Developing divinity

How flowers can be our greatest teachers

Hi, I’m Kate.

I am a Canadian urban biodynamic gardener. I live in West Toronto, not far from Pearson Airport, surrounded by a sea of concrete and 15 mins from the busiest highways in North America.

Perched on the edge of industry, I am stirring, spraying, and digging.

I have committed myself to growing biodynamically, and have developed a deep and spiritual relationship with this little urban plot along the way.

I hold certificates in permaculture and edible food forests, and my biggest gardening hurdles have been terrible soil quality, criticism from neighbours as our suburban lawn slowly converted to wild food forest, a limited budget, and my own inexperience.

I started searching online for a way to create biodynamic compost in urban settings. I found Katrina’s website “Blue Borage” and was captivated by her active social media engagement, her wonderful curriculum content and her engaging presence.

Katrina was as enthusiastic about biodynamic compost as I was!

In her home country of New Zealand, Katrina was making biodynamic compost and teaching through workshops, consultancy and compost management initiatives. A lot of her content was geared towards people like me – small urban growers who wanted to compost biodynamically but didn’t know how. You see, I was having a tough time getting the preparations I needed. Actually, I was having a tough time getting high-quality animal-manure at all.

It was Katrina who told me about Maye Bruce.

Maye Bruce from the Cotswolds, UK. Maye Bruce who, in 1945 had a clear vision that some day, someone like me would exist: an urban gardener who would want to cultivate biodynamic compost but wouldn’t have access to animal manure. A person who would read the words “the Divinity in the Flower is Sufficient in Itself” and feel their truth so deeply.

Katrina shared she was going to use the Quick Return Method while she moved house and document her results. I jumped at the chance to join in her Floral Activator research, and wrote an in-depth biography on Maye Bruce and Katrina’s research initiative for JPI. Click here to read “Experiment for Yourselves”.

And that brings us to this moment now: an incredible opportunity to celebrate Maye Bruce’s work and legacy in her own backyard. One hundred years ago, Maye brought this idea to her local biodynamic society and she ended up leaving. Maye could clearly see what other’s could not: that there would come a time when humans were so divorced from nature that they wouldn’t be able to find the preparations needed; that the degradation of soil quality worldwide required an urgent need for compost.

Here we are, 2025, and we are losing potential new members of the biodynamic movement either because they cannot get their heads around the use of animal parts or because their lives are too busy to align their gardening practices with the cycles of the moon, let alone other planets. Maye’s Quick Return Method is an entry point for people to develop a fascination with flowers. And from there, we offer up a permission slip to let the flowers speak. The ripple effect of that could be part of what’s needed to open up biodynamics for the entire population.

Breaking from the norm is a challenging role, and Katrina and I both embrace Maye Bruce’s rebellious spirit: we see how great the need for this work is. We are eager to celebrate her in-person in the Cotswolds and bring the divinity of flowers to an international community of biodynamic researchers — and hopefully, far beyond.

Kate

I’m crowd-funding to cover travel costs to attend the IBRC 2025 with Katrina. If you can, please click this link and help get me there: https://ko-fi.com/katehemingpanchal