Accueil Paysage Social My First Naturalist Teacher

My First Naturalist Teacher

par Morris Flewwelling

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The farm had neither electricity nor running water when Fred and Hilda decided to retire to Mirror in 1962. Very shortly thereafter Hilda, aged 70, suffered a stroke which left her paralysed on her left side. As she was fully ambidextrous, the disability was but an “inconvenience” and she continued unabated to type, quilt, garden, hook rugs and make her clothes with the use of only one hand. At the age of 83 she attended a Creative Writing course at the University of Alberta, and at 85 went unaccompanied on a six-week tour to Australia. She was a regular at Farm Women’s Week at Olds College. In 1984, at the age of ninety-one, she travelled alone by bus from Mirror to Calgary to present her brief in person to the Alberta public hearings on the environment and soil fertility. It was her last major undertaking, as she died less than a year later of pneumonia at the age of 92.

The foregoing biographical sketch provides only an outline of Hilda’s endeavours, but it illustrates clearly her sense of optimism, adventure, survival, and convictions. However, it does not begin to show how Hilda’s life and work inspired and led young people like me, and how she challenged the conventional thinking of my parents’ generation. Hilda was an environmental evangelist in the 1950s. Alone as a volunteer, she organized Nature Club on Saturdays at the old rural Ripley School where the local farm children pursued fascinating activities and learned about natural history – a forerunner of today’s interpretive programs at museums and nature centres.

Hilda generated cash income through her writing published in The Western Producer. Her works chronicled seasonal observations, research insight and results from her own experiments in horticulture and cooking. She shared new local knowledge with her readers at the time when it was a subject ignored or yet to be discovered. Her collected writings reveal a person who greeted challenge and saw opportunity in every circumstance. Gardening and horticulture included trials with landscaping features, new varieties and endless experiments with hotbeds, cold frames and greenhouses. Magnificent gardens flourished with no watering. Mulching was the key, and the principles and practice of organic gardening were among Hilda’s most fervent accomplishments. Her garden, to the end, was a testament to soil conservation practices. Indeed, her two abiding interests in the years immediately prior to her death were concern for soil fertility conservation and applications for solar energy. She had a passive solar addition built on to her house during her 91st year.

Her final wish was that her modest cottage and organic gardens in Mirror be maintained as an "organic gardening institute" to demonstrate to future generations how to use and renew our soil. As executor to Hilda’s estate I felt it was not possible to create the institute of her dreams with the resources of cash and property. I hoped she would take satisfaction in knowing that the proceeds from the sale of her properties were divided equally between Olds College soil conservation project and the development of the Kurimoto Japanese Garden at the Devonian Botanic Garden of the University of Alberta.

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D'Aspenland 1988 — Local Knowledge and Sense of Place
Edité par: David J. Goa et David Ridley
Publié par: Le Central Alberta Regional Museums Network (CARMN) avec l'assistance du Provincial Museum of Alberta et le Red Deer and District Museum.