Garden

Produced by Dalhousie Art Gallery in collaboration with members of Dalhousie’s Indigenous Advisory Council

Affiliated with the forthcoming exhibition in 2022 at Dalhousie Art Gallery titled Plant Kingdom, guest curated by Frances Dorsey

Introduced in June 2021, this site will develop into a pollinator-friendly green space that will be a welcoming place for butterflies, bees, birds, and all other creatures that the garden attracts, including humans. The garden honours the spirit of Mike MacDonald (1941-2006), a queer Mi’kmaw artist, who planted multiple butterfly gardens across the nation(s), including one at Mount Saint Vincent University 25 years ago.

Designed by guest curator Frances Dorsey, in consultation with Mi’kmaw artist and scholar Michelle Sylliboy, this garden is a living interpretation of MacDonald's original project. Catherine Martin, Director of Dalhousie’s Indigenous Community Engagement, and Michele Graveline, Advisor for Dalhousie’s Indigenous Student Centre, are also collaborators in this project as representatives from Dalhousie’s Indigenous Advisory Council.

At the centre of the garden’s design is the Mi’kmaw glyph jiksituinen which translates into English as “listen to us”. It is surrounded by a mosaic of plants that can adapt to this particular disrupted built landscape. The garden is a community of plants sympathetic to one another’s needs, including both native plants and a few carefully selected exotics.

In future years, parts of this plot will evolve into a medicine garden, and as the site matures, will be used for student-based, multi-level, experiential learning. At all stages of its development, this site will be a place where we humans can stop, look, smell, listen, touch, taste (the berries when juicy and ripe), think, and meditate about how we are intertwined with plants and animals, birds and bees, pollen and the stars.

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