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Fiddleheads Are In: New Brunswick's Rivers Produce a Wild Spring Harvest
| Article
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10923 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
2,836 Words |
| Author
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Barry Parkinson
Barry Parkinson is a free-lancer writer living in Ottawa,
Canada. Sonja Cronkhite is a free-lancer photographer living
in Fredericton. Both eat fiddleheads. |
For a few weeks every year, usually in May, the riverbanks and mud flats of New Brunswick are the setting for an ancient spring ritual. "Fiddleheads" search for the tender green shoots of the ostrich fern, the first indigenous vegetable to appear in the province. The shoots (called "fiddleheads" because they resemble the tuning end of fiddle) have been harvested and celebrated for centuries. And why not? In a province where winter temperatures plunge to minus thirty degrees Celsius and snow drifts two meters high, the fiddlehead is a fine harbinger of the arrival of spring and a new season.
The ostrich fern grows throughout much of North America and in temperate zones throughout the Northern Hemisphere. But oddly, New Brunswickers are the only people who have wholeheartedly adopted the fiddlehead as a cultural and economic symbol. In a world of increasing homogeneity, the fiddlehead--New Brunswick's answer to the truffle--speaks to a sense of regional identity and pride. In the words of one New Brunswicker, "You're not a Maritimer till you've eaten a fiddlehead!"
Indeed, the fiddlehead perhaps is a more common symbol in folk and popular culture than the violet (New Brunswick's official flower) or even the maple leaf. Fiddlehead logos identify groups as diverse as the Nurses Association of New Brunswick and the (now defunct) Fiddlehead Films. In 1984, New Brunswick's bicentennial year, the Canada Summer Games were held in Saint John: the games' mascot was "Fiddle Ed," a giant tam-wearing fiddlehead. The provincial armorial bearings feature fiddleheads (as well as their traditional companion, the Atlantic salmon). Many of New Brunswick's numerous craftspeople and artists use fiddlehead motifs in their work, and regional recipes and gourmet dishes may be found in books like Karen Love's Fiddleheads Instead.
Probably the most famous instance of the fiddlehead's adoption by the community is Fiddlehead magazine. Founded in 1945, it originally was a mimeographed collection of poetry published by members of the Bliss Carmen Poetry Society. Alfred Bailey wrote in the first issue that the magazine's emblem would be "a fiddlehead, that small plant that grows in the Saint John River valley in the spring, and which is said to be symbolic of the sun." By 1952, the magazine had become a quarterly and also offered short fiction. It now enjoys an international reputation both as a journal and for its willingness to publish promising but unheralded writers.
A cross-cultural affection
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