Stay Gold

Of fall leaves and wild grapes

Mountain Grape by Hisui Sugiura (1876-1965), included in Hisui Hyakkafu (Album of One Hundred Flowers by Hisui) published in 1920-22

Last weekend I drove up to my favourite spot for collecting wild grapes. Deep in the valley and up the hill a bit there’s a dead-end gravel road that ends in the property that you used to be able to ski over to in the winter where the French Chef made 12-course dinners, and then you would ski home buzzing with red wine and fine and rare sauces. On the other side, it’s all grassy fields down to the secret spot in the woods beside the river where the chef collected wild watercress. When you turn onto the road in the fall, you enter a kind of portal into the essence of fall. And it’s pure gold. A tunnel of gold light all soft-dazzling its way down through the golden trees on either side. And then halfway up the road, the place that we did not buy but dreamed about buying. The old yellow brick house with the overgrown apple orchard and Queen Anne’s lace woven thorn bushes and flowers all the way up the hill and over a little stream the old limestone foundation of an old barn all covered in years of winding grape vines. It’s basically a Russian fairy tale over there, and on both side of the road, and along the fences are the most intensely purple wild fox grapes which have always been my secret source for organic wild grape ink every fall.

This fall I brought the kids and ziplock bags and we were a little late because the leaves where more bronze than gold, but anyway that should make the grapes all the more ripe and juicy, and really a few cold nights brings out the sugar in the fruit which acts as its own binder for ink making. But it wasn’t just that we’d missed the best fall colour— the grapes were also missing. The leaves and vines looked healthy but there were no grapes. Wild grapes need to be pollinated and have a delicate little flower that just seems to come out for a few days and there were some late frosts up north of the city this year and sometimes it’s just a bad year for grapes.

Today went to my second favourite spot for wild grapes. The Dundas Overpass. The Dundas overpass is very different scene from the one up north, the grape vines there act as a kind of bower to a kind of way station of couch cushions, plastic bags, stray socks, electronics innards, and the occasional sleeping bag. The grapes there, I feel, pick up the metals and toxins from the traintracks and human ruins, and combine these with their natural pigments to make a shockingly stable purple ink, that if not exactly non-toxic, does work great with a brush or dip pen. The Dundas Overpass grapes were also nowhere to be seen. So I continued along to the West End Toronto Railpath where there are almost always a tangle of wild grapes near the Henderson Brewery Parking lot. The pickings again were slim and it was starting to rain and I was starting to feel like maybe it’s just a really bad year for wild grapes.

Letting go of the idea of foraging grapes I started to do what I really like doing which is to wander and notice. Purposeless and attuned and looking a little closer at the wild grape leaves, I started to notice the way they were turning. Their amazing lizard-like skin. How different each leaf is in its dying. The leaves in Toronto aren’t yet in their full glory but their colour made me think of Kyo Maclear. Kyo is a writer, editor, designer, illustrator, investigator, forager and interviews that I was in a Big Businessy Meeting with this week and who maybe I will be working with on a Big Secret Project if all goes well. Kyo reminded me of something I had told her years ago. “Sometimes” (now I am quoting her quoting me) “nature is already doing its best colour.” Put another way, a flower or a leaf is itself a kind of ink making machine finding a way to distill and intensify and clarify its own pigments and soil fed chemistry into a form of communication—a form of beauty that is readable by anyone or anything open to the message. And so I thought instead of talking about wild grapes we could just look at the first colourful fall leaves of downtown Toronto together.

I don’t really understand the combination of light, temperature, anthocyanin pigments and soil PH that sets the colouring of leaves in motion. I don’t know why the sumac and smoke bush make such insane 1970s abstract wall hanging patterns or why the little yellow leaves of the black locust are the first to fill the air. I don’t know why I love the leathery brown of oak leaves so much. But I know that noticing fall leaves should not be just kids and that in their one perfect moment that each leaf doing a thing that can be read like ink on paper. Also there is still one more spot I haven’t checked for wild grape. So stay tuned for next week. And please do share. I am trying to build a colour revolution one reader at a time. —Jason