[Flow]ering

Gabrielle Coulombe

Floriculturalist, Aux monts fleuris

The touch of petals softly murmuring in the wind, flights of birds returning to their night-time perches in the canopy of big trees at the edge of the golden field, onto which the sun shines its brightest, hottest, deepest amber light… This is how a September day ends on Gabrielle Coulombe’s land, beautifully named Aux Monts Fleuris. It’s a time to celebrate. Not a birthday, but a season. A season to draw strength from within, as much as from the fertile soil. A year of flowerings.

A proud gaze, amber-tinged in the sun, the shadows of cosmos touching her face: The strength she draws on all summer long is clearly seen when she poses for our camera. The determination of a sun, as lioness! The sacred power of the feminine... And, kneeling among the sunflowers standing proud as a cathedral on thick stems, she sways with them, supple, resilient… She thrums with gratitude at the season’s abundance. Gabrielle celebrates horticultural cycles just like she celebrates the cycles of life, using the ancient and inner language of ritual. Here: an altar of flowers, there: the smoke of white sage rising in the dusk, and a joyful fire, and contemplation, and sharing… Not surprising then that she is often told that her land has a soul! She talks to it, honours it, and nourishes it.  

Beyond natural fertilizers (thanks to the goats!), it’s energy that replenishes the soil, here. The creative energy of this flower-filled dream, founded on the irrepressible desire to play outside, to care for living things, and to leave behind a life spent behind a keyboard. This impulse is supplemented by the desire to dive back into the knowledge of plants and of gardening passed down to her by her father, taken by a fast-spreading cancer. Her love of Charlevoix and of family fishing trips is also handed down from him! He definitely watches over the flower farm his daughter planted at Notre-Dame-des-Monts: here, by the ­Vivaldi that the seedlings sprout to; there, by a handful of his ashes among the square plots of flowers…

On this land, the life-giving energy of action also flows. Because, beyond the beautiful dream of a field teeming with flowers and long dresses flowing through the rows of dahlias when, arms shaking with the effort of it, the earth is shovelled and rejuvenated, having been left fallow for far too long, sweat mixes with tears.

Gabrielle has awakened in the early dark, returned to the fields by the light of a headlamp after having put the little one to bed, had moments of doubt, and of questioning herself, rubbing soil from her skin stuck there as if it would never wash off. Nevertheless, she has kept her dream alive, keeping it safe through her words (working with them very well, otherwise, as author of the « Simone et tous les autres » collection) expressed during the Louis Hébert young farmers competition, of which she was the winner, in 2024.

The sun ends its race across the sky behind the Drowned Woman. From this vantage point, the feminine silhouette formed by the backcountry mountains seems to have laid her coat on the borders of the land sowed by Gabrielle with flowers.  A good omen, perhaps? The presence of the divine feminine; with her fertile, creative, nurturing energy, to be found in oneself, as with all things… And when the sky turns a darker blue, the air, like the soil, begins to cool. Autumn is already in the air. There’s an urgency to the harvest of the last gladioli; they won’t survive the night. Gabrielle still has work to do, even after the photo shoot. Single mother, newly a businesswoman, in farming, no less: We know she’s tired. But she makes no secret of it. She makes no secret of anything. Around her, you can laugh, and you can cry. You can swear a blue streak and feel blessed beyond words. She is her authentic self, and she has no mask to hide behind. She is fully herself in these photos. The little, frolicking girl. The lover hinted at in the curve of her lips. The dear friend who offers genuine, deep caring in a freely offered hug, in a cup of hot tea garnished with hand-picked dried flowers.

Day turns to night, summer turns to fall; seasons change, and the world turns. Gabrielle has chosen to embrace this motion, to live with it, sowing the floral poetry of cockscombs and snapdragons in that motion. Moved by the improbable beauty of her bare feet on icy soil, of her face under a rain of embers…