Old Man’s Garden: The History and Lore of Southern Alberta Wildflowers

By Annora Brown, Mary-Beth Laviolette and Niitsítapi (Siksika) Bishop Sidney Black

Through pen and ink illustrations and stories, Old Man’s Garden conveys the legends and folklore connected with Southern Alberta’s wildflowers, native plants, and Indigenous culture.

Originally published in 1954, Annora Brown’s Old Man’s Garden is a Canadian classic that tells the story of Southern Alberta’s native plants and wildflowers through art and in consideration of Indigenous traditional knowledge from the region.

Accompanying the new RMB edition of Old Man’s Garden, Sidney Black of Fort Macleod, the Indigenous Anglican Bishop for Treaty 7, provides his own commentary about Annora’s art and writing in relation to the Blackfoot, while independent art curator Mary-Beth Laviolette broadens the story about the artist’s contribution to Canadian art.

Also included in this new edition are full-colour images of Annora’s later paintings of Blackfoot lodges (tipis) and regalia, the dramatic landscape of the Oldman RIver region such as Waterton National Park, and her abiding, lifelong regard for the flora of her homeland.

According to Annora Brown, Old Man’s Garden is a “book of gossip about the flowers of the West.” A one-of-a-kind work featuring 169 black-and-white drawings of flowers and native plants, this classic text is about more than botany. Throughout its pages there is a sparkle to her stories of early exploration and settlement, her concern for conservation, and her regard for the Blackfoot Nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RMB Rocky Mountain Books
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781771603546

Annora Brown

Annora Brown (1889–1987) was one of Alberta’s foremost early artists. She was formally trained at the Ontario College of Art in the 1920s, where the Group of Seven and Robert H. Holmes, one of Ontario’s foremost wildflower artists, instructed her. Her artistic practice spanned the 1930s to the mid-1980s. Despite the isolation of living in the frontier town of Fort Macleod for most of her life, Brown made a living as an artist through teaching (including at Mount Royal College, the University of Alberta, and the Banff School of Fine Arts), illustrating books and magazines, and selling her brightly coloured paintings in watercolour, tempera, and oil, and later, serigraph prints. Her work is represented in private collections and various public venues such as the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, and Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.

Book preview

Old Man’s Garden

Annora Brown

A black and white illustration of Eriogonum. All images in the book are black and white, block printed illustrations unless otherwise noted.The Rocky Mountain Books logo.A man on a rearing horse lassos the clouds. Flowers line the ground below the horse's feet.

DEDICATED TO all Nature lovers everywhere who can see a tree and leave it standing, who can see a flower and leave it growing,who can see a bird and leave it flying, who can see a moth and let it live; and especially to my parents who first taught me love and respect for Nature.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction to the 2020 Edition

Introduction to the 1954 Edition

I. Wi-suk-i-tshak

Old Man

The Garden

II. Trail Blazers

III. Moon-When-the-Grass-Turns-Green

Prairie Anemone

Prairie Phlox

Cinquefoil

Long-Plumed Avens

Violets

Shooting Star

Bird’s Eye Primrose

Buffalo Bean

Larkspur

Fairy Bells and Twisted Stalk

Glacier Lily

Yellow Bell

Globe Flower

Queen Cup

Bear Grass

Columbine

Harebell

Dandelion

IV. Old Man’s Vegetable Garden

Camas

Wild Onion

Arrowhead

Mariposa Lily

Spring Beauty

Evening Primrose

Vetches

Liquorice

Prairie Potato

Silverweed

Prairie Turnip (Puccoon)

Balsam Root

Bracken

Sunflower

Docks

Mountain Sorrel

Polygonum

Common Nettle

Parsley's Western Relatives

Cow Parsnip

Angelica

Two Other Parsleys

Biscuit Root

Cattail

Wild Rice

Labrador Tea

Mustard

Bitterroot

V. Old Man’s Medicine Bag

Clematis

Wood Anemone

Avens

Fireweed

Baneberry

Mint

Bergamot

Dogbane

Alpine Speedwell

Prairie Sticking Plaster

Bladderpod

Yarrow

Wild Sarsaparilla

St. John’s Wort

Ragwort

Wood Betony

Brook Lobelia

Flax

Locoweed

Tobacco Root

Alum Root

Blue Flag

VI. Dyes

Indian Pink

Northern Bedstraw

Algae

Lichens

VII. Desert and Swamp

Arid Regions

Purple Cactus

Prickly Pear

Prairie Mallow

Prairie Clover

Skeleton Weed

Sage

Scarlet Gaura

The Swamp

Mosses and Lichens

Manna in the Wilderness

Horsetails

Club Moss

Sundew

Butterwort

Bladderwort

Indian Pipe and Cancer Root

Grass of Parnassus

Yellow Pond Lily

Swamp Persicaria

VIII. Incense

Sweetgrass

Tobacco

Dog-Fennel

IX. Moon-of-the-Flowers

Red Lily

Blue Lupine

Indian Paintbrush

Geranium

Twinflower

Pyrola

Orchids of the North

Thalictrum

Gentian

Gaillardia

Bindweed

Milkweed

Forget-Me-Not

The Pink Family

Thistle

Waybread

Cone-Flower

Monkey Flower

Elephant Head and Indian Warrior

Beardtongue

Rock Breakers

Wild Rose

Phacelia

Alpine Poppy

A Silver Indicator

Flowers of the Moon

Sand Lily

Drummond’s Dryas

Hedysarum

Everlastings

Many-Coloured Stars

Daisy Fleabane

Blazing Star

Goldenrod

X. Berries

Saskatoon

Red-Osier Dogwood

Canadian Dogwood

Kinnikinik

Devil’s Walking Stick

Rocky Mountain Holly Grape

Wolf Willow

Bull Berry

Snowberry and Buckbrush

Chokecherry

Flowering Currant

Honeysuckle

Raspberry

Elderberry

Mountain Ash

Wild Strawberry

Blueberry and Cranberry

Wild Grape

More Berries

XI. Trees

Quaking Aspen

Balm of Gilead

Cottonwood

Willows

Lodgepole Pine

White Pine

The Lone Pine

Balsam Fir

Juniper

Paper Birch

Medicine Trees

Colourplates

Notes

Index

Foreword

Niitsítapi (Siksika) Bishop The Right Reverend Sidney Black

Annora Brown, who grew up in the town of Fort Macleod, Alberta, came into this world at the threshold of the last century. She witnessed the fledgling town grow from its roots as a NWMP garrison fort into its establishment as a town that would serve the local community and the two adjacent Indian reservations of Piikaniand Kainai.

The world that Annora Brown knew has changed much as the world transitions into the 21st century. Someone has said that technologies change dramatically faster than culture. Annora Brown saw and witnessed, within a span of under a hundred years, a transformation from the horse and wagon culture to perhaps seeing, on TV, Neil Armstrong take the first human steps on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Annora’s life fits neatly in the 20th century that she was born into while that century was still relatively new. She left this world as it was fast approaching modern life in the 21st century. Through it all, it would seem to me that she fit neatly inside her span of life, and has left a marvellous legacy of her artistic talents portrayed in her painting of prairie and alpine wildflowers and landscapes and her depictions of Niitsítapiculture in her paintings of Indigenous regalia, tipis and dancers.

Some people live very private lives, others live very much in the public eye; but they make tremendous contributions to their communities through the sharing of their natural gifts and talents. Their life legacies of home life, and community life, remind us that those happy experiences of home and community prepare us for what we can bring into our world that will make an impression on the generations to come.

Annora’s life fit neatly in her affections, her relationships, her activities, her daily life and space. Most of all her place was to be outside in Napi’s garden, whether on the plain or on an alpine meadow or slope, painting. These were the places where she fit so well: places where she spent herself, and found her life and gave it to others.

Annora also spent her time amongst the old-timers. In her day and age, home was a place of family gatherings, family celebrations, times of thanksgivings, festivities, celebrations and meals, a time of giving and receiving gifts, a place of welcome to others, a place where one can be embraced by a loving family and community.

I am sharing this about Annora, not because I knew her very well, but because I saw in her artwork the passion and creativity within her that compelled her to draw and paint the natural worlds she saw and experienced. Much of life on the plains has changed since the last century; nevertheless, Annora has left for us a wonderful picture of a world before its transformation by modern technology and, perhaps, interstellar travel in the future.

I cannot comment on how Annora Brown’s book might be received or perceived by the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy. However, the illustrations and commentary I think would be very useful for those people who are studying or becoming aware of the variety of plants that were being used by Indigenous people prior to Contact.

Personally, I am impressed with Annora Brown’s work. Her artwork captures and preserves the proud, colorful history and the vitality of the Blackfoot culture, spirituality, and way of life. Her artwork gives an authentic depiction of the many plants she has painted and the description of their use in everyday life.

I am grateful that I have been able to contribute in a small way to the reprinting of a treasure, Old Man’s Garden.

Introduction to the 2020 Edition

Mary-Beth Laviolette

Artist, writer, teacher, caregiver, naturalist and western Canadian Annora Brown said it best. Old Man’s Garden is a book of gossip about the flowers of the west. 1 Conveying this gossip in an informal manner with plenty of anecdotes, Annora hoped people would use her landmark account to change strange botanical specimens to friends 2 – companions, in fact, that Annora Brown (1899–1987) had lived with ever since she’d been a young girl growing up in the vast grasslands of southwestern Alberta.

Raised in the frontier town of Fort Macleod, Annora, along with her two other sisters and brother, lived across the street from the family of Jerry Potts (1840–1896), a legendary scout of Scots and Kainai (Blood) heritage. As a young girl she remembered hearing stories about Potts and a small group of North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) taking a whole day to pass – carefully, gingerly – through a huge herd of migrating bison.

Exhausted from their epic journey across the western plains, the men were headed for a site along the Old Man’s River (Oldman River) where a rudimentary police fort was built and named after their leader, Colonel James Macleod. Their initial purpose was to enforce a ban on the trade of whisky to the Blackfoot Confederacy, or Niitsítapi, all of whom speak dialects of Blackfoot. The year was 1874. A decade or so later, when her London-born father, Edmund Forster Brown (1863–1956) arrived to serve at the busy police fort, the bison on the great grasslands were gone. Nowhere to be seen.

Annora’s relationship with the wild flora of the region, which in later years would bring her recognition as an artist, began early, and after the death of her beloved older sister, it seems to have taken on a greater significance. Then nine years old in 1908 when Kathleen died of scarlet fever, the soft-spoken Annora recalled a special moment when peering closely at the daisy-like Gaillardia. I suddenly felt a presence all around me, as if the spirits of the earth had come out to share the moment with me. 3

This transcendent moment must have been of some comfort to her given that Kathleen’s death was the second devastating loss for the Brown family. Four years earlier, an outbreak of typhoid fever on the train back from a family visit in Ontario had struck down seven-year-old Helen. Five-year-old Annora survived, but only after several long months of recovery, unable to walk at first without a wobble.

This sense of being one with Nature would last Annora’s entire life. It gave her art a certain strength grounded in a bolder, more vivid interpretation of the surrounding environment. There was a belief, as Annora Brown chronicler Joyce Sasse observed, in the restorative powers of Nature 4 – meaning its bird life, its wildlife and most importantly its marvellous array of native plants. This abundance in the southwest region of the province that she was to identify as Old Man’s Garden made the artist into a conservationist.

Later, for instance, she deplored the indiscriminate picking of wildflowers such as the lovely Red Lily, better known today as the western wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum). By the Dirty Thirties, Annora, now a trained artist marooned in Fort Macleod with family responsibilities, had, through her research and talking to old-timers, found out how widespread this provincial flower of Saskatchewan had once been on the great plains.

In Old Man’s Garden, she quoted Canada’s first Dominion Naturalist, John Macoun, who 50 years prior to its writing had observed, Sometimes lilies so abundant that they cover an acre of ground bright red. 5 An acre dense with their showy blooms – there to attract the right pollinator? Some might call that heaven!

But that’s not all. As with many of the 169 wildflowers and native plants covered in Old Man’s Garden, Brown lets the reader know how Indigenous people used the lily. Apparently, when the lily bulb was carefully steamed it was considered to be an excellent substitute for the potato, with a roasted chestnut flavour!

Accompanying the artist’s written description is also a superb illustration of the Red Lily executed in black and white as a scratchboard print. Wonderful for drawing, as long as no mistakes are made, scratchboard is a form of direct engraving where areas of the blackened India ink surface are scratched to reveal a white layer beneath. It is a fine-art medium that Annora handled with finesse. She was also able to afford scratchboard when her much-impoverished family was struggling to make ends meet during the Depression, including the care of Annora’s stroke-disabled mother, educator and suffragette Elizabeth Ethel (Cody) Brown (1860–1936).

Endearing as the Red Lily was to Annora, she could not find any legends about the plant! She had more success with friends like the prairie anemone, or prairie crocus, and the camas. In Chapter III, titled Moon-When-the-Grass-Turns Green, and Chapter IV, Old Man’s Vegetable Garden, respectively, Annora recounts Indigenous stories attached to these particular plants.

It seems appropriate, in a work of this kind, that the first acknowledgement should be made to the original naturalists and poets of the country, she writes in the Introduction to Old Man’s Garden, the Indians who have added so greatly to the world’s collection of beautiful thoughts. 6

The artist later wrote in her delightful 1981 autobiography, Sketches from Life, how she had assembled a pile of notes on the lore of the wildflowers. They ended up serving as her research for the writing of Old Man’s Garden in the late 1930s. Although not published until 1954, much of that book’s information came from first-hand interviews with older settlers and, as she once told an Edmonton audience, Indians of the Blackfoot and Peigan tribes. 7

From both sources, then – settler and Indigenous – she had access to a rich storehouse of oral memory. It is an important feature of Old Man’s Garden that today probably could not be repeated. Annora Brown, as the saying goes, happened to be in the right place at the right time. A deep interconnectedness between past and present flows through the book, with the artist/writer dwelling comfortably in both times.

Annora’s persistent curiosity earned her the praise of Rev. S.H. Middleton of St. Paul’s Residential School on the Blood (Kainai) reserve. In 1949, five years before the publication of Old Man’s Garden by J.M. Dent & Sons (Toronto), Middleton commends Annora on the idea of writing a Book, dealing with Indian names, legends, flowers and medicine etc. It is a vast field to cover, and one which has not yet been explored. 8

As for Annora’s use of the name Old Man, the Church of England headmaster of St. Paul’s, whom the Kainai later made an honorary Chief, – despite having written about their culture and history – could only say there were many versions regarding the existence of this fascinating mythic being. Better known today as Napi – The Trickster – in Annora’s mind Old Man was to honour the super-natural spirit responsible for the prairie-foothill-mountain landscape of the Niitsítapi, which included the Kainai (Blood) and the nearby Piikáni (Peigan) First Nations.

As Annora wrote in her autobiography, I lived by the Old Man’s River, near the Old Man’s Playing Ground and I had been familiar with the thought since childhood so the title came naturally. 9

More recent scholarship, though, reveals that Napi, while a creative force in Niitsítapi culture, was not revered in a god-like fashion. How could they feel devotion for someone who killed babies, disfigured animals and roasted prairie dogs alive? 10 asks Calgary author Hugh Dempsey. Rather, the Canadian historian and writer of more than 20 books about the Niitsítapi and other Indigenous Peoples suggests Napi was a trickster/creator or even man personified. 11

The release of Annora’s book of gossip (which was in fact so much more) was a high point in the 55-year-old artist’s life, particularly in making meaning out of what she perceived as being brought up in two worlds. There was her frontier home on the dry, windy and sometimes harsh terrain of southern Alberta and what others, generally old-timers, recalled as the Old Country or Down East – the latter a wonderfully fertile and civilized place where even the grass was such a brilliant green colour it hurt my prairie eyes. 12 Frustratingly, everything, including its wildflowers, was deemed more impressive.

This theme of things never being quite good enough prevailed throughout her youth and years as a student at the Ontario College of Art from 1925 to 1929. Located in Toronto, the aspiring Annora, then in her mid-twenties, was exposed to the fruits of a solid if somewhat conservative education in painting, life drawing, sculpture, crafts and costume, lettering and design in the commercial and applied arts. In her memory, art school was really where her real life began, and certain individuals played a key role in mentoring her.

It was an experience somewhat similar to some of the nurturing she had already received at home. There the learned women’s Fortnightly Club – still active today – had opened her young eyes to so many artists like Michelangelo and the Impressionists, while the campaigns of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had impressed upon her that a woman’s life could be anchored in something else besides raising children.

Fort Macleod may have been in the middle of the proverbial nowhere, but crossing the doorstep of her home were such notables as Louise McKinney from nearby Claresholm and Henrietta Muir Edwards (Fort Macleod), both of whom supported the legal challenge to allow Canadian women serve as Senators. Edwards and McKinney were part of Alberta’s Famous Five, an early proto-feminist group who took their groundbreaking Persons case all the way to Canada’s highest court at the time: Britain’s Privy Council (1929).

In Toronto, Annora’s mentors included the celebrated Robert Holmes, a design instructor who, it so happened, was also distinguishing himself as a wildflower artist. Together she and the Cannington-born watercolourist shared a love of native species and a concern for their conservation. Notably, Holmes preferred to depict wildflowers in their natural settings rather than as a botanical specimen on a white background. This less scientific approach would later come to characterize a new body of watercolours painted by Annora after the release of Old Man’s Garden in 1954.

Other teachers included members of the Group of Seven, including the always opinionated Arthur Lismer, who once observed how his western students had difficulty with the foreground because they were always peering into the distance. An entirely different personality was J.E.H. MacDonald, described by his Fort Macleod admirer as a poet and painter.

Annora Brown probably didn’t know it at the time, but she and her other western Canadian classmates such as Illingworth Kerr, Betty (Euphemia) McNaught, Gwen Hughes and Ruby Howe were witnesses to a decade of notoriety and the development of a new legacy in Canadian landscape painting before the Group disbanded in 1933.

One other member left a deep impression on Annora, and that was Lawren Harris. At the Studio Building in Toronto, home and working studio for several members of the Group, Harris on many occasions invited Annora and other students, to show them his sketches and paintings and most of all to talk about his philosophy of Art. The ideas could be difficult but everyone was left with an impression about Art having a greater purpose. In Annora’s mind it represented what she later came to call the life of the spirit. 13 Yes, one needs money for food, shelter and clothing, but beyond that?

Upon graduation in 1929 with, as she recalls, my head in the clouds, 14 the honours student returned to Napi’s country to teach art at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, fuelled, as she remembers, with memories of the Group’s dedication to the breadth and width of the country. Mind you, the prairies had never grabbed the Group’s imagination, and Lismer himself didn’t mind letting his students know – tongue-in-cheek – that only the telephone poles were worth painting.

It didn’t matter, though. The young woman was now in her 30th year, and despite the deep disappointment of having to return home in 1931, Annora grew to understand that no man may be considered to have travelled widely until he had really seen what lies about him in his own backyard. 15 It ended up being a good proverb for the artist because, unlike the Group, she excelled in depicting not only the natural beauty of the region as represented by its landscape but also its native plants, as well as leaving a unique and remarkable artistic record of Niitsítapi culture: its tipis (lodges), clothing, tools, dances, designs and portraits of Chiefs.

Her attention to this nearby subject, which seems to have begun in the early 1930s, is credited by art historian Patricia Alderson as being a serious study. 16 At one point, it involved the rendering of several large watercolours of tipis now in the extensive Brown collection of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. These striking works, while focused closely on the tipis’ design and symbolism, are also often depicted in the present rather than some long-ago past. Their Indigenous inhabitants are clothed as they might have been in the 1930s, and their means of transportation include vintage cars of the time along with horse-drawn wagons and carts.

In her research, Alderson also writes that as early as 1936 Annora was providing the Calgary Herald with a series of illustrated articles on different aspects of her neighbours’ culture. But with this engagement also came an attitude typical of her time: suggesting to readers of the Herald that perhaps in time only museums would preserve the lodges of the Niitsítapi. In hindsight and within the context of today’s efforts at Truth and Reconciliation, this theme of the disappearing race now appears incredibly short-sighted.

Included in this new edition of Old Man’s Garden is a commentary by the Right Reverend Sidney Black of the Siksika Nation, another of the four First Nations of the Niitsítapi. The Right Reverend Black, who serves as the Bishop of Treaty 7 – signed in 1877 by the Blackfoot Confederacy – lived for over 20 years on the Piikáni reserve. With his Kainai wife, Melva, he now calls Annora Brown’s hometown his home. For the first time, a Niitsítapi considers the legacy of the artist’s Indigenous subject matter in her art and in Old Man’s Garden.

The book also proved to be a significant stepping stone towards greater recognition of Brown as one of the province’s most important early artists. The fact that she combined her life as a naturalist and an artist set Annora Brown apart from many of her artistic colleagues not just in Alberta but also in the country as a whole. In that same decade, aside from many of her more modernist abstracted treatments of Niitsítapi dancers such as her prizewinning 1954 oil on canvas Prairie Chicken Dance, in 1957, she embarked on a wildflower commission that went far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

In the next three years, Annora travelled the province researching, hiking, sketching and then finally at home painting in watercolour and casein its varied flora. There was, of course, close to Fort Macleod, her much-beloved haven of Waterton National Park, now the site of an annual international Wildflower Festival, where many rare species exist. Annora deftly depicted Waterton’s