Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Coulees to Muskeg – A Saskatchewan Environmental History series. This series is a partnership between NiCHE and the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society (SHFS). All articles in the series appear on the NiCHE website and are published in SHFS’s Folklore magazine.
The Folklore magazine archive contains a wealth of information, buried in over four decades of stories like seeds in the soil. I use this metaphor because there is often much more contained within the stories than a cursory glance may suggest. In Folklore articles’ recollections of everyday life, for example, a lost world of the senses is captured: the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied historical eras as they unfolded. These stories expose the inner lives and emotions of ordinary people, as well as capturing elements of daily life and domestic realities of the past – things which, until recent years, have tended not to receive a great deal of attention from academic historians. Although memories written down decades after the events they recall are not always factually accurate (more on that later), they are nonetheless valuable records, enriching our understanding of the past and how people make sense of it.
Although plants were the explicit center of a handful of articles, they more often occupied the margins of stories like wildflowers in the ditches between field and road.
Keeping in mind the way each reader’s interests bring new light to old information, I combed through the first five years of Folklore magazine (1979-1984), looking for stories that included one of my own personal interests: plants. Although plants were the explicit center of a handful of articles, they more often occupied the margins of stories like wildflowers in the ditches between field and road. In this context, what follows can be thought of a small posy of flowers: a handful of interesting things, gathered to create an echo of the larger environment in which they were found. Although my intention is more to curate a set of examples than to put forth an argument, readers will notice that in many of these stories, plants serve to embody a strong undercurrent of nostalgia and the romanticization of a rose-coloured past, which in turn echoes the tone of the Folklore‘s early issues more generally. To explore the original articles further, make your way to the Folklore archive – all issues more than three years old can be accessed free of chare through the SHFS website here.
Many of Folklore’s descriptions of plants are multisensory memories used to set the scene of past times. Given Folklore’s early focus on the experiences of agricultural settlers in Saskatchewan, it is not surprising that these descriptions often evoke the characteristic scents of rural life. Scent is a powerful carrier of memory, and invoking it is a way of connecting people across the decades. When Thelma Foster’s poem “Harvest Time” speaks of “the fragrance of sun-ripened straw; the sweet nostalgic thrill of summer almost gone,” many readers both in 1984 and today recognize an experience that characterized their childhood. Similarly, when Shirley Harper recounts the chore of bringing firewood inside and mentions armfuls of “split poplar wood, frosty and fragrant,” many others will remember similar moments.
Other Folklore contributors recognize plants as a potent embodiment of the changing seasons. Mildred Cameron (nee Middleton)’s “Reminisces” paints a picture of the prairie as it changes over the course of the year, recalling:
After the crocuses were gone, the prairie would be covered with wild strawberry blossoms, yellow vetch (wild sweet peas), and hidden among the grass we would find little purple violets. Then the prairie bluebells (a wild hyacinth), and in June the lovely fragrant wild prairie roses – those in the shady spots a deep rose color, but not more fragrant than those paler ones out in the sunlight…In the autumn there would be goldenrod and black eyed Susan everywhere.
Mae Worth’s poem “Prairie Winds” also uses beautiful plant imagery to trace out the changing seasons of her childhood memories. She begins in autumn, writing of
..a distant horizon, the wheat’s rippled sway
And bright leaves of cottonwoods whirling away.
Ripe plums in the coulees, the wildflowers gone,
White frost on the dead grass that sparkled at dawn.
Worth and Cameron’s works are both beautiful examples of how the seasonal cycles of plants can evocatively represent the past, with the ending of seasons echoing a deeper nostalgia for times gone by.
Although some of Folklore’s remembered ecologies are familiar to readers today, others seem more distant. Many of Saskatchewan’s natural places have changed dramatically because of agriculturalization, urbanization, and land degradation. Grasslands in particular have been lost – indeed, they are one of the most threatened biomes on earth. We have also become more aware that the type of settlement-era stories favoured in Folklore’s early years provides only a narrow glimpse of the rich diversity of Saskatchewan’s history. They often fail to capture the experiences of people from minority backgrounds or those in the northern regions of the province. Likewise, they have tended to overlook the Indigenous peoples who have lived in these territories since time immemorial, maintaining sophisticated cultures enmeshed in native ecologies. Despite these blind spots, however, the shared nostalgia for a rural past is an important theme in Folklore’s early years, and one that is built up in part through descriptions of plants.
Although some of Folklore’s remembered ecologies are familiar to readers today, others seem more distant. Many of Saskatchewan’s natural places have changed dramatically because of agriculturalization, urbanization, and land degradation.
A small number of early Folklore articles did touch on Indigenous plant uses and stories. From our vantage point in 2025 we can see ways many of these articles were problematic: not carefully identifying the specific culture and language of their Indigenous informants, for example, instead relying on the generic and outdated term “Indian,” or relating stories without explaining their source and thus erasing a great deal of the important information carried by the careful practices of Indigenous oral cultures. Some articles used language we recognize as offensive and inaccurate today, such as talking of “wandering bands of Indians” that “roamed the area,” language that erases the deeply meaningful relationships between peoples, their traditional territories, and their seasonal rounds.
However, other contributors approached their topic with respect, such as Muriel Clipsham’s article “Wild Cotton Root… Shooting Stars… Sage Grass… and Loco Weed” in the inaugural Summer 1979 issue. Clipsham’s article records some of the information shared with her by Abel Watetch during a visit to Piapot Reserve in the summer of 1961. She expresses gratitude to Watetch, noting that the sharing of medicinal plant knowledge is a privilege often reserved for certain family members. She further recounts how Watetch reserved some information as being “secret,” including the identity of the 14 shrubs used in a recipe shared with him “by an old grandfather.” Importantly, Clipsham also shares Watetch’s explanation that “the plants are our brothers, just as animals are… so when we must dig a plant we go to the east side of the plant and put there a bit of tobacco or some other gift. We say to it ‘I am going to dig you up. May we have the gift of your medicine.’”
Clipsham’s article contains practical information about plant use, the type of folk lore that gave the magazine its name. Some of the knowledge is simple to put to use, such as the fact that “sage grass (Artemisia gnaphaolodes) when chewed to a soft pulp and placed directly on a wound would stop the flow of blood.” In other cases, Watetch shares more detailed descriptions of how to prepare medicine, as he did for a bronchial remedy made by carefully boiling pin cherry bark in early spring. Clipsham is not the only early Folklore contributor to record this type of practical knowledge. An Autumn 1980 article by Gilbert Johnson, for example, relates detailed information about the preparation of kin-ik-i-nik. The article recounts the memories of Jean Baptiste Lepine, who participated in “one of the last full scale buffalo hunts in, what is now, the province of Saskatchewan.” Lepine told Johnson that although he enjoyed pipe tobacco, he preferred “a real smoke” of kin-ik-i-nik, which was “made from the inner bark of the red willow or dogwood.”
A different category of plant stories from Folklore’s early focus on settler history centers around their importance for survival – their use as fuel and shelter, first and foremost. The presence (or absence) of trees determined a great deal about people’s life and comfort levels as they made homes in the new province. Trees meant firewood and shelter from the winter wind, as well as being the building material for houses, barns, and even roads. The presence of trees was such a powerful draw that it led to the creation of a temporary winter settlement called ‘Hewitt Town’ and ‘Hogs Hollow’ in the Moose Mountain area, as Gladys D. Nichol describes in “Camping Out for the Winter.” She explains that “it was the custom in the early days for settlers on the prairies to move their livestock and families to the shelter of the Moose Mountains, around a lake, where wood and water were plentiful and hay and log cabins had been put up the preceding summer.” Nichol also recalls that many families cut their yearly supply of wood at this time and says “it was a common sight to see strings of teams coming out of the foothills, heading south 20 to 30 miles, as bluffs of wood were very scattered in those days.”
An article by Jean Gerlock article talks about the use of a less common plant-based building material: straw. Jean relates how the community in the Warmley district came together to build a straw-bale curling rink in 1939. The rink was a popular and busy gathering place, open six evenings a week with two games each night. Gerlock explains that the rink operated for 5 years, until most of the area’s young men enlisted in the WWII effort and the rink’s straw roof required repairs. She explains how the rink was constructed:
First, the ground was levelled; next, the baling of the straw by a horse-drawn baler and a tractor-drawn baler, and those bales were transported by hay racks and teams to the location. Green poplar poles were cut from the bush nearby to be used as the uprights for the walls. A crew was assembled to pile the rectangular bales to form the two sides and one end… Next came the roof. Again, poles were cut but smaller in size and longer in length to go across the top of the bales. These were covered with hay, giving the roof a thatched appearance.
Although the existence of a straw curling rink may have been unique, the use of locally available materials in construction was not. Edna Lifeso’s Spring 1981 article “Homesteaders’ Homes” enumerates ways “the land” (and the plants that grew on it) provided the materials that sheltered the new arrivals in the earliest years of colonial settlement. Perhaps the most famous type of shelter, the “soddies” of early prairie settlers, were the product of unique grassland plant communities that had thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of the settler’s plows. Sod houses were a frequent topic of Folklore’s earliest issues, including in a piece authored by the SHFS to share the results of a province-wide survey soliciting information about them. Many of the houses had bare walls of stacked sods, but one respondent’s grandparents’ 1899 home had walls “plastered inside and out with plaster made of native clay mixed with grasses.” Not all sods were suitable for building – settlers had to find those that were “heavy enough to hold together, and supporting a good growth of grass roots.” The 1979 SHFS-authored article offered this final closing thought: “unfortunately, soddies would not answer the housing shortage in modern times – it is said that the right types of sods are hard to find, due to cultivation.”
One particularly charming story of a sod house can be found in the Autumn 1984 issue, illustrating the remembered romance of sod houses rather than their practical necessity. Mildred Rose describes how her mother, inspired by the weeds and grass that sprung up on the roof of sod-roofed barn, decided to plant a unique rooftop garden with “some of the precious seeds she had brought from Kansas.” By summertime, the result of her efforts was a roof abloom with “poppies, calendula, marigolds, nasturtium and snapdragons,” on which “sweet peas trailed their fragrant flowers over the sides of the barn.”
Flowers are also mentioned in the same issue by Kay Parley, in an article called “Fashions of Earlier Times.” She writes about how weddings were celebrated in the 1920s, recalling how the community banded together to prepare a meal large enough to feed all the guests. Parley explains that “the bridal bouquet was never from the florists, but was cut from a home garden and tied with ribbon just before the ceremony.” She invokes the atmosphere of these special events, remembering “the delicacy and spirit of romance that hovered around those country weddings,” which for her was embodied by seeing “the back kitchen the table…strewn with flower cuttings where a talented friend or auntie had just finished making the bridal bouquet.”
Trees and plants also served as place-makers, creating impressions that people remembered across the decades. Doris Thompson wrote about her family’s 1931 trip to Manitou, the first time they had been to a lake. She remembers that after a long and dusty day of prairie driving, the valley’s trees were a welcome and memorable sight. She writes
the shore on the far side of the lake was bare and barren and very uninviting, but the road ahead of us was so lined on either side with trees that only a few cottage roofs were visible. Surely the resort had more than a handful of people?…We soon discovered cottages, large and small, hidden in the shelter of the overhanging foliage.
In other cases, particularly old or large trees served as landmarks. In an article called “Some Special Trees of the Carlyle Area,” Doris Silcox related a story popular in the Carlyle area about a shelterbelt of Russian poplars planted by homesteader James Moore in the 1880s. By the time of her childhood, a group of boys who had become lost when playing in the bush had the idea of climbing the tallest nearby tree so one of them could try to “spot old Jimmy Moore’s poplars, then point in that direction” in order to orient themselves and find their way out.
Plants could be both building materials and place-makers simultaneously. This is demonstrated by the cover of Folklore magazine between 1979-1981, which featured the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society’s (SHFS) log-cabin logo nestled into an illustrated landscape including trees and shrubs. A brief article about the cover explains that the logo is based on a real house, a cabin built by the Constantine family “in the beautiful parkland north of Waseca.” The builder’s son, John Constantine, explains that “in those days…it was encompassed by big stately poplar trees and clumps of willow, together with an abundance of raspberry, saskatoon, buttercup, prairie lily, and attendant birds and animals.” The logo and the story behind it suggest that the SHFS was aware how important plants were to settlement history, both practically and symbolically. Furthermore, their characterization of the logo as reflecting the “‘Home on a Homestead’ theme of Saskatchewan’s epic years” reveals the powerful nostalgia at play in how they perceived the past and envisioned their organization’s mission.
Approaching Folklore as a source: A Cautionary Tale
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that one must tread carefully when approaching Folklore articles as historical sources. Often recorded decades after the events they feature, they are not so much faithful recollections of the world as it was as they are a powerful glimpse into the narratives that shape people’s identities and ideas of what it means to live in Saskatchewan. The magazine’s plant stories provide a perfect illustration of this. “Lost & Found: One English Willow,” is an engaging article by Dorothy J. Shea that recounts, second-hand, the story of a particularly beautiful willow that stood incongruously in the middle of an agricultural field in southeast Saskatchewan. Shea’s story is based on a friend’s childhood memory, recalled after encountering the tree on a visit to the farm years after her family had left the area. The story involves a homesick farmer returning from a trip to England with a willow tree carefully packed in his luggage, a marital disagreement about the space wasted on such an impractical object, and a covert tree-planting far from the house’s yard. Shea reports that the family who now owned the land had had the tree identified by a horticulturalist at the University of Saskatchewan, who declared it to be a peach-leaf willow. She explains that it was “one that doesn’t grow in Saskatchewan!” and continues, “I guess nobody told the tree.”
With the benefit of the internet, an immediate problem presents itself: the peach-leaf willow, Salix amygdaloides, is not only hardy in Saskatchewan, it is native to Saskatchewan. With this one error, an entire suite of questions is opened, making it difficult to treat this article as a factual account. Did the man inadvertently bring home a Canadian species that had been carried over to England at an earlier time, part of the massive transfer of botanical resources that characterized the British empire? Did the daughter misremember the events of her childhood, unconsciously filling in the blanks to explain the tree in a way that matched familiar storytelling expectations? Similarly, how much of the farmer’s supposed homesickness for the green gardens of England was a matter of fact, and how much was the application of a common prairie narrative?
Under the surface of the stories, we can uncover a great deal about the identities and values of the authors, and how those intersect both with the eras they write about and the eras in which they are writing.
Analyzed as a story, however, rather than as a source of fact, this article provides fascinating fodder for historians and others interested in Saskatchewan’s past. By placing a supposedly non-native, non-hardy tree at the heart of this story, thriving despite the challenges that faced it, the author draws a parallel that reinforces popular narratives about the hardiness and success of European-descended settlers in the prairies. Ultimately, consideration of this article reveals how nuanced and multi-layered the histories collected in Folklore magazine really are. Under the surface of the stories, we can uncover a great deal about the identities and values of the authors, and how those intersect both with the eras they write about and the eras in which they are writing. In my case, reading for seemingly straightforward mentions of plants led to deeper ideas about place-making, perseverance, nostalgia, and memory, as well as pointing to conversations about exclusion and ecological change. I hope this article is an example, therefore, of how the Folklore archive can serve as a unique source base for anyone interested in the ways prairie folk have negotiated the intertwined practices of recording, commemorating, and mythologizing their past.
