Forget's Heather Peat Hamm is an ecologist and an artist and says her debut book 'Blue Grama' is"my vision of the prairie."
Published by Regina's Wild Sage Press, it will be officially launched in the city on Nov. 2, Peat Hamm's book "is divided equally between illustrations and a collection of poetry, some prose, and five songs. It's not private, but it's personal," she says. "The prairie for me is personal and [the book] is focused on the people and stories that I know. It's my vision of the prairie."
"Blue grama is a species of grass," says Peat Hamm of the book's title. "It's a warm-season species that does really well further south. There, it's a big, robust plant. Here, it sort of runs into limitations in our landscape and it's a smaller thing, sort of eking out an existence on our landscape."
In 'Blue Grama', Peat Hamm writes of this particular species of grass, "I like the way it manages to sneak into the landscape where other, better-suited species could take over, but the little grass holds on."
Peat Hamm created all of the book's illustrations, including the cover, which depicts blue grama.
"I'm a plant ecologist and prairie species are one of my specialties," she says. "I used ink and ink wash for the illustrations."
"I've been writing for a long time, so it just became a case of collecting prairie pieces for my work. In addition to the poetry and the one piece of prose, there are five songs in the book," says Peat Hamm.
"The drawings took a couple of months to complete for publication and pulling together the entire book took about eight months."
"In my work as a consultant [plant ecologist], I've worked a lot of different native grasslands, including Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Association (PFRA) pastures," she says. "Things I see every day during field season are things that maybe others don't get a chance to see and I wanted to share some of those things through the illustrations to remind people how important the rural way of life and the native prairie landscape is."
"I grew up north of Kindersley and my last stop before coming to live here in Forget was Vancouver Island," says Peat Hamm. "I did a lot of forestry work on the coast and being here, I've expanded into working with the plants. It's a different palette here when we look at a landscape. We have a lot of blue and brown here on the prairies. We have green, too. But it's like what [American writer] Wallace Stegner wrote when he said that people from eastern zones had brown and a thousand greens. Here on the prairies, we have green and a thousand browns."
Heather Peat Hamm will be "reading, talking, singing, and signing" Blue Grama ($18) at The Happy Nun, Forget, Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m., at Michael's Coffee Shop & Bakery in Carlyle Nov. 20 at 6:30 p.m., and at the Stoughton Library on Nov. 21.
