alharris

In Season: Mulberries

A tub of mulberries, freshly picked.First pick of mulberries today. The street trees we usually pick from have had all their lower branches pruned in a hopeless (I dare not say “fruitless”) effort to reduce the masses of mulberry fruit squished into jam on local sidewalks, but about a kilometre away I found a street tree laden with low-hanging fruit and, with the property owner’s permission, picked about 4 cups.

Mulberries have a sweet and slightly tart taste. They make excellent mulberry-lavender ice cream, very good jam, and are an unbeatable companion to dark chocolate. They also stain strongly, and would likely make excellent purple or burgundy dye or ink. Like most berries, they freeze easily for use throughout the year—a good thing, because mulberries in the Toronto region fruit briefly, a week or two before the raspberries are in full swing, from late June to mid-July. The best mulberries to pick are the fat, long ones that detach readily from the branch. Mulberry trees with eastern exposure seem to produce the sweetest, fattest berries.

Mulberry trees are somewhat controversial in native plant circles, mainly because Asian white mulberry trees (Morus alba), reportedly introduced to North America in the 1600s, have replaced or hybridized with native red mulberry (Morus rubra) and are therefore considered invasive. Native red mulberry is severely endangered in Ontario: reports from 2014 indicated that there were only 217 red mulberry trees remaining in the province, clustered mainly in southwestern Ontario.

Personally, I am on the fence about hybridized mulberries. I am always open to correction, but currently it is my non-expert impression that the proverbial ship may have sailed on the prospect of restoring a sustainable population of non-hybridized red mulberries in Ontario. I am not convinced it is possible or even desirable at this point to eliminate hybrid trees. Having said that, at least two native red mulberry trees are on my wish list for Maher Circle and, if we are able to procure some for our native pollinator garden, I will endeavour to maintain a 50 metre clearance between our natives and any non-native or hybridized mulberries.

In the meantime, however, I am happy mulberry season has begun, and hope over the next week to pick a year’s worth for the freezer, of which a quantity will go into a batch or two of delicious mulberry-lavender ice cream.

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Seen: Producers of Miracles

Wild bumblebee pollinating raspberry blossoms on 1 July 2025, Toronto, Canada.Today is the third of July, and my raspberries are producing fruit. The first ripe berries, hot in the sun, always, are reverently consumed: sweetness on the tongue. Afterward, most of the berries go straight into the freezer until I have enough to make milkshakes, ice cream, and jam.

Reverently, too, we observe the bumblebees who pollinate the flowers and are therefore the raspberries’ principal keepers. Here is one, hard at work a few days ago, a producer of miracles in summer sunlight.

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The cicadas are in season, too. I heard the first one of the season late yesterday, as the humid evening eased itself into dusk. I heard it again this morning, and hopefully soon we will have a loud chorus of cicadas, droning in the summer air.

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Also, seen recently in my woodland garden: a male blackburnian warbler! I am terrible at bird identification, and my phone camera managed only pixelated pictures, but blackburnians have such distinctive plumage that it was fairly easy to narrow down the species while flipping frantically through my collection of field guides. I assume this bird was in transit and stopped by my woodland garden to shelter under the cedars and enjoy the bird bath.

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What Remains

Archaeological site investigating ancestral Menominee agriculture in northern Michigan.
Madeleine McLeester image.

A few days ago, via Connecticut Public Radio, I learned of recent archaeological research finding evidence of large-scale precolonial Indigenous agriculture in northern Michigan. The research findings, published recently in Science, discuss an ancestral Menominee agricultural site consisting of at least 95 hectares of raised, ridged fields planted mainly in maize, beans and squash maintained, likely for centuries, between about 1000 CE and 1600 CE. The study authors report further evidence, in the form of burial mounds, ritual earthworks and village sites, indicating that the fields were intricately connected to the broader Menominee cultural landscape.

These research findings are important for a variety of reasons. First, the Menominee fields (only partially surveyed to date) may be the largest surviving precolonial Indigenous agricultural site in eastern North America–a crucial find given (a) that pre-contact Indigenous communities were long believed to have maintained settlement sites only for short periods, and (b) that more than 90% of pre-contact Indigenous landscapes have been obliterated from the landscape by settler-era farming and development over the last 400 years. Second, their scale, sophistication and long duration underscore the reality that pre-contact Indigenous cultures modified landscapes in extensive and prolonged ways—via deforestation as well as through extensive earthworks and the movement of soils (e.g., floodplain soils brought to the fields, and evidence of compost used as soil amendments)—to serve agricultural and cultural aims. Third, the cultivation of maize on a large scale near the northern extent of its range invites a reexamination of historical crop practices and precolonial population distributions.

I love these research findings because, in the way that innovative research often does, they deftly upend received notions—in this case, about Indigenous impacts on the land. Far from flitting through the woods, leaving few traces (as “empty continent” claimants still insist) —or, alternately, living in Edenic harmony with nature—Indigenous North Americans were active agents of environmental change and extensive modifiers of landscapes. The archaeological evidence, bolstering Menominee narratives, indicates a long history of sophisticated cultural practices, specialised resource activities, and extensive trade networks.

It is also worth noting that the extensive patchwork of linear mounds also rebuts a ridiculous but often repeated claim that Indigenous structures (& epistemologies) were all curved, in contrast to colonists’ supposedly straight lines. I note this because more intelligent framing of the differences — and similarities — between Indigenous and settler ways of knowing & doing are needed both to add to cultural understanding and to advance projects of reconciliation, not to mention appreciating the complexity of North American landscape history.

I also love these research findings because, for the first time in longer than I can recall, they make me excited about contemporary scholarship. In the last three decades the so-called cultural turn has brought important insights to the social sciences and humanities—but it has also, in recent years, led them to become increasingly pedantic, orthodox, and ossified. Increasingly often, evidence is harnessed to serve a foreordained premise about what (and who) is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ determined along ideological lines. In this rubric, far too much scholarship has, contradictorily in this supposed age of interdisciplinarity, become doctrinaire.

To me, good scholarship should open up subjects to further investigation, not close off questions. By challenging received notions about how pre-contact Indigenous communities used the land, McLeester et al make room for further exploration of Indigenous land uses, economies and cultural practices. Two areas of follow-up relevant to this particular research program include learning more about the reportedly non- or less-hierarchical nature of ancestral Menominee communities, their trade networks, and village sites (strongly implied, it seems to me, by the use of domestic compost in the fields) the teams have yet to uncover. That the team will likely continue to combine field archaeology methods with oral histories from contemporary Menominee knowledge-keepers makes this a project to keep watching.

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Seen: Albino Milkweed

albino milkweed

Yesterday, while tending to the pollinator garden I coordinate in a nearby public park, I was surprised to see this common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) exhibiting albinism.

Apparently albino milkweeds occur infrequently in nature, likely due to a genetic mutation. Because they lack chlorophyll, they are unable to photosynthesize and, reportedly, do not live as long or grow as large as ordinary milkweeds. However, milkweeds spread by rhizome, meaning that albino milkweeds may gain nutrients from fellow plants to whom they are connected.

Albinism in plants is never common, but reportedly occurs often enough in redwood trees and orchid plants to suggest it may confer some evolutionary advantage (perhaps especially in shade and understory environments), wherein non-chlorophyll-producing plants—known as mycoheterotrophs—forgo photosynthesis in favour of parasitizing mycorrhizal fungi. One wildflower native to Canada, Monotropa uniflora or ghost pipe, is fully mycoheterotrophic.

[Personally, I object to the term “parasite” to describe mycoheterotrophic plants. If the mycoheterotroph gains or borrows energy without harming the source plant or fungal organism, it seems to me it would more properly be described as a commensal.]

I cannot say whether the albino milkweed in my local park has ‘chosen’ a mycoheterotrophic strategy or is simply a mutant plant. It is noticeably smaller than its peers, but seems healthy so far and shows the beginnings of a blousy blossom head. I will monitor it through the season to see how it grows. I’m curious to see whether it will remain healthy and, equally, whether its blossoms will attract insects.

In the meantime, my mutant milkweed is a thing of beauty and a source of wonder, nestled in among her green sisters. I am grateful to her for existing, and for giving me the opportunity to learn something new about plant genetics and physiology.

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Thrifted Treasures, 7 Mar 2025

Thrifted treasures: dresses, a book, fish napkin rings, and vintage jewelry.

Twice a week, after visiting my mother-in-law at the long term care facility where she now resides, we stop in at a nearby north Toronto thrift store. While my husband, being a man, checks out the electronics and science fiction, I browse … everything else.

I like thrifting: it’s a lot like foraging or beach-combing, and an hour spent browsing idly in a thrift store is an hour not spent worrying about the state of the world. After having death-cleaned both our parents’ homes, and having become increasingly mindful of our own propensity to accumulate clutter, we try to be careful about what we bring home. Our first stop at the thrift store is usually the donation bin, where we drop off things we no longer need. And a question we ask of any object before putting it in the cart is: “Does this add to our life?”

A good example is this Wood & Sons ‘Holly Cottage’ teapot, which made it into the cart about a month ago. It most definitely adds to our life even though it cost about $10 and I have not yet used it for tea. Wood & Sons 'Holly Cottage' teapot.

Is it not delightful?

Today’s treasures included two dresses, a set of brightly painted wooden fish napkin holders, two unusual pendants, and a copy of horticultural historian Judyth A. McLeod’s In a Unicorn’s Garden: Recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens (Murdoch, 2009).

I love these vintage (?) jade-chip pendants so much.

Vintage brass pendants (an owl and a fish).

I don’t even use napkin rings, but do, of course, have fish-themed dinnerware and will definitely deploy these as table decor.

Brightly painted wooden fish-shaped napkin rings.

I have donated many of my practical gardening books to the little library down the street, but love scholarly works on horticulture. This book, whose title draws on the mythos of unicorns in medieval art and fable, is copiously illustrated and looks like a cracker. It definitely adds to our life.

Image of a book: Judyth A. McLeod's In a Unicorn's Garden: Recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens (Murdoch, 2009).

As anyone can see, today’s thrifted finds unquestionably add to our life. If one ascribes, as I try to, to the advice often attributed to William Morris—to “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—these items exemplify the latter.

Not pictured, but useful: some electronic doo-dad my husband found among the old computer monitors and disused printers.

P.S. The green velvet chair in the first picture is also a thrift find (for $15!), from late last year.

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