Pineapple Weed

or

a common friend

I am small, maybe five, maybe six years old, maybe a little older. My sister is two years younger than me, and in these memories, we are both there, sitting on the lawn. We are at home or maybe in the oaks at my Grammie and Poppa’s house. We are forever playing with plants. Sticking maple keys on our noses, collecting acorns, searching for purple violets and popping the blisters of the balsam fir, tucked beneath its drooping lower boughs that we’ve claimed as our “fort”. We watch tent caterpillars build lacy nests in the apple trees and sit on the large flat stones in the fields. The rocks are dusted with lichen and the tall grasses make wind washed walls around us. We lie there and watch the swallows dancing high high above us.

We pick plantain and pull the veins from the leaves. We pick endless bouquets of goldenrod and yarrow, lupins and black-eyed Susans. We walk often with our parents and our dogs around the fields, past the balsam fort, through the maple sugar bush and to the dinosaur tree. She is a golden birch, and one of the biggest things we’ve ever seen. She has multiple wide trunks, spreading from the ground like a many headed brontosaurus. Her bark shines and loose fringes flutter at their fraying edges. We don’t pull at it. It is her skin. We spend hours climbing on her, walking along her serpentine roots and splashing in the ponds and puddles that form inside their shining tangles. Our dad probably tells us how old she may be, but what can 150, 200, or 300 years mean to a little kid?

I eat so many wild strawberries in the field that I break out in itchy hives. We get burdocks stuck in our hair. We hold our breath and swim under the lily pads at the lake, tadpoles the size of golfballs scatter as we pass. We pick the small fruity smelling plants that grow all around the driveway and dad’s fieldstone perennial bed. I don’t know their name, and I don’t think of them as flowers. Flowers have petals, and these are just yellowish green balls, atop a stem dressed with feathery leaves. They are small. They are easy to pick, and fun to play with. They are everywhere. They seem infinite.

We pick them and thread the stems between our toes, until all the gaps are filled with golden orbs, and we laugh and dance and jump around to how long we can dance before they fall out. We spend so much time with plants, never thinking to ask what they are, what their names are, or how they can be useful to us. We smell, we listen, we enjoy their company, and consider no other way of being.

II.

I have been at university for three years now. It is the first semester of my final year, and I am taking a course in ethnobotany. I’m eager to learn about the exotic ways far off people use rare and unusual plants. Instead, we are walking around the stone buildings of campus, looking at the flower beds. We are looking at weeds.

One of the first plants we visit is a rose bush. My professor asks us what it is, we all know it, it’s a rose bush, they’re everywhere. She picks a rosehip from the bush, it is full and bright red. She takes a knife out of her pocket and cuts it cleanly in two, exposing the seeds and their silky hairs inside. She explains that roses are often a colonizing species, one of the first plants to return after forest fires. They are found all over the circumpolar world, she tells us, and then asks what the fleshy rosehip full of seeds can tell us about roses.

Something in me wakes up and sparks: Ask a plant a question. I think for second, and then answer, uncertain of how to say what I’m thinking,

“It can have lots of offspring, with one hip full of so many seeds, and a whole bush full of hips, in a bed full of roses, it can grow new rose plants easily.” I answer. “Yes,” my professor says smiling, “yes.”

On that same walk we approach the low growing green yellow plants I played with as a child and stuck between my toes, but never named. “Pineapple weed,” my professor says. Matricaria matricarioides. Many of the same properties/uses as cultivated chamomile. It is calming, soothing, gentle and widely used. It grows in disturbed areas, pathways, poor soil. It is found all across North America, from Mexico to the Arctic.

Matricaria matricarioides. It is one of over 60 Latin names I must memorize over the coming weeks, that I will need to list as part of my midterms. I am also tested on some the basic uses of various plants, their habitats, a collection of botanical and medicinal terms. We have guests visit the class, a Metis elder who brings camas plants to the class, and shares its uses and traditional importance. A biodynamic farmer who has us shell dried dragon tongue beans. We visit the marshes near the university and search for sweetgrass.

Our course largely focuses on plants of the boreal forest and Canadian North, where my professor did a large amount of fieldwork, and even wrote a book about wild northern plants. I learn about Labrador tea, bear berry, cloudberries, birch and willow. Some of the plants I study are found near my maritime home, but mostly, plants and wild places I don’t expect to see. And there in the mix, pineapple weed. Which I see and smell nearly everywhere I go.

Matricaria matricarioides. I learn its name by repetition. I chant it with a lilting rhythm. It is one of a handful of Latin names I remember now, 13 years later. Rosa acicularis, Wild Rose; Rhododendron groenlandicum, Labrador tea. I collect these and other names and enjoy walking around naming those things around me, the same way I enjoy the feeling of answering a question class correctly, letting the foreign sounds roll out of my mouth, pretending to cast spells. And then I go back to my other school work, and most of the Latin names escape me.

III.

I land in the Yukon, after a six-hour flight. Collect my dog in her crate from oversized baggage, and step out of the airport with a friend of a family friend, who has invited me to spend the night and collect myself before I fly further north to Dawson City the next day. 

My dog, Ulu, and I are both a bit shell shocked. I am moving to a place I’d never been, where I know only one person, and have no idea where I’ll live when I get there. When we arrive at Judy and Bruce’s house, I put my bags inside the door, and then excuse myself to take my still shaking shepherd for a walk. Judy directs me to a trail behind the house.

I am surrounded by unfamiliar things, tired, excited, and anxious. I’ve never lived further than a few hours drive from my family, from friends. I am more than a little scared, but also filled with resolve, and seeking an adventure.

I look around and those names that had somehow stuck in my head, come back to me. There they are, under my feet, brushing my legs: Rosa acicularis, Wild Rose; Rhododendron groenlandicum, Labrador tea & Sphagnum, peat moss. I am away from the familiar, I miss my family, and here are old acquaintances, plants I met in books and on blackboards, ready to be touched, smelled and visited.

I take a deep earthy breath of moss and the camphor Labrador tea and walk to the bluff and my first look at the Yukon River.

When I walk back to the house, there, around the porch, an older more familiar friend, Matricaria matricarioides. I see them everywhere, and I barely notice.

IV.

After years of bartending in Dawson, and lamenting the loss of so many summer hours to the indoors and damp bar rags, I apply for a job in the bush. I have spent the dark subarctic winter listening to a lover talk about his work, and though the love doesn’t last, my interest in a challenge and the places he described sticks. I become an exploration technician, flying in helicopters, spending hours each day hiking and taking soil samples on behalf of mining interests to be tested for gold and other minerals. I ignore the ethics of the work because it lets me see amazing places. The repercussions of the work I do to develop mining claims, and the ethics of it are something I will wrestle with for many years, long after I give my notice a year later.

But, in that year, I enjoy the helicopter rides to remote places where I am dropped into the bush. Sometimes literally dropped. When there is no ideal place to land, I lower myself carefully onto the chopper’s skid, before hanging from it with two hands, and letting myself go as carefully as possible, and landing in the sphagnum and the buckbrush. I spend my days collecting and carrying dirt, but what I am really doing is exploring. I see so many birds, I take notes and draw quick sketches of them and spend my nights looking them up, learning their names. Hawk owl, sapsucker, lapland longspur. I lie in the fens and stare at the mosses. Microscopic forests. One of my crew mates asks me one day what I’m going to do with a million pictures of moss. I shrug, because other than look at them, I have no idea. I keep taking pictures of moss anyway. I sing all day, to warn the bears I’m coming and give them time to avoid me. Some days I am many kilometres away from the rest of my crew, out of radio range. Other days we are only 500m apart and we can hear each others’ singing and shouts in the bush around us. Other days we can watch each other progress over the bare face of an alpine meadow. My face and the back of my hands brown. My palms grow rough and my fingertips dry and fissure, even with heavy gloves. It is both the hardest and easiest job I’ve ever had.

One early fall day, I start a line of samples in the high country, in an alpine meadow. I make myself move forward and complete five samples before I let myself stop for tea from my thermos, to take off the last of the chill from the morning mist and the cold wash of the chopper as it flew away. I am surrounded by dwarf birch shrunk to pencil height, compressed to survive in the wide open and mountaintop winds. Many of the same plants that grow in the lowlands grow far up here, but they are shrunken, and small. Miniature versions of their downhill families. By the end of the day I have made my way out of the alpine, and down a steep hill towards the river. I am in a mature white spruce forest here, well-spaced, with little to no understory and a thick blanket of moss beneath them. The trees are the tallest I’ve seen since moving to the Yukon. It is a fairy tale forest. The moss cushions each step and I feel like I’m walking on the moon. I move further down the hill and stop. There, in the dappled spruce filtered light, a small opening in the forest and the slope is littered with the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen. They have the same shape as a pink lady slipper, a flower I saw at brownie camp as a child in New Brunswick. But they are smaller, dainty, northern. And instead of pale pink, like their Maritime cousin, they are white, with brilliant purple spots. I sit there and marvel at them. I had no idea that here in the north, land of fibrous Labrador tea, rugged roses, as so few varieties of trees, something so beautiful, so exotic, could grow.

I carefully scoop one of the flowers and their footing of moss into my water bottle, and carry it back to camp to try and identify it. My dog, Ulu, runs down from camp where she’s spent the day with my friend, the cook, when she hears the chopper. She sits at the edge of the landing pad where she’ll escape the worst of the helicopter’s wash while the pilot shuts down the machine. After the chopper is on the ground and shut down, the crew walks up the dirt road from the airstrip to camp, a collection of greying weathered buildings in an aspen forest. I put my mattock and auger away, drop off my soil bags, and head to my cabin. First though, I stop at the cook shack and grab an empty tomato can. When I reach the small plywood structure I share with many, many mice, I carefully transplant the flower, before looking through the plant ID book I brought with me.  Cypripedium guttatum, spotted lady’s slipper. An orchid.

I give the flower in its tin can some water before I leave for work the next morning. When I return by the end of the day, it has browned and wilted. Fried by the afternoon sun. Around it, and all around the gravel yard, beside the road to the airstrip, and all along the rocky expanse where planes deliver fuel and groceries, miners and geologists, pineapple weed stands up tall, staring with its yellow flower eyes directly into the bright light.

V.

We are building a house. And I am building a baby. From the wall tent we are living in, I can see the Ogilvie Mountains.  The field we’re making our home is bursting with roses and lungwort’s blue bells. Yarrow waves in the wind and spikes of purple wild delphiniums punctuate the nearly neon and dusty blue of the grasses.

I know now that the rosehip in my university’s flower bed did not just tell a story of biological success, of seeds spread and sprouted. Sitting with a rose bush and listening closely, watching them throughout a Yukon year, you know that rose tells a story of beauty, of wealth and abundance. They feed the bees, who dance themselves dusty yellow in their flowers and buzz the rosehips into being. The rosehips feed worms who hatch in their centres and then grow fat eating the sweet orange flesh. The birds, the bears, the mice, and humans eat the hips. Those who eat too many get itchy bums. The stems of the rose have thorns and the seeds have irritating hairs; the rose is balanced. Its flowers and fruit are sweet and plentiful but not without aggravations. I watch the roses change that summer, their blooms fade and then their hips swell along with mine. By September their fruit is as round and swollen as my own belly.

We don’t have room or time for much of a garden that first year. But I grow a few plants in pots. Some flowers mostly, some mint and a German chamomile plant. There are no wild ones here in this former hayfield. I have read that chamomile and its relative pineapple weed are the ultimate herbs for mothers and babes. I learn that the name I memorized years ago, Matricaria matricarioides, come from the Latin words for mother, and care. The plant can be used to dispel gas, calm a cranky child (or parent), treat bug bites and scrapes even expel pinworms, a common childhood parasite. I don’t see it near our home, and so I plant its taller, fairer cousin. I collect the blooms and dry them. The forest around our home is full of Labrador tea, chaga, morels and other wonderful and wild northern things; there is no dandelion, no plantain, no pineapple weed in sight.

VI.

Our daughter is five now. My relationship with plants has changed. I have stopped memorizing Latin names. Instead learning what I can eat, what settles an upset stomach, what will prevent infection, what will improve soil quality, what soothes bee stings, nourishes, heals. I watch where and how things grow. My time at home here with an infant, a toddler, and now a child has let me spend more time sitting in fields, forests and on hills. I’ve been learning again how to play with plants, how to sit with them, to let them talk to me, and remember to listen.

My daughter stopped the other day in front of a large birch near our house and looked it up and down, before hugging it. She looked at me, her arms stretched wide around its trunk, and said, “I like to hug trees because sometimes they hug back.” I think of the dinosaur tree and the care and joy it brought my sister and I for years. I remember the ease with which we loved a tree, and how freely we hugged and spoke to it.

It seems that pineapple weed took offence to my planting an imported, domesticated version. That or it saw new gaps, and has filled them. Wherever we have made trails, Matricaria matricarioides has taken root. We step on them, they multiply. The foot of our stairs has no lawn, not even the gravel we laid is visible beneath the thick canopy of pineapple weed. Common chamomile has spread and grown under my daughter’s footsteps. As our need for it has grown, it has spread and flourished, soothing gas and grouchiness, bug bites and bruises, and easing bedtimes. As my anxiety grew as a new parent, the remedy spread itself throughout my yard. It is impossible, now, to avoid the pineapple weed. You cannot take a step out of our home without its fruity, calming scent greeting you. 

I wonder if there was a time before my sister and I, when the drive at my parents home was without pineapple weed. Is it actually found everywhere only because it is opportunistic and adaptable, or does it prefer to grow where it can be played on and with, where it can make a path and mark a road? I’ve grown a family thousands of kilometres away from my childhood home, far from the plants I played with as a child. I’ve met orchids, strange subarctic species, and plants I read and dreamed about as a student. But the plant that in the end I spend the most time with, that continues to speak to me and to teach me, is this common one. How lucky I am it is common, a weed, thriving here at the foot of my door. Its seeds and leaves stuck between my daughter’s toes.