In our new Book Arts Laboratory at the University of Calgary, we generally rely on pulp made from second-cut cotton linters for papermaking. Keen to grow and process our own source of fibre, and guided by principles of sustainability, the hand papermaker Brian Queen and I decided to cultivate fibre flax (Linum usitatissimum) in the campus garden. In the experiential book history courses that I teach out of the Book Lab, students examine hand-press books printed on paper made from undyed linen rags. During the period 1400–1800, the early craft of European papermaking intersected with the textile industry; recycled linen and hemp rags constituted the dominant raw materials for paper.1 Today, papermakers who wish to work with raw flax typically purchase the fibre dressed (cleaned of straw and shive)2 and cut to quarter-inch lengths. Our flax cultivation project would not encompass the full life cycle of flax paper (spinning flax for textiles, wearing linen garments to rags, retting the rags to arrive at fibres optimal for papermaking), but by raising flax from seed and dressing the fibre using historical methods and tools, our hands would participate in, to use Timothy Barrett’s language, “the long, long journey from a hemp or flax plant to a finished sheet of paper.”3

For more than thirty-five years, the visual artist and hand papermaker Helmut Becker led a fibre-flax cultivation project at the University of Western Ontario. In late 2022, we got in touch with Becker and with the Environmental Sciences Field Station’s horticultural specialist Caroline Rasenberg to enquire if they could spare any seeds for our project. After Becker and Rasenberg conducted germination tests on seeds that remained from their 2011 stock (a mix of flax varieties from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Canada), they allowed us to choose our seeds. Based on their high germination rates, we selected Agatha, Vesta, and two other promising-sounding varieties, Eden and Caesar Augustus. The special provenance of our seeds—that they were linked to Becker’s own extensive flax cultivation experiments for hand papermaking—made us careful stewards of these gifted seeds. The tiny seeds had already journeyed from Europe to Ontario, and then to Alberta, each carrying within themselves the promise of paper.

For forty dollars CAD, the Book Lab rented two garden plots of roughly one hundred square feet in the campus garden, and Becker and Rasenberg provided guidance on sowing quantities for flax. With the assistance of two English literature majors, Mackenzie Ashcroft and Kailyn Tourney, Brian and I weeded our new plots and divided them into a total of four fifty-square-foot quadrants. On 26 May 2023, we hand broadcasted seeds of Vesta (67.5 grams), Eden (76 grams), Agatha (72 grams), and Caesar Augustus (61 grams). According to the Government of Canada’s 2022 map of Plant Hardiness Zones, Calgary is located in zone 4a. Notably, prior to 2010, the municipality was in zone 3b. Our flax project in the garden was launched against the backdrop of the climate crisis in even more tangible ways. On Tuesday 16 May 2023, ten days before we sowed our seeds, Calgary awoke to the worst air quality in the world due to regional forest fires.4 With the city enveloped in an ominous orange haze, Brian and I attended the new plot holder orientation at the garden wearing N95s. Even without high levels of air pollution and the prospect of drought in Calgary, given the differences in climate and length of growing season between Ontario and Alberta, and between Alberta and Western Europe’s temperate “flax belt,” I was skeptical that our seeds would germinate at all. By 2 June, however, we had sprouting in all four quadrants.

Because the climates in which fibre flax is cultivated are so varied, and because flax might be raised for spinning or for seed (or for paper), guidance about weeding, watering, and harvesting diverges on different points. In Belgium, flax can grow without irrigation (save dew and rain), but in our campus garden, in a year that would turn out to be the warmest on record,5 we found we had to water our plots regularly. Diane Langston, a retired children’s book buyer, joined our ad hoc project team and kept the quack grass from overtaking our young flax plants. In mid-July, we decided to spread a light layer of pure worm castings over our plots. After that, our plants seemed to grow quite quickly and, by the beginning of August, the flax was in full bloom.

At exactly one hundred days, about two-thirds of the flax stalks were dried out and the seed bolls had formed. Breaking one open, we could see tiny light-brown seeds glistening inside. Because we were harvesting for fibre rather than for seed, this was the optimal time to take up the plants. We decided to make the flax harvest a community event. Students and seniors joined Brian and me as we pulled the flax up by its roots and tied the plants into bundles. At one point, coyotes, in unison with the sirens of fire trucks, howled. It was another smoky day in Calgary. Despite the exhila- ration of getting our flax to the point of harvest, none of us wanted to linger. Swiftly the bundles went into the trunk of Brian’s car to be transported to Brian’s home studio where the ceiling-mounted, levered, wooden system that Brian has for drying paper was ideal for drying our collected bundles. After another couple of weeks, we rippled the flax stalks to dislodge the seed bolls and used a mallet to crush the bolls. Later, on an uncharacteristically windless day in Calgary, I winnowed the flax with a hair dryer to lift the chaff and held a stainless-steel bowl sideways to collect the seeds. We tank-retted the dried, de-seeded flax bundles in fifty-five gallon plastic drums filled with city water and used weighted plastic discs to keep the flax from floating up. After five days, Brian checked the flax to see if the fibre was separating easily from the inner woody core. At eleven days, the flax was retted sufficiently.

When the time came to dress our fibre, we were fortunate to have Susan Kolziel, a plant geneticist and member of the Society for Creative Anachronism in Alberta, visit the campus on a cold November day with her set of flax-dressing tools. Shivering, we gathered around Susan who expertly instructed us in how to use a flax break (to break and then loosen the fibres, and to break the inner woody core of the straw), scutching board and knife (to scrape the skin from the broken fibres and begin separating them), and a set of hackles (to pull the flax through a bed of nails to separate the fibres and to remove the shorter tow fibres and remaining debris).6 Bringing along her samples of snow- and dew-retted flax, Susan made all of us think again about the accounts in fairy tales of “flaxen-haired” maidens. Looking at dressed examples of each of our four flax varieties, Susan shared her insight into the relative strength of their fibre. As someone who dresses flax for spinning, she was aghast that we as papermakers would ultimately cut the line and tow fibre into quarter-inch lengths and subject the fibre to a second retting. Not long after Susan’s visit, the Book Lab commissioned Brian to build us a set of our own wooden tools. Using plans purchased from the Woolgatherers,7 with some minor modifications, Brian constructed a set of beautiful and functional tools for dressing the remaining flax fibre. These were not museum pieces; the tools were pressed into service almost immediately and the dressing of our 2023 fibre, as was common in the period 1500–1800, stretched over the next few months. I hosted “Lunch and Learn” sessions with students, and “Flax and Relax” community flax dressing events. We came to know first-hand the great and collective labour that must be expended to ready flax fibre for making cloth (or paper). The Book Lab advertised these events as hands-on sociable opportunities to reduce screen time and to connect with craft processes of the past. As AI creeps into so many recesses of our lives, and at time of multiple wars in the world and the climate in crisis, the chance to work with one’s hands, on a humanistic project guided by frameworks of sustainability and conservation, was clearly valued by our attendees.

Plot holders in the community garden also became interested in our project. One gardener, growing tomatoes, asked if hemp, which he knew was a bast fibre, had also been used for paper; he suggested we grow some hemp next year. Some fellow gardeners wondered if their linen or hemp clothing could be recycled into paper. This led to a discussion of how our fabrics today, even the most “natural” ones, usually contain dyes and other chemicals. Neither do we tend to wear our clothes to rags as they did in the eighteenth century. University staff who were raising vegetables and herbs a few plots over were surprised to learn that wood pulp paper was a relatively modern invention. What was the true cost of our “cheap” paper? Since many of these conversations occurred under smoke-filled skies from forest fires, the urgency of identifying more sustainable sources of paper resonated.

Compared to the long process of preparing the flax fibre—from seed to pulp—the papermaking itself took relatively little time. But each sheet, with its shive visible, testifies to the collective labour that brought our paper into being. Always a generous source of advice for our project, Helmut Becker (1931–2024) died close to the time we completed making our flax paper. We saved seeds from our harvest, and hope that our paper and future flax crops will serve as fitting tributes to his legacy in hand papermaking.

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notes

1. For the reliance on hemp and linen rags by papermakers at this time, see the second edition of Timothy D. Barrett, European Hand Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques (Ann Arbor MI: The Legacy Press, 2019), 10.

2. “Dressing” flax is a historically accurate term that denotes all of breaking, scutching, and hackling. See Adrienne D. Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 55.

3. Timothy Barrett, European Hand Papermaking, 42.

4. See Robson Fletcher, “Alberta has endured some of the worst air quality in the world this week due to wildfire smoke,” CBC News

(19 May 2023), https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-air-quality-among-worst-in-the-world-wildfire-smoke-1.6848195 (accessed September 2024).

5. See the World Meteorological Organization’s report, https://wmo.int/media/news/wmo-confirms-2023-smashes-global-temperature-record (accessed September 2024).

6. See Hood in The Weaver’s Cloth for a detailed account of these tools and processes, 50–55. I am also grateful to Susan Kolziel for her assistance with these definitions.

7. The Woolgatherers’ plans are at https://www.woolgatherers.com (accessed September 2024).

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