Gleaner’s Garment: Walking with the Windfall of Olmsted's Mont-Royal

Mea Bissett

Gleaning is the act of slowly, laboriously collecting the excess crops left behind by the reapers and the harvesters who have already commercially culled. To glean is also to question or tease out meaning from collected information. In my first a/r/tography project I explored an entanglement of meanings that were made while walking on Mont Royal, and reflected on the connotations of gleaning as collecting research. In doing so, I unfurl and perform what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as the rhizomatic potentialities of an environmental arts pedagogy that invites new materialism and movement as provocations for post-colonial ways of knowing.

Parc Mont Royal offers Montreal’s urban dwellers respite from the chaotic demands of the city. As joggers and cyclists cross the first stretch of grass and arrive at the foothills of the mountain, the city sounds fade away. A canopy of Moose Maples and Red Oaks reach overhead, and the dampness of the forest floor brings cool air to the skin. As Hilary Ramsden articulates, walking is a practice of investigating the relationships between landscape, environment, and ourselves from the wide perspectives of history, literature, emotions, and socio-politics (Ramsden, 2017). These perspectives include the construction of McGill University which was built on the mountain in 1821, followed by a cemetery in 1852, the historic hospital Hôtel-Dieu in 1862, and the park which was established in 1876. Before these colonial establishments, however, the geographical region around the mountain was a gathering place and bountiful hunting ground for Indigenous foragers since 9000 BCE (Lampron, 2011).

I began my performative walks in early autumn. I focused my inquiry to the foothills of the mountain, situated in contrast with the surrounding city. I focused my attention to the relations between the elements of nature, culture, growth, decay, environment, movement, and matter (Rousell et al., 2019). I was compelled to further participate in the interconnectedness of all things (Cahill, Coffey, & Smith, 2016), meaning, I sought to experience the materiality and meaningfulness of the forest from a more-than-human perspective. With this in mind, I returned home to stitch together a garment to be worn while walking in the woods.

‘Gleaner’s Garment’ is a handmade linen jacket covered in pockets of different sizes, and is modelled after the uniforms of the landscapers and custodians I observed in parc Mont Royal. I began routinely walking in Gleaner’s Garment, each time yearning to fill the pockets with the leaves, fronds, stems and stocks, folioles and stipules that piled up on the forest floor. This yearning to glean and fill the pockets recalls Deleuze’s (1994) characterisation of desire. It was in this desire that I became aware of the pedagogical possibilities when experiencing movement and materiality. I decided what plants to pluck based on my instincts, informed by a tactile awareness of what is sharp, what is rotten, what would sting, and what I had not yet held.

I returned home with a full garment. I emptied the pockets into a large basin, and steeped the nuts, seeds, and acorns in water. The oddment of Olmsted’s park had coloured the dye-bath a warm brown. I lowered the Gleaner’s Garment into the bath, and let the linen soak in the colours of the forest. The following morning I emptied the basin of all the stones, shells, seedlings and debris, once again filling the pockets of Gleaner’s Garment with the windfall. As a final reciprocal gesture, I walked back to Olmsted’s parc Mont Royal and emptied the contents of my pockets onto the forest floor.

During these walks I unearthed questions of land care and public accessibility, environmentalism and colonialism. Between the interstices of detritus and substratum, I gleaned an understanding of the importance of reciprocity when teaching/learning, caring for the environment, and reconciling with the living past. The historic landmark of parc Mont Royal offers not only a site for refuge and a place for public gathering. It is also a space for conceptualizing environmental arts pedagogies, and has for many millennia been a locale for foraging, harvesting, and gleaning.

References:

Cahill, H., Coffey, J., & Smith, K. (2016). Exploring embodied methodologies for transformative practice in early childhood and youth. Journal of Pedagogy, 7(1), 79-92.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published in 1968).

Lampron, N. (2011). L'histoire. Retrieved November 01, 2020, from https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/siteofficieldumontroyal/histoire

Ramsden, H. (2017). Walking & talking: making strange encounters within the familiar. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(1), 53-77.

Rousell, D. S., Cutcher, A., Cook, P., & Irwin, R. (2019). Propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality.