By Kate Watters
This month’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share offers a creative way to enjoy the garden and your flowers for years to come. Pressed flowers freeze time — they hold their vibrancy and detail so elegantly in ways that roots and water and sunlight cannot illuminate.
To do this, you really don’t even need a plant press; just newspaper and some heavy books, which is a clever, low-technology process. When I was paging through my pressings looking for inspiration, I found the Japanese maple leaves from my old garden in Oak Creek Canyon. I remembered how my heart burst with joy to witness the flaming splendor intensify as the autumn days grew colder and shorter. The violas and pansies are just damn cute. They seem to be sharing an intimate moment telling secrets in the garden. When paired with the fireworks of frosted explosion grass and chocolate lace flower, the spring, summer and fall gardens collide in a dreamlike scene that can only happen in my imagination.
A pansy garden party - flower pressing by Kate Watters
I realize that even though the garden is barely waking up I am still composing garden beds and bouquets. I bought the pansies and violas at the hardware store in Sedona on the eve of the winter solstice. I was already missing the flowers, and these colorful blossoms called to me from a lonely rack. A more reasonable voice was saying “why must we be blooming constantly? When do we get to embrace our wintering and rest?” Yet I could not resist! I planted a couple six packs in the high tunnel and these little champs have been cheering me on quietly through the time when all the other plants are sleeping.
Pansies, I dare say, need a rebranding. This word is used—mainly by men—to describe an effeminate man or someone of wimpy constitution. In my experience they are the toughest, hardest working plants in the garden. They flower constantly through freezing spring nights and snowstorms converting whatever sun they find into profuse, intricate blossoms on their tiny stature. These flowers (including a lone anemone), are a promise of what is to come from the farm for this upcoming season. I hope it will remind you that we also have to find our comfort zone and the right time to bloom. Not all of us are sunflowers with big fat sunny smiles—some of us are short and appear delicate, but we are each strong and bountiful in our own right.
The poem this month is quite a story. Kevin Devaney, the typewriter street poet, dropped in at our farmer’s market booth on Valentine’s Day eve. As if drawn in by magnetic forces to the sound of the typewriter keys amidst the din, he zoned in on our stand where we were typing Valentines for market goers. I immediately recognized him as the poet who wrote me a poem to memorialize my experience as an apprentice the UC Santa Cruz Farm just as our season was coming to an end. I read it to our cohort at graduation, a song to our moment together, a balm to soothe the parting.
“and what poor people plants make
all up rooting and unbound
chasing their own wanderlust stars”
I recited these lines from the poem he wrote me as we embraced in front of my market stand. He immediately joined our booth with not one, but two typewriters and promptly there were three people composing poetry. Kevin now sells tiny matchbox poem books and poetry collections from days on the street in different towns. It seems poignant to me that Kevin would arrive on the scene at this second time in my farm journey. He offers a glimpse of one way to compose a life, from street corner to festival backstage across the country. It seems as though his talent for spur of the moment poems has been woven into his day to day decision making. He follows the instinct, an inspiration—one word typed out leads to the next. Then a metaphor gathers and prepositions connect them like bread crumbs on a path to the next place to go.
The farmer’s market typewriter trio L to R: Kevin Devany, Steve Hulse, Molly Wood.
When I met Kevin in October 2015 he was only just beginning to write poems on the street as a full-time gig. Since then, he has been on the road living in a van and now a Prius, with a partner and without, and always lugging around a handful of typewriters (named after female literary characters). He has created his own mobile publishing house; making carbon copies of the poems from the street and photocopying and binding them into palm-sized collections to sell. Poems, he marvels, bought him land outside of Moab, within a commune of creatives and carnies who come and go, collectively sharing a compound with sheds full of power tools. In this way, they build lives unique to each individual yet bound by convergent creation.
Enter on the scene our first Willing Worker on Organic Farms volunteer, Steve, a 26-year old young man from Buffalo NY. WWOOF pairs farm hosts with individuals with time and enthusiasm for short-term energy infusions in exchange for room, board and hands-on experience. Steve has volunteered in Buddhist Dhamma centers and farms for the last 2-3 years, crossing the country multiple times in a van with a partner, and now solo in a Subaru, looking for adventure and the life he is destined to lead. He tried on various scenarios; CBD production in N. California, tropical food forests and Hari Krishna homesteads in 10 states. He arrived at Wild Heart Farm road weary and in the midst of a twenty something dark night of the soul, seriously in search of a place to settle in, send down roots, and grow. Oh how I remember this time (multiple times!) in my own life, when I never believed I would find a home. Yet somehow I have many times, and had to uproot and transplant myself over and over again. These homes have led me to this farm, this place to mingle with the deep roots of trees and a long history of ancestral people tending this land.
Steve, our first WWOOFer, was a delight to host.
Our time together, although transitory in nature, can tremendously impact one another. Meeting Kevin when I did, and experiencing his impromptu poem, further connected my love of farms, flowers and poetry. These loves are now combined in what I share with my CSA community. We shared a dinner at the farm as Kevin was leaving after a short stint in Sedona, plans organizing around an opportunity to learn as much as he can from a typewriter repair man in Phoenix who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Steve has settled in Salt Lake City with his box of seeds and all the miles and farms and meditation halls behind him. We were happy to share this experience with them and now you too are part of the journey.
This poem by Kevin “Finding Home” seemed the perfect company. You can follow Kevin on the web and join his community of poetry lovers on Patreon.
“Finding Home,” a poem published by Kevin Devaney 2017 National Tour of Traveling Typewriter Poetry, Volume 38, Asheville NC II.