TRAVERSE CITY — A presentation on indigenous farming techniques brought a packed audience to The Botanic Gardens at Historic Barns Park.
Staff there have been able to cultivate plants that have not been harvested in more than a century. They gave 9 and 10 News more details on how they are healing the soil, and some historical wrongs.
When Anishinaabe activist Tara John started working on the grounds of the former state hospital, she found out members of her own team had a deep connection to the site
“A mentor with me…her grandmother was in an asylum over here because they had diagnosed her as psychotic,” John said. “At that point, because she said that she talked to the plants.”
But now, staff at the botanic gardens on the property, like executive director Matthew Ross, are listening to what these indigenous gardeners have to say.
“We’ve learned so much,” Ross said. “I often say that working with Tara and Joanne has been one of the great professional accolades of my career. Traditional knowledge and Western science is a really cool combination of worlds. I think there’s a lot more parallels that we share that are exciting to discover.”
Science is starting to confirm medicinal uses for common herbs in our area that have been used for centuries, like sweetgrass, St. John’s wort, maple and silver cypress.
Traditional fertilizers, like fish poop, are also showing results that are even better than off-the-shelf options.
“There is a lot more than just Western science when it’s distilled away from the anecdotal evidence and the living within its relation,” John said.
The garden is also trying to bring back native plants. Staff there were among the first to harvest certain crops in over 100 years.
“That’s probably one of the greatest stories of this early phase of our garden,” Ross said. “It was the fact that Alvin, a community member here in Traverse City, had gifted us the cushion of rustica, which is the sacred tobacco. It’s a lime green plant, a really cool plant. And now, it’s been brought back here to our garden. It means a lot.”
It also meant a lot to the Anishinaabe plant whisperers on the team.
They feel seeds choose where they will grow, and these roots took hold in a place where science like this was once considered crazy.
“For her to be able to, with her own hands, heal a generational line that was harmed on these grounds, to have that healing on these grounds is powerful,” John said.
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