Hello my name is Ella, and with the generosity of the Global Leadership Initiative I was able to follow my dreams of creating a Literary Field Guide! What the heck is a Literary Field Guide ? You might ask, well let me tell you about it.
After a year of visiting The Moon-Randolph Homestead, I compiled a list of historical and culturally significant plants to highlight in my Field Guide, which is just like any other field guide, but rather than having a soul focus on the taxonomic descriptions of each plant, its main goal was to highlight the connections between people, place, and plants, using poetry as a tool for emotional expression. A Literary Field Guide is a collection of poems for various different plant species on the Homestead. It also includes a brief history of the location, and how that may shape the plants living on the landscape now.
Yarrow, like soft music in your lungs, a scent that lingers on long after its gone.
Many of the plants have histories on the land longer than the city of Missoula does, like Yarrow, Bitterroot, and Yellowbells. They carve out stories from time through their relationships with other beings living on the land. With that being said there are various plants that are new to the land, brought with colonialism, and settled just as we did. It was a challenge to tell these stories, and explore my own relationship with the plants. I am white, of settler decent, and it was most important to me that I was uplifting indigenous histories and not appropriating culture.
I spent the fall and spring semester of 2023-2024 visiting The Homestead learning all that I could about the cite, past caretakers, and the land before colonization. I pruned, harvested and sat with plants, I listened to them interact with one another. I watched a Magpie stumble beneath the 100 year-old orchard drunk off plum. I made friends with a chicken who came to greet me at my car everyday, and I enjoyed so many meaningful conversations with Katie, one of the current caretakers.
This project was so meaningful to me and I owe so many thanks to all of the lovely human and non-human beings that made this Field Guide possible.
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