Hopewell Garden Audio Story - Part Five

In this final episode of the Hopewell Garden Audio Story, Katie, Rebecca and Christine talk together about climate action, hope, the value in all of us working communally, and how much we loved working on this project together. If you’re new to the project, this short listen is a fantastic summary of what we’ve done, and an invitation to listen backwards.

Follow our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/describedtoronto

The Hopewell Garden Audio Story is created by Christine Malec, Rebecca Singh and Katherine Sanders. They are a trio of artists who came together for the purpose of creating audio experiences of the natural world from a Blind-led perspective.

The Hopewell Garden Audio Story is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Foundation.

Logo Image Description: A square with large yellow text that reads, "Described Toronto" and below it "PODCAST" in all capital letters, within a yellow rectangle. The title is layered on top of a photo of four diverse women standing side by side outdoors in front of a garden in a park. The woman at centre who is white speaks into a mic. She has a white cane strapped to her shoulder bag.

Transcript

Welcome to the last episode of the described Toronto Hopewell Garden audio story. This has been a limited series podcast in which we've tried to tell the story of one garden through the voices of the gardeners, through a gardening expert, an expert in pollination and through audio description. And it's been such a lovely, lovely way to spend our time. And so the three of us are here, Rebecca Singh and Katie, Katie Sanders. And we're going to just sort of wrap up and talk about our own experiences of what it's been like to work on this project because for me personally, it's been so beautiful and we came together as a collective with the idea, this mutual idea that we all sort of felt independently of wanting to bring awareness of catastrophic climate change into our own work and just feeling the urgency of that. And so I wanted to start myself just by expanding on that a little bit because I feel that we talk in the media, we get a lot of facts and figures and projections and ideas and some hope and some despair.

And one thing that I don't hear as much of as I would expect is the idea of grief and the emotional aspects of what's happening to the world, to the climate and what will happen. And it's not that I want to make art that's full of grief, but I bring that awareness, that feeling of anxiety and a genuine just pure grief to what's going on. And so grief has all its stages. And I just been thinking about how in my work as a storyteller and a podcaster and an arts creator, how can I talk about that? And this garden story has, it's not about grief, it absolutely is not. It's about hope. That's what it's really about. But that's kind of been behind my sense of why I want to bring this awareness into my work as a creator.

I think that's really important, Chris, to talk about, because when we are able to, I feel like a storyteller, and when I am able to tell stories in one way or another, it gives me a sense of possibility and transformation. And I, in some ways, well, I feel like that's what we have to do as the people living the planet. We have to change and we have to transform our actions, and I want to transform the result. I want to transform the crisis. And so I didn't necessarily start on this journey knowing what the objective was other than telling a story. But now I see that I actually, inside of the storytelling is also the objective of causing a transformation or meditating on transformation through the telling of the story as well.

And I think the grief and the despair is something I struggle with all the time, which is why I sort of responded to this idea of it's action. It's transforming, taking this grief or despair and turning it into action is what generates hope. And we have to all live on this planet, live our lives with the knowledge of what's happening. And I agree that I think it's almost the only problem I feel like we should all be working on right now is because our ability to survive on this planet is at stake. But in the meantime, we can enjoy the wonderful things that we have been given on this planet and these gardeners are that, and watching them come together and build something out of nothing, and the social interaction that it's all brought about, that was maybe an unintended consequence. That's the hope. That's where I find the hope. And it's been wonderful working with these people and on them on the project.

I have felt that way too. And I had the opportunity to speak with a very smart 17-year-old recently, and we were talking about this and I said, what I want to bring to stories about catastrophic climate change are the concepts of resilience and resourcefulness. And right away without a pause, she said, and community. And I was taken aback because it's so obvious, but it wasn't on my bingo card of things we need bizarrely. It was not of things we are going to need in the future. And so I'm with you, Katie, that that's been one of the most surprising things for me is that when I went to the garden and spoke with the gardeners, I came with sort of a set of questions about the garden. And pretty much every question I asked at some point led to, and we all gathered to do this, or there'd be an anecdote about the people gathering in the garden.

And it led me down the path of questioning more about that because that's what really got me. We can talk about tomatoes and eggplants and super interesting and pollinators are incredibly important, but hearing about the public interactions that happened too. So the interactions between the gardeners and the genuine true deep friendships. And if you listen to the previous episodes in the interviews, you can hear everyone says that the depth of friendships that have come about through gardening together is surprising even to them. But then there's this other element that the park is very public, it's on residential streets and there's people walking by and there's all these beautiful rubbing my eyes, beautiful anecdotes of kids and old people and new Canadians and all sorts of different types of people walking by. And it's this universal thing that everyone's got to eat everyone likes. Most people like to look at stuff growing and lots of people have experience with it. And so the ways in which just planting a garden and working and it brings people together have been something that I've really taken away from this project.

Yeah, I thought it was really interesting too also. So we did two events where we brought folks to the garden and just kind of, I guess transformed the space in terms of the pollinator talk that Lorraine gave and then the described walk. So also bringing new folks to the space I think was interesting for me. And at the same time as hearing all of these stories before those events happened, I don't know, I was thinking, this is a bit of a tangent, but I was just thinking the other day about land acknowledgements and I was thinking about land acknowledgements, and I was thinking about something that I always used to do around this holiday Thanksgiving, which was to try and think about all of the foods that I was cooking and where they came from and try and just acknowledge the work of the farmers and just the labor and what it means to be able to eat and get sustenance from the land.

And I was thinking of that process that for me was kind of very intentional on a particular day. I dunno if I learned that in elementary school or whatever, but there was this whole farm to table process or even soil to table thing. And I was just thinking about how maybe because land acknowledgements are more common, well, they're common now, this practice of thinking things through from soil to plate, and there's all these people along the way, like farmers and people driving it to the store or bringing it to you or baking you something or what have you. So to me, that of nourishment and sustenance has more of a, I don't know, there's just a bigger community I think in terms of, I feel like there's more interconnectedness. And this project has helped me in some ways articulate these thoughts in terms of being able to really put a pin on it. We are all connected to each other even if we have no idea that we are.

It struck me how when you were both talking, I was thinking about how the gardeners, they seemed kind of a little taken aback by our interest at first we're just a bunch of people that got together and built a garden. So every time when we brought people to see this garden and talked about it and asked them questions about it, it's like they began to see the importance of it more than they already, they were aware of it, but I think they were kind of flattered that other people were interested and that we thought this was worthy of wide attention. And then the people showed up to these events and were so appreciative, and it was such a different kind of arts in the parks project that really focused on the land of the park and not just doing some art in a park, which is fine, which is great. But this was actually using the land and the natural elements of the park as the jumping off point for the storytelling, which is tied in with land acknowledgement and what that is about. I think

I love that we brought in Lorraine Johnson as an expert because for a few reasons, selfishly because I learned so much stuff from her. She's a lovely speaker. She's in one of the previous episodes, so check it out if you haven't. But there's a few things that she said that really stuck with me. One of them was just purely educational that I had never considered, which is every time I hear that, oh, say on the top of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, there's beehives, I'm like, awesome win. That's a feel good story. That's so great. But actually the truth is that too many honeybees are taking nutrition away from the native bees who are trying to pollinate the native species. And so it's never as simple as we think it is. And the second thing that stuck with me is what Lorraine had to say about what we can do and how planting one little potted black-eyed Susan on your balcony can be transformative.

And because you might feed a few pollinators from it, but your neighbor might see it and go, oh, pollinators. Oh, how interesting. Or you tell your friend. And so Lorraine's sort of take home message was just talk, talking is climate action because the more we talk about it, the more it's in people's consciousness and the more it becomes something that maybe you can act on, it's sort of talking about it normalizes that it's a big, huge overwhelming, maybe as Katie said, the only issue we should be thinking about. And so just the act of talking is climate action. And I really liked hearing that,

And it's something we can all do. And I love that moment when our young guest Rie asked the question about what to do with the pot on the balcony, because yes, it's also something kids can do and it's something we can do together. That's the other thing that I think is that I think that I became interested in actually actualizing climate action in my work through that question of like, well, what can I do the platforms that I have? And that's what brought together this community of the three of us actually as well. So it's a wonderful message, and I don't know if that helps with the grief, but I hope a little, I think we should celebrate. I think that we should also celebrate the things that are actions that are happening.

Yeah, I mean, I suggested Lorraine for that talk and because I had used her books as a jumping off point to begin my native garden journey, and I've found so much joy in it. I can't even tell you the excitement that I have in March and April knowing that things that I planted last year are going to start emerging. And there's going to be flowers where there was just lawn before. It's so exciting. And my mom was a gardener and I grew up watching her and was never, I liked it. I appreciated her appreciation, and I was just sort of, yeah, okay, I'm not really interested right now, but boy, you hit your forties and gardening is the most interesting thing in the world to me right now. So it was really great to have an opportunity to hear from Lorraine and to see other people experiencing native pollinators and getting excited by that and the flowers and all of it is just so, it's just so lovely.

I think I went through this little transformation too about golden rod because golden rod is kind of everywhere, and I went through the transformation of understanding that it's not bad and that it was just sort of misclassified and that it was sort of an urban myth that golden rod was bad. And then being like, okay, no, golden rod's great. And to actually sort of cultivating golden rod on my little balcony, which I appreciated. It was a late bloomer. I like the yellow flowers that come out after everything else is sort of winding down. But this year, through this experience now, I celebrate golden rod just for the extra. I'm like, it's a pollinator. It's cool. It turns from yellow to white later, and it's so robust and it has so many flowers on it that so many bees can visit at a time when all the other flowers are slowly fading away. So yeah, the golden rod, golden rod is now up there with my favorite flowers.

I love this idea of a changing aesthetic, and it's something that Lorraine spoke about a little bit too, which is that in the past we sort of had this manicured green lawn and really cultivated garden that was probably full of imported species, and it has its own beauty for sure, but the idea of what's beautiful and how we can change that, and I was actually speaking with my sister about this because I was telling her about this project and she said, oh, well, you wouldn't believe it. We've been completely rewilding our property out near London. They have some farm property, and just one little example she had was, well, you put little paths through it like they do in Hopewell, and just by the fear, mere fact of putting a little path in, you've already established this isn't a neglected piece of land. It's something people care about.

And so if it doesn't look the way your trained eye expects a cultivated garden to look, it's obviously still a cultivated garden to some extent. And so, especially as a blind person, that aesthetic piece is a little mysterious. I gardened a lot in my life and I know how beautiful dahlias are, and I liked it when my different non-native species flowered and bloomed. I was very excited by that, but it's not a thing that came naturally to me to think, oh, but if it's this or that species, it's a weed. And so the concept of weed is a really interesting one to help deconstruct that idea of aesthetics. And so that's one element that I have found intriguing about this project is what makes a garden beautiful. And if you're trying to work with someone who doesn't share yet, share the ethos of let's plant native species, how can you speak with them or communicate with them or present something in a way that could shift their idea of what makes botanical stuff beautiful

On that subject of beauty, I did want to offer another thought about, one of the surprises for me with this project was we haven't really talked much about the guided walk that we just did in September where a group of people who were blind and low vision got to experience the garden and the park through this guided walk and witnessing this was so fascinating to me and I was struck by how interested some folks were in things that I would consider sort of mundane and maybe even ugly because I experience it with my eyes and I take it for granted. I just see it every day. But to be told something is there when you're not aware of it kind of automatically makes it more interesting, I guess. And it was just interesting to see that, to witness that in action that, oh, this hydro pole that I would've thought is ugly up. The landscape here is interesting. It has a plaque on it, it has graffiti on it. What is that about? It was just made me look at things differently.

And I loved, loved, loved that aspect of the three of us working together, that because we started out with this idea, let's try to make this project as inclusive as we can. That was sort of baked into what we chose to do and how we chose to do it. So as a creator and someone working, it was holding my hand over my heart. There's a genuine delight to work with both of you, partly because I'm used to working alone. So collaborating has been really a great experience for me and learning how to be a better collaborator has been good. But also just that we all started out with this idea of inclusion and, and part of the work, if something wasn't working for me, you guys would be just like, oh, alright, well, let's try it a different way. Or we had a SL videos and just the ethos and the approach that we had to the work was really beautiful to me. I really appreciated that as we worked. And so I hope we get to do a lot more of that kind of

Work. Oh yeah, me too. Absolutely. There's nothing more interesting, I think, than the ways you can springboard off ideas when it's a diverse group of people coming together to tell stories. So yeah, I would be very down for more storytelling with you guys.

Me too.

Count me in described Toronto Collective. We're a thing now. We're a thing now described. Toronto is a collective of storytellers, including Audio Describer, Rebecca Singh, event producer Katherine Sanders and myself, accessibility consultant Christine Malik. We're grateful to the folk at the Hopewell Community Garden for their participation in making this project come together. The Hopewell Garden Audio Project is an Arts in the Park initiative. We're grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council.