Protest Art
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled wood
$170 unframed (no frame necessary)
Ubiquitous in gardens across the UK and Europe, tasty gooseberries of many varieties, used in jams, pies and sauces, or eaten out of hand, are found everywhere. Everywhere over there.
Let me explain. When I was a little girl, I started life picking these wonderful sweet-tart, vaguely grape-like berries every summer from the sprawling, thickety, green bushes, careful not to catch my fat little fingers on the thorns. My parents had them on their property when they bought their house in the 1950s. I was born in 1969 and relished the cool pop of gooseberries on my tongue every July. I remember my dad, an avid gardener, wanting to add to the ones we had, and browsing the Miller Seed Catalog from Canandaigua, NY, discovering other varieties, purply-red ones, golden ones, and other kinds of green ones like these. He mailed in his order and that was that. A week later, he received a call from the nursery at Miller's. "I'm sorry, Mr. Morrill. I'm afraid we can't ship you the gooseberry bushes you ordered." The nurseryman explained that in the early 1900s, a federal ban was issued on all Ribes family fruiting shrubs, because they could carry a blister that harmed white pines. Mainly aimed at black and red currant varieties, the family also included, unfortunately, gooseberries. They pulled them up wherever they could find them, and burned them, nearly eradicating them. That's why most Americans now have never heard of them. And until the day of the phone call from Miller's, dad had never heard of the ban. Apparently, the bushes we owned had been missed during the gooseberry and currant holocaust, and dad had no idea. The plethora of big white pines crowding the driveway by the woods never seemed to care about our little bushes way over on the other side.
He dug them up and took them when we moved to a different house in second grade. The bushes were looking pretty ragged, weathered and old by the time I left home and got married, probably getting punky with old age. The pines there never once even had the sniffles.
The rest of the story goes like this: In 1966, about 55 years after decimating Ribes in this country, the US lifted the federal ban and now you can grow them in the US. Yay! However, a handful of states still have them on the banned list or tightly regulated. My state is one of them.
I'm mad about it, and this is my protest art. I can walk down the street and catch the whiff of a skunky cloud of smoldering marijuana that muddles the brain and stunts the spirit and no one does a thing about it. But I never smell gooseberries on anyone's breath. If I did, I'd have to call the Agricultural Schutzstaffel with the shovels and blowtorches.
