How, by rewilding, might we invite more wonder into our gardens? Our gardens are shared spaces, communities of beings. Who visits? Who doesn't? Why? What moments invite enchantment and wonder? This winter, start your rewilding journey by discovering the stories of the beings with whom you share your garden. We'll explore how rewilding might change who we become as gardeners.

1. Rewilding
re-enchanting our gardens
and our cities

2. I’m an assemblage of beings
bacteria
water
minerals
soil
fungi
forest
sun
plants
entangled in the more-than-human world

3. A settler whose Ukrainian ancestors immigrated to Alberta
in the early 20th century

4. I dwell in a suburb in traditional Anishinaabe &
Haudenosaunee territory

5. A place where the land—like the people—was colonized

6. When we took up residence, my husband, trained in
Western science, lobbied for a “normal” front yard

7. The colonized “normal” that carpets our cities with asphalt,
grass and non-native foundation plantings

8. I rebelled against a colonized “normal” (the influence of my
Baba Yaga ancestors?)

9. And began my rewilding journey into a place-centred life

10. Seeking wisdom from poets (human & more-than-human)
to ferment my assumptions

11. Now imagine the inner:
soul, intelligence, the secret worlds!
And don't think the garden loses its
ecstasy in winter. It's quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.
~Rumi

12. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least
recognized need of the human soul.
~Simone Weil

13. Like Freya Mathews, starting just where I was
Little did I expect that this attempt to re-enchant my neighbourhood would result in the
re-enchantment of my own life… as if a long-lost elixir were bubbling back up from archaic
springs, and bringing my arrested existence to life.
~Freya Matthews

14. This winter, as spirit moon rises, I invite you to entangle your
own riotous roots in a journey of place-centred enchantment

15. For me, this place-centred rewilding journey is entangled with the question:
What do forests have to
teach us?

16. Becoming
apprentice
Becoming
rooted
Becoming
walnut

17. What does it mean to
understand walnutiness*?
Becoming
walnut

18. How does this being see
themselves?
Walnut this being is
How do I see this thing?
It’s a walnut

19. This shift—from seeing things to beings—oddly enough
began with a story of an apple

20. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say
“What is it?” And we answer
“Dopwen yewee. Table it is.”
But of apple, we must say
“Who is that being?”
and reply “Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is.”
To speak of those possessed with
life and spirit we must say yawe.
~Robin Wall Kimmerer

21. Meet the forest being with whom I share my land,
walnut hickory forest this being is

22. A forest gifted to this land by squirrels, much loved by
walnut & hickory elder for their faulty memories
“Bird memories are... a tree's dream of the future.” ~David Haskell

23. Who is walnut? What is walnutiness?

24. characteristics
behaviours
needs
How does this being see itself & its
situation?
gifts

25. characteristics
behaviours
needs
How does this being see itself & its
situation?
gifts

26. characteristics
behaviours
needs
How does this being see themselves
& their situation?
gifts

27. ?what’s missing?
characteristics
behaviours
needs
gifts

28. Next time you walk through a forest, look down. A city lies under your feet. If you were
somehow to descend into the earth, you would find yourself surrounded by the city’s
architecture of webs and filaments.
~Anna Tsing, Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom

29. characteristics
behaviours
needs
How does this being see themselves
& their situation?
gifts relations

30. characteristics
behaviours
needs
How does this being see themselves
& their situation?
gifts relations
animating spirit
(breath)

31. Breath means community, means sharing, means letting
yourself be imagined by others: by humans, by non-human
others, by non-animate others, as stone, and sand, and air.
~Andreas Weber, the commonwealth of breath

32. characteristics
behaviours
needs
gifts relations
language
animating spirit
(breath)
How does this being see themselves &
their situation?

33. Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come across the marks of deer in the snow.
Language, but no words.
~Tomas Tranströmer, poet

34. ?
[A plant being] is always contributing to the environment that supports
[their] own life and the life of other [beings].
~Craig Holdredge, Thinking Like a Plant

35. Black Walnut Guild

36. Killer trees or misunderstood beings yearning for us to learn
their language?

37. behaviours
How does this being see themselves
& their situation?

38. Does anyone know the plant being to whom these
leaves belong?

39. Meet field buttercup (Ranunculus acris) in motion

40. How we see plant beings transforms as we deepen our
relationships—learning plantiness, plant
language—through time

41. Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver

43. Invitations: How does this place feel?

44. When you meet a plant being, Robin Wall Kimmerer
suggests some questions you might ask:
What is this being telling me? What are ways I can listen?
Who are you?
Why are you here?
What have you brought us? Let’s get to know you and what you are bringing.
What do you need?
What are your relationships? Who is your family?
How do you fit in?
Who do you dream of becoming?

45. What does it mean for
forest to know me?
Becoming
apprentice

46. cultivate relations with forest
becoming apprentice
ID forest
being a master gardener

47. Meet the forest being I’m apprenticing with

48. This question in my heart “Humans can speak to forests.
And forests can speak back...What does it mean to speak?
What does it mean to listen?”
~Eduardo Kohn

49. What is this tree—perhaps dreaming of becoming a forest
elder—saying?

50. Wolf trees, too wild & untidy for plantation forests, were
once disparaged as “forest ulcers” to be eradicated

51. Wolf tree—mother, grandmother, elder—joyously shares her
story with those willing to learn her language
Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but what they do. ~Robin Wall Kimmerer

52. To learn the language of forest, I’m adopting the mindset of
allokataplixis
“the gift, usually unacknowledged, the traveller offers to the places they visit”
~Liam Heneghan, Ecologist

53. From the Greek allo meaning ‘other’ & katapliktiko meaning
‘wonder’, it’s the mindset of a traveller paying attention

54. Paying attention to the language of bark, touching oak to
feel myself touched by oak
To touch the coarse skin of an oak tree with one’s fingers is also, at the same moment, to experience
one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. Similarly, to gaze out at a forested hillside is
also to feel one’s own visibility, and to feel oneself exposed to that hillside - to feel oneself seen by
those trees. ~Monica Gagliano, evolutionary ecologist
Monica Gagliano

55. Learning to see formerly mundane or hidden layers of beauty
and function opens up a world of detail and nuance that allow
what is local to become spectacular, bringing us closer to home.
~Michael Wojtech, Bark

56. Instead of a blur of brown and gray trunks, I now see individual
trees with species names and a host of ecological relationships.
~Michael Wojtech, Bark

57. Paying attention to the ordinary, asking “what does robin have
to teach me?” rather than allowing familiarity “it’s just a robin”
to dim enchantment

58. Warping the doors of perception by personifying plant
persons, rock persons, animal persons...

59. Turkey persons!
We need to allow ourselves to be open to the subjective agency at the heart of every ‘thing’ in the
world so that we can speak and act appropriately in their presence and on their behalf… allowing a
strange kind of intimacy to develop in which the urge to control is replaced by a quickening awe at the
astonishing intelligence that lies at the heart of all things… This way of speaking recognises that for our
sensing, feeling and intuition the whole of nature is a vast encompassing being, whereas for our
thinking it is also a complex, interconnected system.
~Stephan Harding, Animate Earth

60. ...language [is] a mirror for
seeing the animacy of the
world, the life that pulses
through all things… This is the
language I hear in the
woods; this is the language
that lets us speak of what
wells up all around us...
This is the grammar of
animacy.
~Robin Wall Kimmerer

61. Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it’s not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.
~Mary Oliver

62. What if adaptation is intelligence and dialogue? Creative
more-than-human agency?

63. We share the same trembling for our existence, its future, its
unfolding, its flourishing. These are feelings that any
autonomous living creature experiences.
~Andreas Weber

64. Seeing their agency, their trembling for existence, not
frozen in the moment but through time… meeting downy,
meeting bear, meeting bay

65. ‘meeting the bear’... included the time before we arrived, as well as the
time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a
sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund ‘bearing’.
~Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

66. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped
between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a
bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder
that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores,
conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do
otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall
~Robin Wall Kimmerer

67. Exploring place-based meanings of time
“forgetting about the clock, the days and months, but think about organizing yourself
through environmental changes and longer term trends.”
~Kyle Powys Whyte, Indigenous scientist & climate change expert

68. Some fly fishers, hunters and birders speak this language
“Chittering swallows signal their discovery of a hatch of river mayflies”

69. In these sounds we learn that there are not just four seasons, but dozens
or hundreds. Bird sounds reveal the polyrhythms of a living Earth.
~David Haskell, The Voices of Birds

70. Wake of turkey vultures circles
Cathartes aura means purifier and air

71. When frost comes, bumblebees hibernate

72. In the 72 microseasons of Japan there is a slower, almost imperceptible
slide into each next stage. Felt as well as visualized:
Thunder ceases
Insects hole up underground
Wild geese return
Crickets chirp around the door
Light rains sometimes fall
Maple leaves and ivy turn yellow

73. Bumblebees hibernate, buds swell, swallows return,
toothwort emerges...
Part of our responsibility… is to carefully give our attention to the changes, especially the
most subtle.
~Val Plumwood

74. As I cultivate the art of relationship, I am beginning to gift
names to some of the forest beings, places & stories

75. Chicken fat pines

76. Gifting our attention & accepting the gifts offered in return
invites us into the enchantment of multi-species kinship

77. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human
gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the
sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the
rain ecstatic with what is offered.
~Linda Hogan, Dwellings

78. It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak
~Mary Oliver, Praying

79. Invitations

80. How might I support
multispecies resurgence?
Becoming
rooted

81. seeding forests as refugia
Helping the land remember*
earth-centric
Planting trees for climate
Healing the land
Human-centric

82. Meaningful sustainability requires multispecies resurgence, that
is, the remaking of livable landscapes through the actions of
many organisms.
~Anna Tsing, Anthropologist

83. I now see my work as supporting multispecies resurgence, sending
cracks through my human-centric worldview

84. Exploring an Earth-centric worldview
“learning from intelligences other than our own” ~Robin Wall Kimmerer

85. In asking how I might support multispecies resurgence,
tiny forests captured my imagination
“it’s time to restore our forest heritage, not plant more lonely trees” ~ Peter Wohlleben

86. Instead of our human-centric obsession with planting trees

87. I seek an Earth-centric approach, forming community with
tiny forests

88. Might tiny forests—kinship clusters—become mother
patches? Keepers of wisdom, memory, story?

89. Enchanting our cities with the language, the stories, the
animacy of the more-than-human world

90. Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world
is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As
we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
~Robin Wall Kimmerer
we help the land
remember
(rewild the land)
the land helps us
remember
(rewild ourselves)

91. Meet Lakeside, with whom I’m conspiring to plant a tiny
forest—rewilding the land, rewilding myself, reinhabiting
place

92. To engage with the larger life of things, to encounter the intelligence in the world, and to
be borne along on the current of its unfolding, is to experience re-enchantment… To
belong to the world is to engage with it concretely,,, and we can only engage with the
world concretely through particular places. Truly to reinhabit places then is to re-enter
the stream of a larger life, to experience re-enchantment.
~Freya Matthews, environmental philosopher

93. To invest a place with our life is, as Aboriginal people say, to
‘sing it up’, to awaken its own life and capacity for
recognition: the place claims us, as we claim it.
~Freya Matthews

94. Invitations

95. When you meet a place, some questions you might ask:
What is this place telling me?
What are ways I can listen?
Who did this land used to be?
Who is this land now?
Who does this land dream of becoming?
How is land re-becoming herself?

96. The big shift
...in horticulture over the next decade is a shift from thinking about plants as individual
objects to thinking about plants as social networks—that is, communities of compatible
species interwoven in dense mosaics.
~Thomas Rainer

97. ?

98. The big shift
… in horticulture over the next decade is a shift from thinking about plants as things to
thinking about plants as persons—as kin—manifesting intelligence and agency in
multispecies entanglements

99. We’ve been invited by the birds, the trees, the forests, the more-than-human
world... “Let’s answer their invitation, stepping outside to give them the simple
gift of our attention. Listen. Wonder. Belong.”
~David G. Haskell

100. Listen: Notice the sacredness of where you are. The mysteriousness of where
you are. This is a different notion of indigeneity altogether... a living breathing
vocation of noticing the enchantment that is around us, in us, with us, wherever
we are.
~Bayo Akomolafe

101. This is a time for straying, for losing one’s way, for asking new questions. A sacred
activism. A slowing down that knows enchantment is not in short supply.
~Bayo Akomolafe

102. Close your eyes. Allow the earth and its spirit to
seep into you. You are safe and you belong.
~Noel de Sa, mentor and guide, national coordinator for Kids for Tigers
you are safe
you belong
you are wild
You breath the Earth and the Earth breaths you.
Feel the touch of the Earth.
Feel the enchantment around you, in you, with you.
Feel the roots down there riotous
Grow wild. Garden as if you were writing poetry,
a song, a love letter to the more-than-human world.
Let’s rise up, together. Rooted, like trees.*

103. joyce_hostyn@yahoo.com
twitter: @joyce_hostyn
medium: @joyce_hostyn
rewildmycity.com
rideau1000islandsmastergardeners.com
lakesidecommunitygarden.org
We could all use a little more slavic witch in our lives.
~Taisia Kitaiskaia