- by Andrée Levie-Warrilow

As I write this, I’m sitting on my verandah, watching a Monarch butterfly dancing around the milkweed in my front garden.

21 years ago I dug up the lawn and put down some plants that I liked.

I hoped birds and bees would like them too. As time passed, I’d dig up a bit more. I would amend the soil with manure, but never mulch. I wanted to see what the wind and birds and the soil itself might bring to grow in that space.

Today, without getting up from my seat, I can count 14 varieties of flowering plants – from daisies to lavender. I can’t count the number of pollinators!

Over the years I’ve fallen in with the local Master Gardeners, which you may know is a science-based group of volunteers who are constantly updating and sharing their knowledge of gardening. Eco-gardening and sustainability are themes that are cropping up as topics more and more these days. Science is confirming the interconnectedness of everything living. I was listening to a botanist on CBC recently, Suzanne Simard, discussing her recent book, Finding the Mother Tree.

Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence. I happened to catch part of an interview on CBC’s science program Quirks and Quarks where she related a story about talking to a First Nations elder about her work with trees and how after various experiments she’d learned trees can communicate for quite some distance. The elder replied that this is something his people have known of for generations!

That got me thinking about this course I’m taking online, “Indigenous Canada,” offered by the University of Alberta. After taking part in the local Walk for the Children in honour of victims of residential schools, I knew I needed to take this course and listen to an Indigenous view of Canadian history. I’m in week 9 of 12 weeks and learning so much. I highly recommend it if you are interested in understanding the cause and effects of colonization in Canada, and the damage it has brought to Indigenous peoples, their relationship with non-indigenous people, and the environment.

It is a big country and First Nations have varying customs, laws, and points of view on many different subjects. But what they do have in common is a sense of responsibility to care for the land and a connection to it and all living things.
I hope we may, sooner rather than later, learn to share these same sensibilities and understanding about conservation and sustainability for this beautiful world we live with.