I’m sitting in the Centretown condo of my good friend Élizabeth Powles. Outside are signs of construction and autumn. Inside are her loudly purring cat and what she describes as a fuck-ton of common milkweed seeds. (I correctly guess the size of the container they fill: 8 cups.)
Our plan is to pack seeds, a heaping eighth of a teaspoon at a time, into the paper envelopes she already folded, for distribution by the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library. Scoop, insert, fold, tape closed with explanatory label, repeat. It is useful work to do with your hands while watching TV or chatting about nature and art and community and the future.
The Butterfly Meadow, generating seeds
As one aspect of her volunteer work, Élizabeth now runs the Butterfly Meadow in the Fletcher Wildlife Garden (near Dow’s Lake in Ottawa). She chose to run the meadow as a drop-in, so that volunteers who have a bit of time during the season can show up and do some weeding or hauling or whatever needs to be done. “The intention is to be accessible for anybody who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing and doesn’t have a lot of time.”
The goal of the meadow itself, she says, “is to demonstrate, if you have a big rural lot, what you might want to do with that land. It’s not managed-managed like a backyard garden would be. It runs semi-wild, but we have paths and we intentionally planted a lot of native plants, but they’re kind of all over the place, and there are still a lot of invasive plants.” This includes her eternal nemesis, Dog-Strangling Vine.
“There’s so much less than there was, there’s areas where there’s hardly any, where you can really see the impact that we’ve made, so that’s really satisfying, but again that only works because we’re managing [invasive plants] every single year and we’ll have to keep managing it indefinitely or it will all just go back to the way it was. But I’m okay with that because it’s a very harmonious job. I love just having a reason to be out there in the sunshine and it’s great exercise and all the plants smell really nice and there’s the earth and the green things and you hear the birds singing and it’s lovely and I’m very happy to spend as much time as I can possibly squeeze out in the summer working away.”
This is her first year volunteering with the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library as well as the Butterfly Meadow. Élizabeth had originally been interested in the idea of guerrilla gardening (planting flowers or edible plants in neglected private or public spaces), but it turns out the germination rate is low. Then she attended a workshop for making seed envelopes.
“We sat around, a big group of people at the community centre, and we just folded seed envelopes and it was very soothing. You just sit there and do something kind of rote with your hands, but talk to a bunch of like-minded pleasant people and feel like you’re doing something useful and it’s lovely.”
Next up was a seed-packing workshop, and it occurred to her that the Butterfly Meadow is effectively a seed orchard (where native plants are grown and can be harvested for seed for restoration projects). She’s already planning to use the seed library’s four-tier priority list to fill up some bare patches next year, so the meadow can generate the native seeds that are needed most.
“Some plants have hyper-abundant, easy-to-collect seeds and those ones very quickly the seed library is like ‘we have enough, thank you.’ Other seeds will always be high priority because they’re more rare, they’re harder to collect, etc.” Milkweed, she says, is highly valued because it supports monarch butterflies.
The technology and art of seed envelopes
We talk about the concept of technology, how to some it means only shiny engineered gadgets with moving parts, like the energy-intensive air conditioning that becomes a necessity when you build a giant glass tower in a desert. Élizabeth instead conceives of technology as “information applied in an appropriate way,” such as “a building that’s essentially self-cooling because it’s modelled on termite mounds,” or other types of thoughtful design with lessons learned from nature.
We talk about solarpunk, a genre of science fiction and a style of art and a social movement about sustainability and finding a balance between nature and technology. “People who don’t think of themselves as science fiction people are putting out ideas for sustainable building practices, sustainable urban planning and urban design, and yes, okay, that’s all solarpunk. [And] a lot of people create art that’s like the cities you’d like to see in the future – idealized cities where it’s clearly high tech but there’s also a ton of greenery incorporated, for a sustainable green city. None of this ‘we’re going back to the stone age because that’s the only way we can save the earth,’ it’s sort of accepting that technology is here to stay, and offers a lot of benefits, but we have to use it wisely.”
Solarpunk, she says, is about “a better society, decapitalism-izing society, and better community bonds and low consumption.” Plants in particular are “gloriously anticapitalist. They make their own food, they do their own thing, and they produce, like, 50 million times more propagules than they actually need for replacement, so they’re just ‘here is some food’ for all the wildlife and the people who want to share seeds.” (A propagule, she explains, is a plant term for anything that propagates a plant, such as a seed or a cutting.)
The seed envelopes themselves are low tech and efficient. Each is a little square of paper folded in such a way that there is a pocket for seeds, and each gets taped shut with the relevant explanatory label printed off the seed library’s website.
The envelopes we’re packing are also art, because they’re made out of paper left over from Élizabeth’s surreal but naturalistic collaging projects.
“I cut up so many books for collaging and used the leftover paper for seed envelopes. A lot of them were art books or nature books – the paper that’s left over was actually very pretty – so as I was folding the seed envelopes I was looking at them and thinking ‘ooh ooh, let’s make the prettiest side available to the person who gets the seeds, it’ll be cute, it’ll be a little bonus!’”
I packed envelopes that were medieval line drawings; paintings, dark or colourful; short, inscrutable passages of text; sheet music. The seed envelopes don’t have to be beautiful to perform their propagation function, but a little extra art in a gloomy world doesn’t hurt.
Doing what you can do
All told, we pack 504 envelopes with common milkweed seeds for the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library.
These and other types of native seeds will be given away for free at in-person events in November and December, and what is left over can be ordered for mail-out starting in late December.
“There’s ultimately 8 billion people in the world and it’s not on you to do 8 billion people’s worth of work to save everything,” Élizabeth says. “I cannot control the world, I can’t control human nature, but what I can do is whatever little small things I can that will make a small amount of positive change. Yes, we’re trying to put more native plants out into the world, but one of the side benefits of this is to support this notion of communal endeavours, working together on a thing, and I do think that stuff is contagious. There are people out there who may be feeling woeful, and looking for something that they can latch onto, and this could be something good that they can latch onto.”
504 little artful, joyful, anti-capitalist bundles of hope for a future with more butterflies.