; checking on wild spreads of nettles, bergamot,  and calamus along the creek, and ending at the wild spreads of cattails in the constructed vernal pools in the front field.   Identified along the way was a sampling of the diversity of medicinal plants and shrubs (roughly, 50 identified so far, although we know that’s a fraction) growing in varied habitats on this old farm.   We tasted a few of the edibles, sorrel, lovage, mints.  With his Japanese digging tool (the hori hori), James pulled up squirrel corn to show the edible and medicinal corm, leeks to show the edible bulb, wild ginger to show the edible root and strange little flower, Solomon’s seal to look for the signature ‘seal’ on the medicinal root.   

     As he focused on plant identification to help people sharpen their recognition ability, he commented variously on a plant’s healthful properties (lavender’s volatile oils, for example) or its value for gardening (beautiful natives such as bloodroot) or for both healing and gardening (solomon’s seal or wild ginger, for example).  Brief discussion at each location ranged widely.  By a goldenseal plant rescued before destruction by road building, for example, we talked about the need for plant rescues.  In the group were several who had done  such rescuing.  While James talked about the plants' medicinal value or properties, he did not specify its traditional or current medicinal uses.   He referred the group to Jennifer Tucker, the herbalist who led last year’s walk, for that information.  (I supplemented with suggested readings in the practice of herbal healing, including several from Jennifer’s recommended reading list.)  In addition, knowledgeable group members told us about their experience with eating wild plants for their nutritional value.  

  Altogether, a satisfying weed walk.  We're already planning follow-ups for other seasons.

A Sense of Place

Place
Sense of Place
A Sense of Place
Gaining a Sense of Place
Building a Sense of Place
Thinking about a Sense of Place
Thinking about Thinking about a Sense of Place

A Place Is What It Is

Bottom line -- a place is what it is.  A physical reality.  It exists, or at least we have to assume it exists if we and everything else are not to become part of the butterfly's dream.  It is not good, bad, beautiful, ugly, valuable, worthless, . . .  It just is. 

Everything  beyond what is is a matter of perception.  We sense it.  We see it.  We hear it.  We smell it.  We see beauty, ugliness, or we may not attend to it in an aesthetic manner.  We may attend to it abstractly, noting what others have said or measured of it.

Thereby, we may come to understand that any sense of place is one sense of place among many.  Thus, there is no The Sense of Place, only one sense of place that is likely to soon be replaced by another sense of place.

Over time, we may realize that in the accumulation of different senses of place we are gaining a sense of place -- a richer composite characterized by the multiple awarenesses that we have had over time but can recall on reflection.  And, thus, we can play one against another.

This gained sense of place may just happen.  Without any attempt on our part to direct or control our perception.  But, perhaps a bit mysteriously, we may find our interest piqued and we begin to direct our attention to specific parts or aspects of place.  We may focus on the native plants that grow there, or the birds that live or fly through, or the history of the place -- natural, cultural, or other.  Thus, we may more or less consciously begin building a sense of place.

As we continue building a sense of place, we may become more conscious that we can, at least in part, direct our perception and thought processes.  We may begin to see some larger pattern in the different facets of perception or information that are part of our sense of place.  If so, we may elect to extend some of them, or we may see that several of them suggest another line of inquiry that would complement them.  We may come to realize that our sense of place needs to take into account what lies beyond its borders, such as a neighbor's riparian area that extends our woodcock habitat, or his field of invasives that come to visit, or his plans to develop or drill.  We may also come to see how subtle but how strong a role language plays as we build our sense and try to describe it to others.  How easily and unconsciously we may write gain for build when we haven't really decided which it is.

So where does this leave us?  We began with the notion that a place simply exists.  Beyond that, we can gain or build an unlimited numbers of perspectives.  On balance, we optimists would like to believe that they give us an enriched sense of place.  But they are all snapshots -- in place, in time, in historical progression, in values.  Especially values, because they guide our efforts to promote ecological diversity in a way that probably never existed before or aesthetic appreciation for a landscape that was not seen previously.  There is no real notion of restoration, only a new and, according to our values, better future.  And it's so ephemeral.  Not just the place, itself, but our sense of it.  So we try to hold on to it as best we can.

One very reductive instrument we are using in our attempt to hold on to our evolving sense of place is the ChicoryLane Web Site (http://www.chicorylane.com).    It is a place we can put those understandings lest we forget them and where others can share them.  But it is a very crude instrument that in no way replaces the original.  We know that.  But, even with all its limitations, it has become a catalyst for us, exciting us and suggesting new things to do to gain fresh insights into our 68 acres and beyond.  We sense, vaguely, that it perhaps could, at some future time, become an instrument of discovery and pleasure, enriching one's sense of place without distorting or limiting it.  In the meantime, . . . 

Perceptions of the place

Since we (Catherine, John, Ian) have lived on this farm (since 1974), our perception of the place has changed several times. 

Early on, we occupied the house and used the barn (for chickens, geese, goats, and horses) while John and Catherine commuted to jobs elsewhere and Ian bussed to and from the local school.   We had little awareness of the place.   We weren't farmers.  We were apartment-dwellers who had moved to the country.   It was our 'place to stay, with weedy fields around it.'   The attention we gave went to the log farmhouse, remodeling it according to our ideas of loghouse living.   However, even then, perception of the surrounding grounds shifted when, around 1976,  we took a wild medicinal and food foraging class led by Evelyn Snook, Keith Wilson, and Bill Russell thru Penn State's Free University.  ("Stalking the Wild Asparagus" was the idea.)  As a result of that experience, the outdoors took on a special interest.  The weedy fields suddenly seemed a 'farmacopoeia' of useful plants for eating and for healthcare.   With Evelyn's and our plant-knowledgeable friends' encouragement, we began to pay attention to coltsfoot, golden seal, stinging nettles, skullcap for health care, added ground cherries to salads, and steamed lambsquarters and dandelions for side dishes.  (Nothing like Evelyn's and friends' creativity, but it was a change for us.)  We had a glimmer that plants required particular growing conditions ('habitat'' was not yet the term, but it was the recognition), but we didn't think much about it. 

In the late1990s,  James Lesher began working with us, bringing his eye as a landscape architect, his skills as a gardner, and knowledge of plants.  What decided his willingness to work with the place, he told us later, was not us.  It was a plant, the red Canada lillies growing one of the streams ('mountain runs') as he noticed driving in the farm lane the first time. He wanted to know more about the place where this rare (red color) lily grew.  Over some 15 years now,   James' artist's eye, skilled hands, and experience as groundskeeper at Rhoneymede (a historic farm and art garden nearby) has added to our emerging idea of  the place as a 'landscape' and to our aim of encouraging 'native' plants in it.  This was the 'garden' phase of perception.  (We had small vegetable gardens for a year or two, but not for long.  We started and have maintained a kitchen herb bed. The combination of native/nonnative occurs in beds all around the house and barn as well as in wooded areas.  This phase of perception is ongoing, while becoming  better informed.)  Meanwhile, we still perceived the place primarily as a 'farm,' with tillable fields rented to neighboring farmers for crop production and we (the 'hobby farmers') gardening isolated patches of it.

These relatively subtle perceptual shifts between 1974-approximately 2005 occurred within the frame of 'farm,' or agriculture.  In that frame, locations on the farm had value according to their usefulness or attractiveness to us or to renter-farmers.   Wet locations, for example, were ignored  because they were not useful or they required special treatment (usually more work) to make them useful.

     Around 2005, we stopped renting fields for farming.  The farm entered a post-agriculture life, in our minds.   (Meanwhile, without our noticing as it happened,  the formerly open, grassy, pastured hillside had gowrn up in a new, successional forest of elms and other trees along with brushy multiflora rose, autumn olive, etc.)    Gradually, we introduced 'conservation' practices of reforestation, wetland restoration and construction, prairie grassland development, plant and animal habitat improvement, and others.  Wet places became most interesting.  In this phase, Pennsylvania and US agents in government roles as biologists, wildlife managers, watershed specialists, and others are our educators and helpers.  This relatively strong perceptual shift  is still growing strongly.  Ecology is the new frame and 'old farm ecology' is our working concept.  'Sense of place' is evolving.   Now in 2012, we're fully in frame of trying to understand the place.   Related, we're trying to recognize our impacts on it and the ways we and it change reciprocally, in tandem.

   As one activity in that frame, we're tracing the place-people ('what the people living there then did on it and with it') in time.  We're trying to learn how place and people interacted over roughly two centuries (recorded)  before we came on the place, roughly 1760s to 1970s before us, then in our time 1974-present.   James is now using his historical research skills,  examining records of various kinds for references to land and water use or vegetation (forests, other plants) over time.  He and Catherine are gaining momentum in understanding the reciprocal impacts of people and place over several time scales.   John is building a website for the place that, among other functions, archives and invites discussion of our progress in historical study.    This blog entry is a way of opening the discussion.

   As James has pored over deeds, tax records, maps, atlases, and aerial photographs in times prior to 1974 when we took occupancy of the place, he has initiated several thought-provoking ideas that are directing subsequent research: 

- 'heritage forest (remnant woods on our property and surrounding properties of "The Pines,' a feature prominently marked for the area on the 1861 Tilden map (the first map) of Centre County).  Relates to nearby place names such as Green Grove Road.

- 'improved' land (indicator of change in land use such as clearing woods to create farmfields.  Example: tax records for '200 acres, 10 improved').

- 'released' or 'returned' fields (post-agriculture conservation)

Values and Goals

We have lived on ChicoryLane Farm for over 37 years.  During that time we have focused on several different things -- its nearly 200 year old log farm house, the yard, and the land. Here, I will comment on some of our thinking about the land.

We are trying to enhance the natural landscape of the farm.  In doing so, we have identified three key values and goals:

First, we are trying to extend the ecological diversity of the farm.  We have identified ten different plant communities in this relatively small, 68 acre plot.  We are releasing plant species native to the area by managing invasive species, particularly non-native ones,  that would crowd them out if left alone.  We are also supplementing these natives with new plantings to increase their numbers and varieties, where these introductions are consistent with the plant communities. To date, most of our attention has been directed toward plants; in the future we will be giving more attention to birds, animals, and insects, again to increase their numbers and varieties consistent with the plant communities where they live.

Second, we are trying to extend the educational and research potential of the farm.  Last summer, we hosted a workshop dealing with native medicinal plants.  That workshop will be repeated this summer and we have scheduled a field day dealing with Old Farm Ecology: Conservation and Habitat Improvement for different Conditions.  We are also in the planning stages for a field day for Plein Aire Drawing and Painting.  We have also worked with several Penn State classes on student research and application projects, and we hope to increase this activity in the future.  We have also begun a Web site (www.chicorylane.com) where we are lodging information, images, and perspective on the farm and its history, ecology, and landscape.  In addition to conventional pages, the site includes a database and GIS map and information layers of the farm.  These resources make the farm a potentially useful site for learning and research.

Third, we are trying to encourage an aesthetic awareness and understanding of the farm's  natural landscape.  "A wetland is not a wetland is not a wetland," to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.  There is great diversity in different kinds of wetlands, ranging from Wet Meadows, to Marshes, to Riparian Stream Banks, to Vernal Pools, to Old Ponds.   And in them there is considerable beauty and a variety of things to look at and to wonder about.  We are trying to see the different areas of the farm with fresh eyes and to encourage others to do the same.  We have put several slide shows of the farm on the Web site and will continue to do so, and we hope to host on-site field days so that others may come and draw or paint what they see as well as talk with others about what they see and what they think about it.

We invite readers to share their reactions to this post and to record their own views on such things.