THE GRASSY DREAM
Colourful countermeasures for mid-winter
Suzanne had the idea. She lives a two hours north and a world away in a valley bracketed by the soft white Dolomite cliffs of the niagara escarpment and is probably chipping at frozen horse chunks and shovelling them out of the barn as I you read this. At 78, she has an almost Buddhist approach to the work of life on a big piece of property with gardens and hayfields and wild apple trees and brush to clear and a changing cast of equine social dynamics that I can never keep track of. In the little community she is part of, it’s not uncommon to get a printed wall-calendar of seasonal nature pictures from a friend. Year after year these calendars feature fall leaves for September, a rustic fence-post topped with snow in December, a yard full of bluebells for April and…well anyway you get the picture. It was on one of those deep icy snowy winter days a bit like today a few years back that Suzanne had her kind of genius and possibly bubblegum-fuelled, marketing idea. The last thing you need to see in February, she noted, is a picture of watery sun glinting on icicles. Visually (and viscerally) what we most crave in winter is a little memory of summer, whereas in the depths of a hot summer, you kind of want to look at a sea of cool white snow. And so her idea of the reversed calendar was born, and it’s an idea I can’t get out of my head this week. Because I am still waiting for this product to hit the market, and because I find that the time change makes watching the Australian open excruciating, and because I live in a winter-locked city in the northern hemisphere where I have been reduced to taking pictures of slush, I offer you, dear reader, the following reversed-season mood-board of summery-coloured images from my desktop. This colour therapy is mostly meadows and grasses which I love and which probably deserve a more practical newsletter about the chlorophyll greens you can get from stinging nettle and hemp oil and a kind of elaborate process with certain grasses I collect along the West Toronto Railpath. Stay Tuned. JL
If you made it to the bottom of this newsletter and are longing for summery colours in your life, you could check out (free) Botanical Colours on Making Green With Natural Dyes. Or get yourself (not free, but in support of an amazing cause) into a hoodie and keep on dreaming (also free). Next Week (I think), I will write about Distilling Colour based on this amazing new project.
Last evening I was working on a poem about Ukrainian folk remedies—nettle for arthritis, hemp oil for eczema, a poem full of green things in a season of no green—then I read your piece and saw that there's nettle and hemp oil on the way. I'm ready for it!