When European settlers arrived in Canada, they brought more
than their families, and the landscape, flora and fauna of North America has
been changed forever.
We often think of scourges like smallpox when we think of early
Canada’s history. Even though many Europeans continued to die of the disease,
many had developed a limited immunity and became carriers. The North American
native tribes had no such immunity, and the price for being in contact with,
and often helping the white arrivals cost the First Nations people tens of
thousands of deaths.
But smallpox has had, comparatively speaking, a minor impact
on our western environment. Ships brought over numerous other stowaways,
including almost every variety of sparrow. Most of the sparrows – one of the
most numerous birds on this continent – actually are not native to the country,
but are of European origin. Carp, found in all three of Manitoba’s great lakes,
are also non-native, but have taken over our slow-moving waterways. Each
spring, kids and many grownups spend days dip-netting these bottom feeding fish
as they work their way up streams to spawning beds. This massive “kill” does
little to control the carp population, and few locals eat the slimy-tasting
fish (even though they are a staple on many European tables).
Dandelion, too, is non-native to our continent, but now is
one of the most prolific and common weeds in the northern and western hemisphere.
1600s-era Europeans actually cultivated dandelion, using the flowering plant
for medicinal and culinary purposes, drinking a coffee substitute made from its
roots and steaming the greens. Every turn-of-the-century immigrant in the
mid-1900s knew how to make excellent dandelion wine!
But other plants, introduced by settlers into their gardens,
chose to stay “close to home” where they were planted. Hawthorne is one of
those homebodies. The berries were much sought after by the settlers for their
winter stores, but when the old homesteads decayed, large farms took over the
small plots and the owners moved into the cities or died off, the houses and
sheds decayed and collapsed, while the hawthorne shrubs thrived.
Two other staples of the European settlers’ diet were garlic
and horseradish. Both continue to grow wild around the old footings and
foundations of homesteads long disappeared. The plants propagate slowly, but sufficiently
fast to maintain a continual supply of these dietary supplements. A wild
harvester is sure to find her years’ supply of late-season hawthorne berries,
garlic bulbs and horseradish tubers wherever an 1800s rural house once stood.
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