Inspiring Women Through Art.

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© Aislinn Adams           When Sleeping Women Awake

Every accident has a silver lining.

Many years ago I fell while rock climbing at my local crag in Dublin, Ireland. I broke my ankle and spent nine weeks in a large, heavy cast, from upper calf to toe tips. I broke the talus bone- the second rarest bone in the body to break- and difficult to heal. I was warned that on no account should I put any weight on the leg. The orthopedic surgeon, well known for his poor bedside manner, left me in no doubt that if the bone didn’t heal I would have a permanent limp. I hopped out of his surgery on my new crutches stifling a sob and vowing to do everything possible to help my ankle heel.

A forced vacation.

At the time I was a free-lance graphic designer living in a second floor apartment with no elevator. This was in the ‘old days’ before email and websites. I had no option but to take a forced vacation. I rested my broken ankle, elevating it as much as possible until the swelling eased. I had been free-lancing for a few years at that stage and had never really taken any vacation: as a self-employed person if I didn’t work I didn’t get paid. I worried a little about the loss of income but I had some money set aside and I knew that no amount of money could compensate for a permanent limp.

“When sleeping women awake, mountains will move”.

One day during my ‘convalescence’ I visited some female friends. Several of them were women religious from a prominent Catholic religious order in Ireland. I enjoyed the spirited, intelligent conversation darting back and forth across the table as we drank tea. They were highly competent women, leaders in their communities. We discussed an article one of them had read. She shared this quote from the article, “When sleeping women awake, mountains will move”. We all responded enthusiastically to the inspirational quotation. The irony of the situation was not lost on me as I sat there with my climbing injury, unable to get near a mountain.

A dream-like image came to mind.

One of my friends turned to me saying I should create an illustration to go with the quote. Usually my imagination doesn’t work that way. I don’t just come up with an image to order. I have to let the idea or feeling sink in. Not this time. Almost instantly a dream-like image came to mind. When I went home that evening I started working on it. I chose a pen and ink cross-hatching style to create the desired affect.  I used my finest rapidograph, handling it carefully, its ridiculously narrow-gauge hollow ‘nib’ only letting the ink flow when held lightly and delicately above the paper. The work took me hours and hours. I didn’t care. I was totally engrossed. With time the mountain range of women moved from my imagination onto paper and to this day that illustration strikes a chord with so many women. What a gift that fall turned out to be.

Eventually my ankle healed and, after a lot of physical therapy, I went back to climbing. I had no limp and a new portfolio of illustrations.

Aislinn Adams

The Common Fig, Ficus carica, the First Cultivated Plant.

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The story of the common fig, Ficus carica,  needs more than one blog.

I started writing about the common fig in my last blog- The common fig, Ficus carica, Fruit, Flower or Carnivore? As I uncovered its story I realized that it would take more than one blog to share its long and complex history.  I illustrated the common fig, Ficus carica, several times for the “Digging In” gardening column of the Washington Post. This week I post a botanical illustration of Ficus carica “Negronne” to illustrate this entry. This natural dwarf variety can be grown in containers and is particularly suited to the Pacific North West, where I live.

The common fig, Ficus carica, and the first farmers.

It seems everything I read currently brings me back to the first farmers. Recently while reading about the Burren region in the west of Ireland I learned how the first farmers impacted that environment, using only a simple axe as their main tool. Then, while researching the common fig, Ficus carica, for this blog, I discovered that it was probably the first plant cultivated by humans: predating the Neolithic farmers’ “eight founder crops” -einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, lentils, chickpeas, barley, flax, bitter vetch, and peas, Wikipedia– by many centuries.

Neolithic Farmers.

The Neolithic period (starting c. 9500 BCE) marks the beginning of farming and the common fig comes from the region where farming began, the Middle East. Common fig subfossils found in the Neolithic village of Gilgal 1, 13 Kilometers north of Jericho (present day West Bank,) date from 9400-9200 BCE.

Parthenocarpic figs and human selection.

This first fig crop was a parthenocarpic type i.e. the fruit is produced without pollination (see my last blog for more on this subject.) This means that these fig plants were “cultivars” i.e. plants selected and propagated from cuttings by humans rather than grown from seed. We have been growing and eating figs, as well as introducing them to different parts of the world, for over 12,000 years. Parthenocarpic varieties helped this spread because they don’t need a local insect to pollinate the plants in order to produce fruit.

How much do I know about the food I eat?

Reading about the common fig makes me realize how little I know about the food I eat. I’m not talking about which farm my food comes from, whether it is organic or conventional, what variety it is, or how far it has traveled to reach the grocery shop’s shelf. Rather, I am talking about food’s cultural history. I wonder what it means that we have been eating figs since the end of the last ice age? What a long human-plant relationship this is. Have we co-evolved together?

Plant or human selection?

In my last blog I also wrote about the high nutritional value of figs, especially in relation to our human needs. Is this just a happy coincidence? Science may explain the selection and success of figs as a food crop through a mixture of human interference and natural selection but I wonder if those first farmers choose the fig knowing how nutritional it was to eat or just because it tasted good? Or, could it be, as Michael Pollan suggests in his book The Botany of Desire, that the common fig chose us to guarantee its survival?

Agriculture- from Neolithic times to today.

Agriculture has come a long way since Neolithic times. The highly intensive form that we now practice, with its heavy dependence on chemicals, limited selection of crops grown in vast monocultures and enormous use of fossil fuels and other natural resources to produce the crops, is a far cry from those early days. I imagine those first farmers, mostly women undoubtedly, scratching their heads in amazement. Learning about the common fig’s story raises my awareness of our dependence on nature to sustain us: the long and critical relationship we humans have with the plant kingdom- the source of most of our food- and the role this small fruit has played.

Aislinn Adams