Juneberry, Saskatoon, Serviceberry, Amalanchier!
Good morning, Saturday Morning Garden Blog-Friends old and new! This cheerful long-running tradition appears every Saturday morning at 9am Eastern, and lasts well into the week as conversations percolate. A core crew of us reads every comment, as far into the week as it goes.
Anyone who likes to garden or talk about gardening or gardening-adjacent topics and whatever they devolve into… WELCOME!
When I was a kid growing up in Kansas, both our house and the neighbor lady’s had vegetable gardens as part of the back yard. Her garden had something special that ours didn’t, though — a row of Juneberry bushes at the back of the lot. I don’t believe I ever saw her out there harvesting, so I think she had them mostly for decorative purposes and feeding the birds. And they are indeed lovely to behold three seasons of the year: blossoms in spring, berries in early summer, bright yellow and orange leaves in the fall. My favorite season of the neighbor lady’s Juneberries, though, was berry season. The berries have a distinctive flavor, with sweet juice and crunchy seeds just a bit larger than raspberry-seeds.
When I eventually settled down in Wisconsin, it felt like home to discover that the city used Juneberries for decorative plantings. When we ended up with space to fill at the corner of our house, I advocated for bringing that taste of home right onto our property!
And indeed:
The bush “took” on the first try, the flowers bloomed, the berries ripened, I was grateful!
Given this history, imagine my delight when this little book caught my eye on the “Too Good to Miss” rack at the public library earlier this year:
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
I had listened to the audiobook version of Braiding Sweetgrass, read by the author, a couple of years ago. It’s a beautiful book, and I think the audio was a benefit to slow me down (I tend to read fast) and think about what’s being said. The central symbol though, the sweetgrass of the title and around which each section was framed, was unfamiliar to me.
So I was delighted to encounter the themes again in context of the serviceberry, aka the Juneberries of my childhood and adulthood both!
Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Servis, Serviceberry — these are among the many names for Amelanchier. Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance…. Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed. In this folklore, this was the time that mountain roads became passable for circuit preachers, who arrived to conduct church services.
Here is what the Serviceberry calendar says going into this weekend:
Not yet time for the circuit-riding preachers to come around...
We are likely about a month away from this:
Ready for the bees, so it can be ready for the birds… and the humans.
In Potawotami, it is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries….
For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is the “min,” the root for “berry.” It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry (Minaan), Strawberry (Odemin), Raspberry (Mskadiismin), even Apple (Mishiimin), Maize (Mandamin), and Wild Rice (Manomin). That word is a revelation, because it is also the root word for “gift.” …
In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response.
For me, gratitude is as much a discipline as it is an intuition. In November 2016 (in case anyone remembers what happened back then, sigh) I started posting every morning with something for which I am grateful. You can see a couple of those posts above, and many more of them in my Thanksgiving post in 2024.
Each of these little flowers is a gift, and a potential Juneberry
Gratitude is a force one can use to push back against the forces in our culture that bray the opposite: greed, extraction, scarcity, fear, rugged individualism.
Kimmerer presents an entire “culture of gratitude” as a way of life:
Many Indigenous Peoples, including my Anishinaabe relatives and my Haudenosaunee neighbors, inherit what is known as “a culture of gratitude,” where lifeways are organized around recognition and responsibility for earthly gifts, both ceremonial and pragmatic.
Grateful for the September butterfly on the Juneberry bush
The act of recognizing gratitude is powerful:
Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Data tell the story that there are “enough” food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished. And yet people are starving. Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough rather than far more than our share.
Kimmerer identifies the opposite of “enoughness” with the evil spirit of Indigenous worldview, the Windigo — a monster so heinous that one does not say its name aloud (which was a criticism of her audiobook, the fact that she spoke the name).
The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the “monster” in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little. It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world. Windigo thinking jeopardizes the survival of the community by incentivizing individual accumulation far beyond the satisfaction of “enoughness.”
The act of gardening, of attunement to the seasons and the Earth’s goodness, predisposes us to gratitude-thinking rather than Windigo insatiability. I see it in this group’s seed-sharing exchanges, and the seed-exchange enterprise more broadly. I learned it, all unknowing, in the Juneberries I ate from the back of the next-door lot, with never a “hey kid, get off of my property” from the generous owner! It lives in the ripe strawberries I shared with my recently-relocated neighbor, and the berry desserts she’d make and bring a share back over. (I will have to run a strawberry gift out to the assisted-living facility for here this June).
Let’s wrap this up with a concept I first learned from Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, which I’m pretty sure she re-visits in The Serviceberry but I can’t find the reference right now and I need to get this queued up, ha! The link and quote below come from a 1993 translation of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address:
The Thanksgiving Address (the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen) is the central prayer and invocation for the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora). It reflects their relationship of giving thanks for life and the world around them. The Haudenosaunee open and close every social and religious meeting with the Thanksgiving Address.
Just imagine opening every day and every gathering with a joint expression of gratitude to the elements of creation that surround us and bring us to be, and to all with whom we share the gifts.
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty and responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give our greetings and our thanks to one another as people.
NOW OUR MINDS ARE ONE
I’m grateful for this group, and for the gardening we celebrate! Thank you for the opportunity to reflect with gratitude, and for the chat that’s yet to come. I will be a bit late to the conversation, as we have the first farmer’s market of the year — squeeee! — and grocery shopping to do just when this gets published.
I also — in case it wasn’t implied — highly recommend both Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry for your reading lists.
All Flourishing Is Mutual
