Epigraph

A true Canadian gardener should be referred to by the suffix canadensis, to signify that this species may not be native, but is truly acclimatized.

 —Bill Granger, Letter to the Editor, The Globe and Mail May 21, 1998 (A20)

Bloodroot (sanguinaria canadensis): [a] communal flower of early spring, this plant can appear in enormous masses along the edges of streams or in the moist, leaf-littered woodlands of most of northeastern and northcentral North America. When damaged, the stems of this plant exude a red juice from which the common name is derived. This same crimson liquid was once used by pioneers and native peoples as a dye.

—William Reynolds, Wildflowers of Canada (1987) (42)

Now more than at any other time ought the literary life of the new Dominion develope itself unitedly. It becomes every patriotic subject who claims allegiance to this our new northern nation to extend a fostering care to the native plant, to guard it tenderly, to support and assist it by the warmest countenance and encouragement.

—Henry J. Morgan, Bibliotheca Canadensis: a Manual of Canadian Literature (1867) (viii)

This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.… But as popular states bec[o]me corrupt, so also d[o] philosophies. They descend to skepticism…[and] it c[omes] about that…citizens [are] no longer content with making wealth the basis of rank, [and] str[i]ve to make it an instrument of power. And as furious south winds whip up the sea, so these citizens provoke…civil wars in their commonwealths and dr[i]ve them to total disorder. Thus they cause…the commonwealths to fall from a perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies…. [I]f the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease…then providence for their extreme ill has an extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men….

—Giambattista Vico, The New Science (3rd. ed., 1744), trans. Thomas                      Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (1968) (78; 422-23)