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Deirdre Fraser brings her foraging, gardening and florist skills to the table at Restaurant Pearl Morissette.
Looped in by Melanie Hill
I’m a self taught gardener, florist, forager and edible plant specialist. I grew up in the Niagara area in a rural spot, and my parents were artists so I have a very visual way of processing the natural world. I had spent a long time being obsessed with food, and about ten years ago had started working in restaurants in Toronto, while I was also hanging around the art scene. It dawned on me that all the stuff I knew about foraging was in the right moment for it to take off. So I started going home, picking wild greens and bringing them back to the city for chefs, which was successful and gave me a new relationship with the local food world. Then I started gardening to fill certain gaps in the harvest season. I already knew a lot about herbs and plants that chefs would want, basically anything to give a breath of life and fresh air to a plate, and transitioning back to rural life went very smoothly. Somehow this transformed into a job creating a huge garden for Restaurant Pearl Morissette, which wasn’t even open yet when I joined, and now it’s been over 5 years there. In addition to growing herbs, culinary oddities, small fruits, edible flowers, foraging and so on, I also talked them into letting me do the floral in the restaurant, so I also started growing annual and perennial flowers. I’ve had this great learning curve and now I’m a florist as well, and it’s still exciting. Ideally I’m just transmitting whatever moment is happening in the garden into the kitchen, onto a plate or into the dining room, so when people arrive they feel like the season is very present. I feel like there’s a good common thread there across the wine, the restaurant, farm and cafe of great people working on expressing a local moment in the finest way they can.
I feel like I can’t define who is ‘a creative’ in the first place. Maybe originally this was used to define a type of person generally working in the arts or design, but so many professions require flexible thinking and creative problem solving. A lot of this has to do with cultural perceptions- 20 years ago being a chef was pretty much entirely considered to be just a trade, and now chefs are treated like how artists are, in that they have cultural currency because people give more value to the place food has in their life. I’m sure that custom welders, child care workers and forensic accountants all require creative thinking in their professional lives, just as well as being a painter has days of mind numbing tasks like sorting through old hard drive files of documentation, doing grant applications, or sorting receipts. Also I wouldn’t say repetitive tasks can’t be included in creative time. For me, my mind is really free when I have 5 hours of tying raspberry canes keeping my hands busy, it prepares me for when I have to create something.
I could say old books, though I don’t know if anyone would find that surprising if they knew me and my lust for Arcane Knowledge. I’ve amassed a good collection of books on cooking, wild food, horticulture, botany, floristry and ecology and it usually refreshes the imagination to dive in. Despite the fact that the internet has been so life-altering, I find it harder and harder to be surprised online, or even find what I’m looking for when I’m doing research on a niche subject. There’s been this flattening effect where search engines just deliver the most popular websites to you over and over. You can use a plant ID app to give you information about what that leaf is, but you’re not gaining deep knowledge about that plant and how it fits into the world you live in. Besides the fact that there is so much content in old books that hasn’t been brought into that world, it’s also kind of stimulating because when I was young that was all there was, it was books and making things and the outdoors, you had to either go to the library or figure things out on your own. So books can revive my sense of wonder about learning things.
I like to make my own version of something, because I see a void where the answer to a problem either doesn’t exist, or there are no great solutions. I like a fascinating problem, even if it’s simple- a better plant pot, a more diverse garden, a mixtape that suits me right for a certain moment, whatever it is. I like learning from other people with similar interests and seeing how they work out their own problems. It’s also not that I’m looking to have the definitive answer to something, maybe just joining an ongoing conversation in which different people contribute to evolving a problem over time. Also, flowers are great.
I can get a new hyperfixation any time, so right now, it could be uh, spider chrysanthemums, the history of daffodil breeding, plant resins, oolong tea, mid-century Finnish art glass, seed adaptation, great lakes invasive species cycles…
Maybe using food, herbs and flowers as a kind of sensory storytelling to help remind people that there’s a world beyond things that can be described, listed, and sold, and that it’s worth spending more time on.
I was overthinking something and my mom’s friend said ‘One foot in front of the other’ which is just another way of saying, I guess, take the first step at least. I’ve been trying to remember ever since that almost all big problems can be broken down into smaller components.
Let’s be honest, some sort of baba yaga in a hut in the woods with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling.
A space for contemplation. A space for renewal. A garden.
The children of Prince Edward County are lucky to have Julie Fowler on their side. She just launched a forest school, and wow I can’t be behind this enough. More of this, everywhere- immersive nature education for children.
The children of Prince Edward County are lucky to have Julie Fowler on their side. She just launched a forest school, and wow I can’t be behind this enough. More of this, everywhere- immersive nature education for children.
Anna May Henry makes work that gets at precarity and food insecurity in an unexpected way. I treasure a scarf I have from her that has the opening lines of Christina Rosetti’s poem The Goblin Market laid out across bright yellow No Name brand food boxes.
Anna May Henry makes work that gets at precarity and food insecurity in an unexpected way. I treasure a scarf I have from her that has the opening lines of Christina Rosetti’s poem The Goblin Market laid out across bright yellow No Name brand food boxes.
I’ve never met her, but I’ve been following Hannah Verra of Wild Ocean Pearls for awhile. It’s such a remarkable enterprise. I know foraging for food takes some dedication, so every time I see a video of her in a rowboat going out to find saltwater pearls I’m blown away. If I was looking for something special for jewelry, I would source these ethically harvested gems from her first.
I’ve never met her, but I’ve been following Hannah Verra of Wild Ocean Pearls for awhile. It’s such a remarkable enterprise. I know foraging for food takes some dedication, so every time I see a video of her in a rowboat going out to find saltwater pearls I’m blown away. If I was looking for something special for jewelry, I would source these ethically harvested gems from her first.
Zach Keeshig is an Ojibwe chef from Owen Sound that has been doing amazing pop up dinners and events with his project Nagaan, bringing his own fresh perspective on “progressive Indigenous cuisine.”
Zach Keeshig is an Ojibwe chef from Owen Sound that has been doing amazing pop up dinners and events with his project Nagaan, bringing his own fresh perspective on “progressive Indigenous cuisine.”