Grovewood Group
What the Land Grows
My family has been farming Northern Michigan soil for four generations and I was too young to know what I would be inheriting in this picture. I inherited more than land, I inherited the desire to tend, whether it be plants, horses, orchards, woods or communities.
I have 235 Montmorency cherry trees. A tart variety that crossed the Atlantic from the river valleys of France, Montmorency is honest fruit. It is bright, acidic, forthright. It tells the truth about itself. This feels like a reflection of my own nature.
These trees are not simply an orchard. Each one carries the memory of the years my family farmed. The years of late frost, the years of abundance and the years someone almost gave up. And, of course, the years of waking before dawn to tend what needed tending. Four generations.
Grovewood
Grovewood. The name I've given to the place where the understory meets the edge of the orchard is also the place where I fell in love, with Neil, with Cleveland, with a little restaurant that no longer exists, the Grovewood Tavern, all wood-panel walls and twinkly lights.
I too sit at a threshold, between Northern Michigan and Cleveland, both are home.
And then there are the seventeen acres of woods, forgotten, a nuisance really. The threshold was, and still is, too close to the cherries. The cherries are the bright red star. My Grandma loved those woods.
When Gramps gave me and my sister this farm, he gave us so much more than just land. He gave us a legacy.
The forest bends, breathes and is abundant. Teaching me a different way of being in the world.
Wild and Slow
Ramps, or Wild Leeks
The forgotten understory, building layers, giving the ramps and trilliums what they needed to have been here, 100 years, or more.
These woods were once the land of the Anishinaabe people from Ottawa and Ojibwe tribes, holding more knowledge than I may ever know.
I now harvest ramp seeds with some of my favorite people, gathering them in the speckled light of fall. We call this project Ramps from Gramps.
When we harvest those little black seeds, we move through the woods together — in friendship, in family, in laughter, in quiet, in thoughtfulness, with a spider or two — hoping to offer growth and abundance to the next four generations. To conserve what is beautiful and what is good.
Left to Right: Elisa, Julia, Neil, Joe and Lauren