Shade magic is never entirely harmless

So I may have collected poisonous flowers from a mass of wildflowers on an unmarked grave under the hanging tree in the cemetery of an old Indian Mission Chapel with a long and violent history. And I may have accidentally brought home some of the grave soil that they came in when I was just trying to make sure they're happy in their new homes.

I am not a witch. I swear. I just realized afterwards that I probably would have been put to death by that same little church had I done this 150 years ago. Good gardening feels so much like witchcraft sometimes... Watching the seasons closely. Hearing the rain. Waiting for life to happen on its own. Coaxing it along when you can... or collecting Siberian Squill from the local cemetery to plant in your wildflower garden.

In the 1800s and early 1900s this church was used as the parish building for one of the most brutal residential schools on Vancouver Island. I don't think they would have been happy with me 'meddling' lol. I brought flowers from the tree they used to hang people from as a reminder of the genocide. I don't want people to think that we have always been here or that our history was as kind as our present. It's so peaceful there now. It would be easy to forget.

I wandered the graves lazily that early spring morning.  A friend of mine and I had gone there to smoke some weed and enjoy a quiet space.  She pointed to a tree that looked like it had cartoon eyes at the base of the trunk.  Huge, malicious, selfish eyes.  You can see the branch high above those eyes, stripped of any smaller growth or branches until it turns upward.  Somewhere easy to throw a rope over.  High enough to be seen from anywhere in the valley that looked up at the hill.  High enough that someone hung from it would be seen against a backdrop of only sky.

I came back two days later.  After the equinox and new moon had passed.  While I wanted those bulbs...shooting stars of microscopic blue completely covering a sward of short green... I wanted to make sure that their magic would be tempered and not come from a powerful moon or one of the great festivals.  So, at midday (to avoid magic associated with sunrise or the moon) I began to quietly dig.

The grave soil was dry and rich and crumbly.  It was the kind of thick layer of uncompressed worm castings that only come from maintained grass that no one walks on or compresses.  I had brought eighteen three inch pots and a tray.  This was in addition to my tiny transplant trowel and a bag of potting mix I decided to throw into the truck box at the last minute.

I had gotten about six scilla siberica shoots carefully uprooted and moved with bits of their soil into the bottoms of my small pots and was standing up to look for the next patch of specimens. I didn't want to leave a bare spot from collecting, I wanted it to look as though I had never been there and was taking my specimens very carefully when a man crossed the street and entered through the arbor at the far side of the graveyard... making a beeline for me.

We exchanged business cards and when he found out that I was a gardener taking specimens he began to tell me about the Garry Oak ecosystem that flourishes there.  An ecosystem so unlike anything else in Canada and yet so familiar to the British settlers who moved here.  An ecosystem that doesn't erase the traces of what happened as quickly as the forests, mines, and wetlands do.

By choosing to look after those flowers and tell the story of that little church on the hill I wanted to find some magic.  I did.  I found context.  I found how to look our colonial past in the eye and stare it down. How to say, "I have advantages because of what my people did to the community here". How to look out over the valley and not forget that before the first ships brought smallpox the Comox and Tsolem people lived and used and cared for this land just like I do. I found the magic of remembering and not forgetting the people who were here for centuries and have a far longer and deeper connection to this land than any one gardener.

I stared at my ugly history.  And I wept.  And I found some peace with it.  Turns out that there was a more powerful magic there than I was expecting to find.

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William Batchelor
Oyster River
23 March 2018