Description
THE ART OF WILDCULTURING
July 25-28
Sacred Gardener Farm, Golden Lake, ON
(with a day visit to the Madawaska Forest Garden in Whitney)
all teachings, meals and camping included
Stay in the dragonfly house for an added fee (choose dorm option when registering)
payment plans available
Wildculturing is based on our ancestral co-creative ways of working with the Earth to help manifest wild cultures of perennial abundance, that generate food and medicinal sovereignty for ourselves, our family and community.
Come join us at the height of summer to experience the lost ancestral art of wildculturing, and learn to re-wild your life and surroundings.
For the first time in many years, Steven is offering a workshop specifically on Wildculturing, (in forest and field environs). We will be hosting the Art of Wildculturing intensive three day workshop at our Golden Lake homestead, where we have been wildculturing with the land for twenty-four years and there are thriving examples of; ‘garden wildculture’; ‘polycultural orchards’; and co-created ‘wild perennial plant cultures’. As a rare treat we will also visit the Madawaska Forest Garden, to learn about forest wild culturing. Very few people have seen this (25 year old) mature forest garden based on Indigenous practices (The Story of The Madawaska Forest Garden tells the full story, Steven’s first book).
This course promises to be a journey of experiential learning, vastly different from any other agriculture course you might find, many of which are primarily theoretical. Steven’s practices grew out of direct experience with the land, with Elders, and through his own spiritual discipline. And so, he teaches not from theory but from the heart in a hands-on way, where the ethical understandings are embedded in action; in the practice. The Sacred Gardener courses are experiential so the teaching goes into our bodies and not just our minds. The participation helps integrate and ground abstract concepts that underpin the work. This is how we were designed to learn, so unlike with book learning the teaching sticks with you.
More About Wildculturing
“Wildculturing, or co-creative integrated agriculture, comes from the land itself as part of the continuum of the living, flowering, Earth and works responsibly with everything including the economy. It’s good for the ecology, good for the growing land, good for the farmers and good for the culture. Positive agriculture works through synergistic relationships, not exploitive contracts”.- From “The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden”, Steven Martyn
“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” Steven Martyn
Wildculturing is one way we can de-colonize our thinking, and de-industrialize our habits of consumption.
Background Story
“My time at Trent University helped me research, plan and document the land use process on the land in Whitney, Ontario, on the Madawaska River. But it was an earlier sojourn in Central America, an experience with Lacandon Mayan people and their complex polycultural milpas, that really inspired me to create the Madawaska forest garden. This, and the time I spent with Akwesasne Elder Henry Lickers, while working on an M.A. about Traditional land use shaped my approach to wild gardening or WILDCULTURING.”
“Having first learned how to forage and then later how to garden, I was spurred on over many decades to develop a way of truly gardening co-creatively and cooperatively with the Earth like a forager. Not surprisingly I rediscovered the original indigenous gardening methods that all agriculture started with. The results of these unconventional “experimental” gardens, feed not just the wild but my family, friends and guests, which proves there is a way to not only honour the ancient agreements but also have abundant wild gardens.”
Instructor’s CV of relevant work
Steven worked as professional landscaper and started Livingstone & Greenbloom, one of Toronto’s first ecological landscape companies, in the late 80’s. He was the founder, primary grower, wildcrafter, and production manager for The Algonquin Tea Company for twenty years. In 1999 Steven completed an M.A. in Traditional Plant Use from Trent U. For over a decade he was a professor at Algonquin College teaching wild edible and medicinal plant use as well as traditional survival skills. He also was a guest teacher at the Orphan Wisdom School for ten years, and has led workshops internationally. He and his wife Megan Spencer have run The Sacred Gardener School, teaching traditional skills and ways of being with the land, since 2017. The least remarkable thing, but that few can claim, is Steven has grown and or foraged much of his food and medicine, every year for the last forty years since he was 19.
