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The Sacred Gardener
The Sacred Gardener
Golden Lake, Ontario
 
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The Mythic Life Podcast

The Mythic Life Podcast

By Steven Martyn July 5, 2019 January 13, 2020

In this episode, Dr Sharon Blackie speaks with Steven Martyn: an artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, visionary.

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Echinacea, Snake Root and Snake Oil Recently I st Echinacea, Snake Root and Snake Oil Recently I started thinking about ‘snake oil’ and I knew even before I started looking I’d found gold. This term is seldom used these days but was still in common use when I was growing up. “Snake oil” basically means something is fake. My Grandmother, who was born in 1900, used it with regularity. She grew up with ’snake oil’ as the name of an actual product, a liniment, and lived through the takeover of naturally based medicines by pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry was born in the late 1800s and grew up in the early twentieth century. In the initial stage of this boom, many medicinal products were in fact just traditional medicines, such as herbs, that had been processed and packaged up into pills or liniments. So I wasn’t surprised to find snake oil is in fact a traditional North American and Chinese remedy. As the doctrine of signatures might suggest, rattlesnake works very well for poisoning, inflammation and arthritis. It was also reputed to be able to turn around an ornery ‘rattlesnake disposition.’ In the 1880s the first patent on a herbal snake oil was registered by a Dr. Meyer. It contained Echinacea, known then as ‘snake root’ and was sold as panacea; a cure-all. Having harvested bulk herbs to make commercial products for thirty years or so, it’s easy for me to see that as the product’s reputation and sales grew it would be difficult to keep up with the harvesting of these special plants. In the case of Echinacea not only is harvesting seasonally dependent, but only the older roots are traditionally harvested for medicine. In a flood of interest and income it seems inevitable that less scrupulous folk would generate look-alike products of lesser quality. There were no quality controls and so it’s likely in the fervor people would even sell just the mineral oil itself or the oil infused with more available but less effective herbs. Thus, “snake oil” came to have its modern meaning and connotation. https://thesacredgardener.ca/echinacea-snake-root-and-snake-oil/ #snakeoil #echinacea #echinaceaangustifolia #makingmedicine #herbalmedicine
New Year's Meditation One of the gifts that spen New Year's Meditation One of the gifts that spending time with people in their last days can bring to us is perspective on possessions. So, I’ve been meditating on the nature of ‘possession’. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve done this or likely the last, because this tree, from which so many forms of colonization grow, keeps bearing fruit of insight for me. On the one hand I can justify feelings of possession and attachment by saying they are an evolutionary necessity. That in order to form pair bonds to raise children and form stable communities we must feel a degree of possession. But in another way, in the moment when I watch myself possess, it doesn’t feel necessary, right or mature. I can see it’s a contrived behaviour that grows from fear. We’re taught to placate our fears by surrounding ourselves with possessions. We ‘possess’, to shore-up what we imagine is our life, against the surging tide of uncertainty and death. But it’s futile, because when the tide actually turns we find our sandbags are full of straw and floating away with the tide. The origin of the word possess comes from french and essentially means “to sit as a master”. So clearly possessions have always been about power-over. In reality our ability to possess is a complete illusion. And with this insight it follows that anyone who would take the idea of possession seriously, must be fully delusional. Yet our whole culture, and much of our personal time and energy is devoted to this imaginary concept. It’s the barb that keeps us struggling on the hook of modernity. Even our language is possessive, so trying to think or write about things in a non-possessive way is like sailing into the wind. It can’t be done directly, we need tack. And because this backward way of thinking is built right into the language, we can assume its been there from the inception of English culture, and every other culture whose language uses possessives. To realize this is to begin to see how we’ve been semiotically programmed for thousands of years to think this way. Read more: https://thesacredgardener.ca/new-years-meditation/ #meditation #possession #minimalist #minimalism #lettinggo
The Shadow of Silviculture (or growing ‘tree gar The Shadow of Silviculture (or growing ‘tree gardens’). When we live in the bush or on a farm, cutting trees is a reality we must face or we will be overgrown. I hate cutting trees, and have a hard time with it, as I do with killing animals for food. But I consider both a necessity in the North, where the ground is frozen for half the year. Mostly I cut standing deadwood for the fire, which is its own ‘taking’ but it doesn’t hurt so much. Unlike in the intensive silviculture areas such as the Madawaska Forest Garden, and here at Golden Lake where I have to cut healthy trees. I put it off as long as I can, often considering and negotiating with the trees for many years, and then I do a bunch all at once. Why would I have to kill a healthy tree? Well, with silviculture, (growing forests), it’s the same as why you have to pull some ‘weeds’ in your garden. True to my wildculturing garden philosophy, which leans toward letting everything grow as long as it can and as big as it can (before seeding); before it’s harvested to enrich the ground it grew from. The same holds true in a forest garden. In the garden, I need to weed a few times over the growing season. With the forest garden it seems I have to cull some trees every ten years! Or a few times over the eighty year design of this successional polyculture garden. Because it happens so seldom it’s a big deal for me doing the needed cutting. Of those that had to go there were at least two really big healthy Sugar Maples that had benefited over the last twenty five years from the clearing I made for the polyculture forest garden. In that time, some of the nut trees, at the back or north edge of the clearing (receiving the most direct sunlight), had seriously grown, and leaned into the opening, to the point that a Heartnut, Butternut and Carpathian Walnut were completely over-canopied. These trees were not only getting stunted from the lack of light but also getting lopsided, reaching out horizontally to the south for the sun, making them destined to topple at an older age. #silviculture #trees #forestgarden #forest #polyculture #polyculturegarden #permaculture #sugarmaple #ottawavalley
Thank you to everyone that takes the time to send Thank you to everyone that takes the time to send some love, whether it's to us or anyone you're feeling grateful for. So needed and welcome, always. Let's do it more. #gratitude #givethanks
"I love to watch a field as it grows back in as it "I love to watch a field as it grows back in as it’s healed by the plants. I’ve learned most of what I know about polyculture by watching field’s natural successions, as they slowly move over time, from grassland to hardwood forest. The land regenerates with successive healers in the form of plants. Each plant has a time and place in this healing process. It’s such a beautiful thing to see this procession through the years, a glorious green parade of healers. It’s amazing to think that some people think of these gifts as noxious “weeds”. The herbs and pioneer trees in these clearings come by many means. They come by the wind, birds and rodents, ungulates and predators. Many plants were also spread from domestic farm animals, both wittingly and unwittingly brought, as an essential part of the settler’s existence." -From "The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden" by Steven Martyn
Teacher Trees This time of year, when all my gard Teacher Trees This time of year, when all my garden and wild herbs friends have called it for the season, I spend a lot of time with trees. The fall is the time of trees for everyone in these parts because of the blazing colours. Even after they lose their leaves, there's something universal about the love of trees through the dark months. In the north it doesn’t take faith or even reason to know why we love trees through the year. They are standing proof that part of us lives on and can endure the dark seasons. Only to rise again into triumphant flower. And this doesn’t just happen once, but for many, many years. The trees teach us that when we come out of the dark cold months we are revitalized, and able to rise up in more glory each year; That the dark time is not “the end” but part of the cycle of growth. That pinch we feel in the fall/winter, with loss of all the annual plants and leaves. The melancholy pale ‘fall’ light diminishing day by day into the cold cellar of Winter Solstice. This end-of-year time holds a clear presence of ‘the end’. The green Earth's end, and our end. So it seems natural to turn to the trees because they live beyond the smaller cycles of life and death we’re so concerned with. Deep inside their trunk time stands very still, and there they dance to the curvature of the seasons, within the stillness of eternity. The trees are my teachers. When I’m feeling depressed I just go out and talk to the trees and they straighten out my tangled branches of thought. I have maybe a hundred and fifty trees that I am very close to and take care of, and who care for me. Some of those are Sugar Maples that I tap every spring. And the other hundred or so are fruit and nut trees, many around twenty to twenty five years old. Some are here at the farm in Golden Lake; most of the others are at the Madawaska Forest Garden just outside Algonquin park. In the forest garden there are 24 year-old Walnuts and Butternuts I planted as seedlings, well over forty feet tall and nut bearing. There are also a few Pear trees, now thirty feet tall, that have escaped the ravages of Deer and Bear. Read more of this post, link in bio.
Happy Solstice Everyone! We're thrilled to share Happy Solstice Everyone! We're thrilled to share our first online course, may it manifest joy in your days, water the seeds of your intention well, nurture your dreaming of what may come when life returns to the land in the spring. Here's a bit more about it: “Come, journey with me through the growing seasons while I practice an agriculture ritual that’s 10000 years old; a ritual that is the fruit of a divine marriage, that formed the sacred foundation of our civilization.” In this hour long, 6 part documentary you will learn how to mound plant corn, beans and squash using a heavy hoe, and a good deal more. From Steven’s perspective we are given a rare insight into the prehistoric foundations of agriculture. Perhaps most importantly this video claims back agriculture as a sacred art. Steven brings the viewer with him as he steps into the philosophy and practice of a 10 000 year old agricultural ritual. In acknowledgement of Indigenous Peoples whose land we live and teach on, and to where much of the knowledge Steven holds about mound planting and ‘the three sisters’ came from, and in our commitment to broadly disseminate traditional understandings and practices, we will be donating 10% of each sale to a local organization, The Circle Of Turtle Lodge. “All the elements of the most elaborate grand rituals are present when we garden. It all starts with a natural setting, often a place of inherent brightness, richness and splendor, a place of moisture and life. Then, in an honourable way, we work with the land. We cultivate Her using ancient techniques passed down through the ages from the first marriage agreement we made. These deep understandings of plants were gleaned thousands of years ago when we eloped with our wild plant ‘bride’ taking her from her home.” – Steven Martyn, The Long Dance: Ten Thousand years of Gardening Ceremony Pay what you will, or pay what you can. Suggested course price is $30 (includes 1:10 min video download), PDF with synopsis of main points and additional information to that’s not in the video. And an hour and half online Q&A for the first 30 participants. Link to sign up in our Bio. #gardening #agriculture #sacredgardening
Part of our winter ambient sounds, on a sunny day. Part of our winter ambient sounds, on a sunny day. The greenhouse rebuild included recreating our fountain. Along with it’s sonic beauty, it adds moisture to the air (we only turn on the pump on sunny days).When you heat with wood, it can get quite dry. Lots of plants helps too. Quite a few years we’ve had a frog overwinter in this pond, emerging in the late winter and early spring, announcing their presence by croaking. #water #meditation #peace #winter #greenhouse #homesweethome #loghouse
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