On tour for her latest book on year-round foraging, Armstrong author Mikaela Cannon is striving to educate people on nature's garden.
With her recently published Foraging as a Way of Life - a year-round field guide to wild plants, Cannon is currently on a book tour of B.C. and Alberta, and will be hosting two events in Salmon Arm on Thursday, July 4 to share her knowledge.
The first will be a workshop for families and all ages, where Cannnon will show some common plants and highlight their uses, with some hands-on activities offering a chance to touch, smell and taste some of the local flora. The event will also feature live music by Treebirds and Leaflings. The workshop will take place in the library at the Mall on Piccadilly from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and is free with no registration required.
That will be followed by a book signing and meet-and-greet at Bookingham Palace, on the same day in the same mall, from 1 to 2 p.m.
Cannon, who currently lives on a farm in Armstrong, previously took a two-year wilderness guide course in Sweden and later worked as a ranger and research assistant in Australia, and prior to that worked as a sailor in the Mediterranean and Carribbean.
"In each and every location, I went and studied the plants and used them for food, medicine and material," she says on her website, www.forestfables.ca. "Further studies in ethnobotany and herbalism have only made me more interested in the topic. There is a world of plant knowledge out there and I will never stop learning."
Cannon now teaches classes on how to use wild plants in the Okanagan, with Foraging as a Way of Life her first book. She has numerous other local events coming up in the Okanagan from Armstrong to Kelowna, with the full schedule available on her website.