Journal

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The service berry, the shadbush, June berry, saskatoon.  Amelanchier, whose common names show how emeshed they are in culture as an important calendar plant, coming into blossom as the ground thaws. A sign of easier times.

Robin Wall Kimmerer takes this tree, her native Amelanchier arborea and her neighbours’ cultivated Amelanchier alnifolium, as the centre of a web, connecting fungi, plants, insects, birds, animals and people in an abundant gift economy.

Kimmerer is a writer with an unusual point of view - straddled between modern science and indigenous knowledge, stitching them together with lyrical words.  Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is, I feel, one of the most important books of the past decade.  Certainly it is one of the books I buy for others most often.

This book takes the same theme as Lewis Hyde’s wonderful The Gift - the idea that in gift economies the main thing is that the gift needs to remain in motion, that they are destroyed by hoarding.  Here the argument is expanded beyond ethnographic and cultural studies and out into nature. 

The gift of the berries - to birds, to earth, to deer, to farmers, to neighbours and community.  It is a great, moving, exuberant, abundant passing on of gifts. From the dispersal of seeds to the sharing of pies.

And also this book, for the writing is a gift.  It was originally written for Emergence magazine and was published by them, the words made freely available.  You can read it as a gift here.

Or you can choose to buy the book, beautifully illustrated by John Burgoyne, fitting neatly in your hand in its silky dust jacket. 

Perhaps you might buy it as a gift.