Poetry as Method: Engaging the “Weediness” of the Manitoba Maple through Poetic Encounter

In the summer of 2021 as part of my PhD fieldwork, I volunteered with a “Neighbourwoods” project in Ottawa, Ontario, to inventory and assess the health of our neighbourhood’s tree canopy. The project offered me the opportunity to get a sense of residents’ relationships to trees near or on their property and think through the methodological challenge of doing ethnography with trees as well as people. With this poem, I try to extend empathy to the Manitoba Maple, a tree often considered “weedy,” “unruly,” or even “crap.” I try to use the poetic form as an act of interrelation that attempts to push against the ontological delineation between person and tree.