Once an important food crop, yellow bells are now rare, yet continue to mark the exchange of water and heat in the soil and to mark what is still possible for renewal […]
Yellow Bells Arrive
The First Petal of the First Blossom of the Sun
It’s a good day for arrow-leafed balsam roots. They have come fast (in two days). If you hurry, there’s still time for some fine steamed sprouts. Their menthol flavour is not yet […]
What is Medicine? What Isn’t?
In Western culture, artistically-prepared, purified products are medicine. They are designed to correct a deficiency or combat an invasion to the body’s temple. The natural state of this temple is one of […]
The Harvest Begins, With Desert Parsley (and a very fine rock)
The desert parsley is up in the Similkameen. This is on the south-facing side of a gulley. The north side was still covered in snow, so perhaps three days before this slope […]
Eating the Night Wind
If you like eating the land, this ever-changing weather gives you a new pleasure these days: a chance to eat the night wind. Here at the northern range of Columbia Hawthorn […]
Garden’s Up On January 5
Well, gardens, you know. What to do with an unseasonably warm winter? Play, perhaps. Here’s some orach, spinach and cress I planted around November 20, after adding some gravelly soil and some […]
The Role of Poetry in Industrial Development
I showed you some beautiful patterns that poetry was able to read from natural processes. Here are some further patterns, that extend them into useful manipulations. Notice that these, too, are not […]
A New National Park Reserve for the Okanagan Similkameen?
Here’s my grandfather Bruno Leipe, c. 1963, looking down from above Cawston Creek over the middle Similkameen Valley. This area is part of a proposed National Park Reserve, in partnership with the […]
The Beach at Dusk
After the bold statement, the exploration. Canada is a colony and its poetry, science, transportation structures and administration are colonial. OK, that’s the statement. Now for the niggly bits. They concern themselves […]
How to Make a City Indigenous, Even if You’re Lazy, Eh
Let’s go downtown as if we lived here. Let’s look at Canada through the lens of the story it tells in the Syilx illahie (illahie is Pacific Slope trade jargon for “story” […]
Okanagan Okanogan 