Land, Love, Loving Land, and Letting go to Grow

A good few strides into 2025, it’s time to do real Blog Blog Blog. The backlog blog blockage is about to break folks, head for high land! My brain is full of drafts, and a window of left open browser tabs is calling to be used.

This one shall as usual be chock full of Non-GenAI flags of typos and visual metaphors. But it’s also to write of what’s been ongoing for a long stretch of time and not blogged.

It’s about land. And love. And life here. And loving it. But hey, that’s in the title. Get on with it, CogDog and stop weaseling through a three paragraph wandering.

Acknowledging Land

For those catching up, I was born and lived much of my life in that little obscure country with “United” (yes, those are Sarcastic Quotes) in its name. I remember one of my early conference travels to maybe Toronto the first time I heard a land acknowledgement. I was, as Mom used to explain, “blown away” (non sarcastic quotes) (is this too much meta explanation?).

Down there in America, the abbreviated history was something like brave Columbus nobly found an undiscovered land, boat loads of Pilgrims trekked here, met a few friendly inhabitants who shared local food, we turn that into an annual activity of consumerism, more boatloads of brave settlers came here to just set up shop, colonies were formed, Lewis & Clark went on the Manifes destinary tour aided by more friendly long time land inhabitants, zip zip zip we are a country led by a failed businessman / TV hack who was born a silver implement inserted to a body oriface.

Never in my memory of growing up on land on what is not suburban Baltimore did we even hear of or understand the people who were thriving there before the colonists. Almost 60 years after emerging into the world, I finally did my own digging as a response to an activity spun out for the OEGlobal 2023 conference. The places I knew as “my land” were the homes of the Susquehannock people (Conestoga in their lingo) and/or Piscataway (Conoy language).

Of course the regular recognition of history partly through land acknowledgement has finally spread widely through practice, I see it more regularly in colleagues in the US. I was inspired as well on a conference visit to Brisbane in November, how much more broadly this has become practice in Australia and New Zealand / Aotearoa. This was on a scale of notice even since my last visit in 2017, and earlier. And more than events, but ingrained in email footers, institutional web sites, and history references.

I have been urging my colleagues at OE Global to adopt a version for a globally distributed organization. Still working on that.

Yet there is much more to do than rattling of names. That’s the acknowledging part, but what I am keen on is land. Our relationship to it. How we care for it. How we sustain it, no more than that, what we do to enable it to be there for some future person to acknowledge, live, respect that land.

Yup, a love language. Speaking of that….

This Land, Now

My American chapter of life changed when I fell in love with Cori and she said yes. That’s its own story. Our first home was in a small village, but more or less a suburban style patch of land, but with its fence to delineate from the neighbors just a short hockey puck distance away. On of attractions was the enjoyment of natural land scapes, and we tore up much manicured no so green grass, planted native grass, trees, shrubs. We did about as much as we could alter in that patch.

Yet we both dreamed of a place bigger than a patch, yet something not so far away from Cori’s work as a teacher in Moose Jaw. We reached a point in late 2020 to be looking for an acreage, and again cutting to the point, found a 16 acre property with a beautifully restored 1900s home, bu best of all, had a surrounding swath of trees and shrubs. I am reconciling that we coordinated the sale of one house, the purchase of a new one, the move, in the first year of the pandemic.

For those only seeing photos of Saskatchewan or just watching it whiz by through the car windows.from the number 1 highway, you’d think it’s just all tree free farm fields or wafts of waving yellow grass. You do see far apart residences with maybe at best a strip of trees on sometimes a few sides, sometimes more. I thought of them as 2-dimensional forests, as often it was s single, maybe dual neatly lined row of pine or ash trees. They are “shelter-belts” to at least try to block the regular intense winds.

But the place we found had ones a bit thicker. In the front corner we spotted from the road as we first looked at it, were 2 old grand spreading poplars.

And better yet, it was even closer to town than our first home, Cori’s drive to school reduced from 45 minutes to 15 AND we had space. And places to tend.

Our name for it is Ursa, for the constellation that we see above in the very bright star-filled night sky, but also in the sense that this is our universe, not in an owned sense, but a place we felt was a whole.

Forests in Southern Saskatchewan?

This place indeed is a dry climate, not only the dry kind of heat I knew in Arizona but extreme dry cold. You gotta be in the game fully to be a tree here. Can there be forests?

Ironically, just across the highway from our first home and fully visible from the number 1 is a living example we came to explore, what we thought was from an old sign as an “Experimental Forest”

It truly was 3 dimensional, depth and width, and lush enough to leave the open prairie behind when you walked in. We found remnants of trees planted originally in rows, marked with ID signs but left alone, as some dude in a movie says, “Life finds a way”.

I only found shred of information online, about this being a project of a national Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) program to address the drought conditions spread in the 1930s. One can find blog posts (hey someone said that act was dead? 2021 yo!) of people who discovered it too, YouTube videos, geochaching guides.

At one time this land was tended to, but for a long time sense, is doing quite fine on this own.

This rather inspired Cori and I that we could as well, turn the land around our new home, in parts or whole, into a forest.

Trees!

Each year we have planted a lot of trees. We lost count. Maybe 10,000? We have benefitted greatly from a program from our provincial electric company, that uses energy for an electric plant to sustain the Shand Greenhouse. The program provides free tree saplings to environmental groups, towns, and rural folks like us. Free trees! We also have purchased more from TreeTime.ca as well as a few more mature trees from local nurseries.

Still, it’s a hard go. There’s surviving winter, getting water to them in the hot, dry summer, and the munching habits of deer and rabbit. But we have great success on many.

This is the things we do, but I want to talk about how we are helping the land thrive by not doing.

Letting Stuff Do Its Thing

The people we bought this place from where not the ones who restored the house and planted much of the shelter belts. They had, well, not cared for it. We found bags of trash, and litterings, still 5 years later, or shotgun shells and clay pigeon fragments.

When I spoke to the “dude” who lived here, he spoke of the 11 hours it took in the summer to mow the grass. They mowed it all, the “grass” was pretty much dry stubble, and in many places was cracked, semi-barren. We also saw many signs were they had trampled much in and near the tree belts with snowmobiles.

I am the sun of a man who loved cutting grass and a green lawn— in Maryland were abundant water falls from the sky. When he chose an email address, it had “Lawnman” in it.

There’s lawn grass, golf course stuff that is genetically groomed, quite different from lush, tall natural prairie grass. Our plan for the start was to let much of the fields grass grow on its own, keeping a small mowed patch in front of the house.

Long grass does so much for the environment. It keeps moisture in the ground, shades it, provides places for condensation to gather, and in the winter, accumulates snow drifts that in the spring melt back into the ground.

It allows wild flowers to grow and spread. I just looks prettier too.

The winter of 2023 brought in a lot, a lot, of snow. We were snowshoeing in our north shelter belt on drifts that were 15, 18 feet high. The spring melt spawned a miracle, a pond that has been full of water since.

When we moved here, this was a dry hole. This was previously a slough used to capture water in more wet climate times, dug by the first settlers here. They even built a small hill. But the dude who mowed everything cut this depression dry. It was decorated with a shooting target along with a carpet of spent shells.

Letting the grass come back, means again, more snow banking in winter. The willows on the right side of that photos are flourishing and spreading. We have muskrats making it home, the frogs croon all summer, plus ducks, herons, geese hang around.

The changes in a few years are astounding, but there is more.

The typical regional landscaping practice is building those one tree wide margins with a hybrid poplar, often Prairie Sky variety. They grow very fast (good), but are not long lived. We have many of these, that have died in place. Okay for a few birds to perch. But fortunately there are more natural poplars, cottonwoods, the kind that grow big and broad. And they spread on their own, suckering, rhizoming (that’s the metaphor!).

These trees were trying to go, but the lawn cutting dude was chopping them down (along with dogwoods). In a few years of not cutting grass, we have many trees growing on their own, some now over 12 feet high in 4 years.

Below is a photo on our west side, the mature poplar in the back, spawing numerous off shoots in the mid ground.

And adjacent to our new slough is a vigorous new resident, with growth likely aided by the ground effect of being next to a pond. This is maybe 3 years of growth, and not visible to the right, is a row of maybe 15 more starters we saw emerge last summer.

Again, by not cutting with gas powered machines, and just letting things grow on their own, some of our forest is naturally emerging from the land. BEEP BEEP metaphor alert, e.g. the “discovered” concept of rewilding the internet.

Another project is a front yard wild garden of rocks (several transferred from Arizona), native flowers, and yes cactus (many which we have “liberated” from a wild area. It again, is growth by starting, and letting go.

First Iterations

Both Cori and I love these projects we do together. For her, it was the kinds of adventures her Dad provided. He told me of how he would dig up wild chokecherries to grow in his yard.

It struct me of things I did as a kid. That suburban yard on Susquehannock land where my dad mowed the grass, had a good number of trees, and was adjacent to a few blocks of other homes that had been built in what was originally forest. A storm drain entered the side of our yard, providing a small human spawned creek overgrown with whatever grew there.

At some point I asked my parents if I could plant some stuff on the back edge of our property. They never told me what they though of this as a playing activity, but like our land I described, in many ways they both guided me but let me go. That edge of our yard had a few small planted trees or shrubs, separated by grass. I started in small patches, digging up the grass, adding dirt, and transplanting stuff I found growing in that wild creek part of the yard. I expanded a corner into a larger triangle patch that I also re-wilded. I started it, and stuff did fill in, sometimes just blew in on its own, but let it go. I don’ recall seeing it when they sold our home, but I am pretty sure if filled in quite nicely as a natural border area.

I continued this approach with the little house in Strawberry, again, a suburban style lot, maybe 1/3 of an acre. I would transplant stuff from the forest, move around things that grew on their own, introduced a few nursery plants. I saw maybe 3 times a ponderosa pine sapling get started on its own. I would merely border and toss in leaves and other debris as a mulch.

Land and Love

These earlier efforts at cultivating growth are just on the path of doing this a larger scale at Ursa (sometime Cori and I call it Ursa Acres, but just Ursa is special to us). There is a mixture of both doing some work to start or nurture, but much happens to the land if we stop trying to reshape it with machines.

Yup, that’s a metaphor.

Yet to me, this is the kind of care that feels important to honor the earth itself as well as people who made this their home before. This is our relationship to the land, they way we gently tend and let go, to grow, and be there in the future for something else. Cori has described it as the mind set of leaving a place better than how we found it.

On the long term scale of global temperatures, climate change, burning fuel enable generation of cartoon pictures, our impact might be small. While it may not always be original “native” plants, we grow what thrives here.

It’s action we can and do do. It’s love. It’s living.

If we are not blogging, Cori and I are likely out there helping the land grow. For those interested, I have a series of (sporadic) drone flights over and around Ursa.

Post Post Script

I’ve been recalling more points that should be added to this! The post never ends.

Last year I read a great little book A Year in the Woods by Torbjørn Ekelund and in September I blogged about why I was reading it so slowly. The November chapter opens with a quote from Dag O. Hessen author of (Natur: Hva Skal vi Med Den? or Nature: What do we want with it?) and Ekelund paraphrased Hessen later with this bit that resonates with this post (it is underline in red ink in my book)

Hessen provided good, fundamental reasons why we must take care of nature: that we are dependent on it, not only to give us food and other necessary raw material but also because it provides us with experiences.

A Year in the Woods by Torbjørn Ekelund p 215

Oi! I would have opened this post with that quote!

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Featured Image: Our grass as let go wild and the daily sunset show we get here- Over the Prairie Grass to the Horizon flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)