The offerings of La Société des plantes

I’m really into sensory pleasure, so it’s really a gourmet curiosity. These are things you won’t find at the grocery store, but you’ll find in old Quebec cookbooks, like La cuisine raisonnée, which was developed in Saint-Pascal de Kamouraska, at the classical-home economics school. You know, let’s talk about a salsify pâté. Well, try finding salsify at the grocery store. You won’t, but it was in La cuisine raisonnée, so salsify was around, or people had it in their gardens.

So naturally, I’m going to look for products that are part of our culinary history. It’s about getting the best of both worlds: resilience and vigour, good taste, beauty, and beautiful shapes. So there’s a very aesthetic, very ethical and I’d say agronomic side to it in terms of health, healthy crops, and profitability, because when you go back to the old heritage varieties, the yield isn’t always there. You can have very high quality in terms of sensory pleasure, but lower yields in terms of volume. That’s what makes for a niche product.

Amidst this great wave of change, we’ve launched agrotourism, gourmet workshops, and opened a shop on site for the public, thus entering a more official circuit. In gourmet workshops, we follow the path from seed to plate. So we have a section in the garden where we talk about how to grow these plants. Then there are the resources of the month. So it’s like the content changes every month. There’s the horticultural management part, then the harvesting part. Then, in the kitchen, there are demonstrations and I serve a meal. And the plant gallery complements this agrotourism offering.

I really like the Indigenous saying that we are borrowing the earth from our grandchildren. It’s also about leaving a place that is more diverse and healthier than when we received it. So I think it’s part of our mission to be stewards of the landscape, to preserve or improve its diversity. We are responsible for the ecology and beauty of the landscape.