When my gardening plans got rained out this afternoon, I opened up my copy of “Best Books for Kids & Teens” which had just arrived in my mailbox. As I always do, I turned to the index in a hopeful (and egocentric) search for my name. (”Best Books…” is the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s annual publication of a catalogue intended to help teachers, librarians, and parents choose the best from the hundreds of books for young people that are published in Canada each year.) I had two new books last year – A Pocket Can Have A Treasure In It and Love Every Leaf: The Life of Landscape Architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

Happy day: two page numbers by my name in the “Best Books…” index. Even happier day when …

… I flip through the pages and find a star beside Love Every Leaf (signifying a “title of exceptional calibre”)!

So, if you don’t yet have a copy for the student or garden lover, artist or environmentalist in your life, go out and buy one! Now that it’s stopped raining, I’ll be heading out to my garden!

Last night, at the CANSCAIP Mentor’s Dinner honouring my husband, Peter Carver, I learned from Rick Wilks of Annick Press that A Pocket Can Have A Treasure In It has been short-listed for the Ruth & Sylvia Schwartz Award.

Let’s hope that the young readers at Market Lane Junior School in Toronto make their selection for the prize wisely!

I asked my son the other day, “If I say ‘Cornelia Oberlander’, do you know who I mean?” He’s a busy guy, working on his MBA while working full time, so I wasn’t sure how much he took in of the book I had written about her. “Yeah, she’s the Green Roof Lady,” he said. I don’t think Cornelia would be unhappy with that description.

Today Cornelia emailed me and others a link to a National Geographic article which cites examples of green roofs all over the world (including one of her creations). Including lots of great pics (as any National Geographic article does), it’s an article that will help inspire the building of more green roofs – for their many benefits to urban environments and to the health of the planet.

Happy Earth Day! Okay, I’m a bit early, but with the spring rains nudging open the buds outside my window, it feels like a good day to celebrate.

My apologies to anyone who has gone in search of my South Africa or Europe photos, only to be asked, annoyingly, for Facebook login information. I specified that I wanted “Everyone” interested to be able to see the photos, but apparently Facebook doesn’t interpret “Everyone” the way I do. (Facebook may soon lose me; it has proven annoying in more ways than one lately.) If I get around to posting them elsewhere, I will let people know. In the meantime, thanks for your interest!

Perhaps my next posting will be about my novel in progress, that is patiently awaiting my return.

I’ve just finished reading The Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson (winner of the Best Book In Africa Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007). I bought it while in South Africa, thinking it might offer me useful insight into the complex world of that beautiful country, and it did, to some extent, though of course there is a lifetime of learning to be done here.

The Native Commissioner is George Jameson, “deeply unsure of the morality of his work [during the early years of apartheid], but unable to escape it”. The novel is the story of his son, eight years old at the time of George’s death, piecing together a picture of his unknown father from papers in a box his mother has passed on to him.

There is a line in the novel about those white people who don’t seem to get that Africa is not just its wild animals and its dramatic landscapes; Africa is its people. It stood out among many great lines, perhaps in part because I had recently finished sorting through hundreds of photos taken in South Africa into “albums” – Kruger Wildlife, SA Plant Life, SA Scenery – knowing that different people will be interested in looking at different things. There’s also a SA Carver Family Connections album that I’ll send out to family, so maybe I’m not one of “those white people…”. Still, the line did give me pause.

I will go ahead, nonetheless, and offer up my South Africa albums for anyone interested in having a look.

Scenery

Plant Life

Wildlife

A Pocket Can Have A Treasure In It will be on display in a special exhibition of recent books for toddlers and babies, during the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) Congress in Rome in August.

A Pocket Can Have A Treasure In It has also been shortlisted for the 2009 CLA Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award, recognizing an illustrator of a noteworthy Canadian picture book. Thank you, illustrator Deirdre Betteridge!

Cruising down rivers and canals from Amsterdam to Budapest had its lovely moments, but the experience paled in comparison to our visit to South Africa and to my own time in Liberia in February. Not that I’m ungrateful for a season so rich in travel opportunities, but I do understand why “Another Bloody Castle” is how many sum up travel to a string of cities in Europe. Among low points: cold rainy weather and head colds when the weather improved, stretches of time on buses instead of on the ship because of water levels and ship damage, too much dependence on buses where we thought we’d be free to come and go on foot. Of course these complaints were put in perspective the night we docked unexpectedly so that a sick passenger could be taken to hospital, along with his wife. They were still in Turin, I believe, when we boarded our plane home on Monday.

We bring home good memories, too, though. Meals and conversations enjoyed with a number of Australians on board. Our initial delight at the narrow cobblestone streets lined with old houses. How luxuriously relaxed it was to float along with scenery showing increasing signs of spring passing by. The loveliness of the Rhine Valley vineyards (and yes, castles!) A concert in Vienna. The sight of Budapest at night.

But it’s good to be home – despite the snow and the wind -  reconnecting with family and friends, our neighbourhood and our work.

See more photos from this trip.

I’d been told to expect elephants, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, and more. And I suspected that if we did, it would be fun. But I had no idea how exciting it would be.

For fifteen years my husband’s cousin John and his wife Veda urged us to visit them in South Africa. When we finally went early in March, they started our “tour” in Kruger National Park. Venturing out in an open bush camp vehicle with our guide, Raymond, we were immediately caught up in scouring the veldt for signs of wildlife. Our granddaughter, back home in Canada, wondered if we would see giraffes and we saw many. Did you know giraffes have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as we humans? We probably won’t tell Claire (who has just turned seven) about the giraffe we saw being devoured by a lion. She’d probably rather hear about the elephants we heard shushing through the grassy riverbed outside our camp one night, or maybe the monkey that stole my toast right off the breakfast table one morning. It was fun, as we went along, trying to guess which animals each of our grandchildren would like best.

When we weren’t busy with animals (including kudu, impala, klipspringer, warthog and others new to us) and various birds (hornbills, rollers, storks, fish eagles, vultures, etc), there were lots of new trees for us to admire and learn about: marula (whose fruit is used in the liqueur amarula), tamboti (the milky sap the tiniest bit of which will burn your skin and blind you), and the buffalo thorn among them.

Fascinating plant life continued in the Capetown leg of our trip. There we visited the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and the Tokai Arboretum, and took a hike across the fynbos, which contains more different species of plant life than anywhere else in the world. Learning about which plants were indigenous to South Africa and the problems created by those imported from elsewhere, I couldn’t help thinking of Cornelia Oberlander (subject of the bio, Love Every Leaf for anyone new to my blog) and wondering if she’d visited this part of the world.

Cornelia came to mind when we met our hosts’ son, Stephen, too. Stephen Carver is a passionate visionary with his hand in many exciting projects. We stayed on his farm near Sedgefield for three nights, with cattle, donkeys, horses, and eland just outside the old labourers’ cottage where we slept. He kept an office in another of the cottages. One day he proudly showed us around the environmentally friendly campus of a green business college that he helped establish.  Stephen has also taken on the Outward Bound camp near Willow Point as an extension of the Eden Campus. There, students will be involved in eco-tourism projects. I’m sure that Cornelia would be delighted to know that this arm of the Outward Bound project that her uncle, Kurt Hahn, established, is now being used in this way.

Stephen’s brother, Boody, is also involved in green education, working to help elementary and high school students to grow vegetables in township schoolyards.

The landscape of South Africa is almost indescribably beautiful: beaches with their gorgeous sand and surf, mountains with layers of rock (sometimes red) twisted and folded, vineyards with their grapes dangling in the sun, and the simple clean lines of Cape Dutch architecture. It’s a country with 12 million refugees and so ramshackle housing was a feature too, but in galleries we visited, we saw those neighbourhoods made into appealing works of art, too.

Hardest of all to say goodbye to, as was the case a month before in Liberia, were the people who were so important to our enjoyment of South Africa, some family, some not, who all generously shared with us their hospitality and their visions for and interpretations of various aspects of life in their complex society (the complexity of which I have not even tried to address here), in their stunningly beautiful country.

(Please come back in April for links to pics!)

When Menelik-Llord Aidoo, one of the writers I worked with in Liberia, wrote a piece about a comic book he’d read as a child, about George Washington and his love of nature, I was glad I’d brought Love Every Leaf with me, to plant the idea with Liberian writers that they might like to consider writing biographies, too. Llord was enchanted by the book - about landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, and the love of nature that she has for many years brought to her profession.

A young student of architecture, Sherrin (I don’t know her last name) is keen to read it when Llord is finished, and I’m delighted that awareness of this remarkable, inspiring Canadian is growing – as far away as Liberia!

I’m also delighted that shortly after I came home from Liberia, I received an invitation to speak this summer at the 75th anniversary conference of the CSLA (Canadian Society of Landscape Architects). As it happens, Cornelia will be delivering their keynote. My late father-in-law, Humphrey Carver, delivered the keynote at the 50th anniversary CSLA conference. What a privilege (and what fun!) it will be to speak to this group of people, many of whom will know Cornelia well, and if they didn’t know Humphrey will know of him, as he was a founding member of the organization. My mind has already started turning over with thoughts…

But right now, I have a bag to go finish packing!

Even as I anticipate heading off with Peter, imminently, on the first winter holiday either of has taken to a warm place, and returning to a basement much transformed during our time away, I feel the need to return once more to moments from my time in Liberia – for my own pleasure in reliving them, and for the pleasure of the many people who have expressed interest in what I was doing there. First apologies to my sister. I think I may have stolen the subject line for this entry from my sister’s blog.

The ride from the airport into Monrovia, music blasting from radio, the honking of the horn every time our driver passed another vehicle on the pitch black narrow road, with people walking along the shoulders, sometimes alone, sometimes in crowds, with no apparent concern for the speeding, swerving vehicles.

My first point of connection with the Liberian people: I grew up in Canada at a time before a body of children’s literature was established here, so I appreciate the importance of what the Reading Liberia program has set out to accomplish.

So much evidence of wartime damage and poverty in the downtown streets, yet what’s quickly apparent are signs of progress in the reclamation of the city. Cleaning up of the beach, no longer being used as a latrine, repaving of pot-holed streets, billboards proclaiming, “Never Again Liberia Let’s Reconcile and Live Together in Peace and Unity”.

When children on the beach, too poor to go to school, see me taking a picture of Ingrid by the water’s edge they gather round, keen to have their pictures taken too. Then I hold my camera strap tight as they take turns taking pictures of each other. And they just can’t get enough of seeing their images on the camera’s display screen.

Large coils of barbed wire top the walls around our hotel, and armed police guard the entrance to the grounds around it, but it’s the ordinary people going about their lives here who make us feel safe.

Ingrid, CODE program manager, is a great listener as I process all I’m seeing and hearing, and is tremendously reassuring in her comfort level and observations and comparisons with other African countries she’s been in, and the role I will play here.

During a meeting with Liberian teacher-leaders, there’s a discussion of songs and poetry that teachers could write down to use as reading material in their classrooms. Someone mentions the Liberian anthem, and soon I’ve urged them to sing it. And they do – 6 or 8 gorgeous black men – with pride and in the spirit of rollicking good fun, and I wish I’d thought to grab my camera quickly enough to capture the scene.

The sun sets differently in Liberia. It can be sunny and bright as it’s lowering in the sky, so bright you feel blinded by it reflecting off the water, but well before it hits the horizon it seems just to fade away. Meant to ask Johnson or Abraham, who teach science, about why that is.

What are those green things? Grenades, suggests a teacher during a session about how non-Liberian books can act as mirrors or as windows for Liberian students. And I’m told that some of their kids would say red is best because it is the colour of the blood of Jesus, religion playing a prominent place in the lives of many families here. So, a point of connection between Marie-Claire and potential readers here I hadn’t anticipated.

An E.L. Doctorow quote I often share with writers goes over as well here as it does in Canada. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” It applies to the whole monumental task that the Reading Liberia program has set for itself, too, I realize.

Riding back to the hotel with Sherrin, a young teacher, writer, and student of architecture says she’s very interested in reading Love Every Leaf when Llord is finished with it. She wants to read all my books, she says. She has already found herself reading Red Is Best over and over again. (CODE bought enough Annikins for all the workshop participants to have multiple copies to take back to their schools.) “I don’t know why,” she says in her lovely lilting voice, “but I just keep wanting to read it again.” Florence, another teacher, tells me that with so many illiterate adults in Liberia, King of the Castle is an important book for me to have brought there.

Wheelbarrows pushed through downtown streets laden with everything from water, to toilet paper, to fruits, to cement blocks. Women balancing everything from bowls of fruit to loads of laundry to jugs of water on their heads. Colourful market stalls. Unemployed men with cushions or maps of Liberia, all manner of goods, congregate outside the grocery store where aid-workers shop, hoping to make sales. Chase, an illustrator in my workshop group captures something of the street life in his neighbourhood in a sketch responding to an assignment I’ve given. I’m pleased to be able to buy it from him, and an oil painting of a group of African women in their colourful garments from another artist, Lawson.

The manuscripts I’m discussing with writers and which they’re discussing with each other range in how far along they are in their development, but the level of discussion demonstrates a good and growing understanding of what makes for a good story and how to discuss work in a way that both encourages and inspires a writer to continued effort, and I’m optimistic about their continued development after CODE’s people go home.

We hear and I later read some of the pieces people write in response to an exercise asking them to write about someone they consider a hero, someone who has inspired them. Everyone is quietly moved by Gus’s writing about Nelson Mandela. In my hotel room later, I am similarly moved by Mike’s piece about his grandfather. An idea begins to grow for an anthology of ‘personal hero’ pieces, and I expect to have more to say about that here in the future.

Among the many day-jobs writers in our group hold, are social worker, policeman, construction worker, working with trauma-afflicted youth, and many others. So many stories to be told – sad, and hopeful, and yes even funny ones. (Mike was born in the hotel where we CODE people are staying. It was a hospital then. If we look carefully, he tells us, we will see his little footprint on the ceiling of a room on the fourth floor.) Will I have the chance to hear or to read more of these stories? We’ll have to see.

A special Liberian handshake that ends with the snapping of thumbs and middle fingers which I’m starting to get the hang of by the time I’m leaving to go home. There’s an ocean that lies between their country and mine. It’s big, but not as big, somehow, as it used to be.