The Elmwood Community Garden Flax Project Timeline
Welcome to the third growing year of the Elmwood Community Garden Flax Project.
Year one began with a collaborative reading list developed by myself and social geographer Dr. Harlan Morehouse, a scholar of climate change/climate collapse, community resiliency and the use of narrative and folklore in climate adaptation. Our decade of shared conversation around ecopsychology and community responses to climate grief shifted into explorations of how object-makers and culture bearers understand an ethics of caretaking that expands to land stewardship practices. We described this inquiry as “ecologies of art-making,” exploring the social and physical geographies of art-making in rural Vermont. We paid particular attention to the worldviews of artists whose art materials are place-based. This led us to explore art-making materials that did not rely on extractive processes and landed on flax as a climate beneficial art-material. Flax appears throughout global textile histories and has been bred to thrive under a variety of harsh conditions. Its sucessful processing relies on maintaining a seasonal growing and processing cycle in balance with the life cycle of the plant, the humans that cultivate it and the microbes that digest the pectin, rendering the long bast fibers loose from the stem.
The first year of ECG, while I sat on the waiting list for growing space, was spent learning how to spin flax and researching flax culture. I was awarded a scholarship from the Marshfield School of Weaving to learn from Andrea Myklebust. I went home several skeins of my first handspun linen—spun from vintage Vermont flax stricks of an unknown age. I sourced more unprocessed bundles of antique flax, found at an estate sale in Pennsylvania and began my first woven samplers with this fiber.
For year two, a spot opened up at Elmwood Community Garden. I was also gifted several stricks of dowery flax from the Muhlvertl region of Austria, from Christianne Sufferlin of Berta’s Flax. Christianne rescues the unused flax doweries and life stories from elders in her region and passes the unspun fiber on to spinners who are committed to keeping flax culture and handweaving skills alive as both a past-facing cultural inheritance and climate-beneficial intervention for the future. With new seeds in one hand and a hundred year-old inheritance of dowery flax in the other, I planted and processed my first patch, while weaving my first dowery flax pieces. This harvest season was significantly disrupted by the historic flooding that swept central Vermont and decimated Barre City’s historic downtown. Elmwood Community Garden was largely spared, though the harvest was less than we anticipated because of the heavy, nutrient-stripping rains. A collection of Year Two photos and clips are above. The final slide shows “The Table in the Pear Tree,” in process, woven from vintage handspun linen, handspun wool and marigold-dyed cotton for Design Made Visible at The Gallery at Mad River Valley Arts in May/June of 2023.
Year Three begins in a few weeks, with tilling, four new beds and a community seed swap on the books!