I went down to the river, sat beneath the willow tree;
The dew dropped on those willow leaves and it rolled right down on me
And that's the reason I've got those weepin' willow blues

The Music Library is in full bloom this June! Step into our Queer Music Garden anytime this month to rest, read or listen in our interactive Pride display.

Queer stories are underrepresented and often find themselves hidden, if not erased entirely from the record. Part of the point of Pride Month is to highlight these stories and give them their flowers. We would love for you to engage and interact with the different parts of the display throughout the library this month. Some of the ways we invite you to engage with us include:

Browsing our stacks: Any books with a flower sticking out are highlighting hidden Queer stories.
Curated displays: Our rotating display bookshelf next to the Circulation Desk has highlighted materials in our collection that focus on Queer stories.
Listening station: Listen to one of the CDs from our collection that features music by Queer artists.
Queer song vine: Add a song rec by a Queer artist to the leaves on our vines! Help contribute to our playlist for Pride :)
Un-study DIY stickers: Take a break and create some DIY pride stickers.

It is easy for things to be lost or unintentionally hidden in spaces like libraries. The collections are so big, and learning to navigate a library can be like learning a new language. There’s even a term for this – hidden collections. This often refers to special collections that patrons are not familiar with. That may be because they are less visible – such as our CDs or LPs that don’t live in the public stacks at the Music Library – or because they are not clearly noted on online discovery tools. In the case of some of the material we are spotlighting this month, it can be considered a hidden collection in that you might not be aware of the connection many of these pieces have to Queerness.

This can in part be attributed to the fact that many musicians throughout time have not been able to be open about or explore their gender or sexuality due to homophobia and transphobia. Despite the barriers that Queer people have encountered over time, they have still always existed and found community. We have chosen to turn the library into a garden because some Queer people used flower symbolism to find each other. Key flowers you will see throughout the library include:

The green carnation: used by Oscar Wilde and his peers to flag that they were men attracted to men.
Pansies: both a derogatory term for men along with the “pansy craze” used as the term for a boom in drag and gender impersonation in big cities in the 40s.
Lavender: equated with Queerness, used to describe significant movements such as the Lavender Scare when Queer federal employees in the USA were fired, and the Lavender Menace, which referred to lesbian feminists reclaiming space in the women’s rights movement (Prager 2020).
Violets: featured in poet Sappho’s writing, adopted as a symbol of sapphic love. Lesbians in Paris picked it up and wore violets in the early 20th century.
Roses: associated with trans people, with the phrase “give us our roses while we’re still here” to remind people to continue to work towards protections for trans people (Johnston).

In addition to the symbolism of flowers, gardens, and nature more broadly, have been sites of reflection and recharging for Queer people (Kopylova 2023). Part of this can be attributed to the reminder that gender and sexuality is far more complex across the natural world than often perceived. This has been referred to as Queer Ecology, a term popularized by the 2010 book by the same name. Gardening and nature-based Queer groups have described it as a greater understanding of themselves and nature, as well as a way to remind people to reflect and find joy in nature (Henderson).

In urban hubs like Toronto where there is less access to nature, community gardens can become sanctuaries. They give people spaces to enjoy, “a few hours of respite in a queer safe haven before heading back out into the capitalist world” (Elliott 2024). The natural world itself serves as a symbol of resistance against societies that try to box us into invented hierarchies and social norms (Deely 2024).

When connecting this back to the context of music, these same desires for refuge and solace in nature are found. Musicians have always drawn inspiration from the environment, and spaces like music gardens invite people to slow down and pay attention to the world around them. It is important to take these spaces, like urban nature outside or libraries inside, to find moments of peace for themselves. Environmental sound artists have talked about how, “listening to environmental sound is key to the way in which we experience and understand the world around us, providing us with a complex web of information” (Gilmurray 2016, xix). What can you learn from listening to the sounds in the library, and the environment around it?

Music gardens are more curated approaches to this, with perhaps the best-known being the Toronto Music Garden. Toronto has undergone a long period of revitalization on the waterfront, as the city slowly decided to actively invest in urban nature and support public engagement (Heritage Toronto). The Music Garden is one of the most prominent moves towards creating community space by the lake. In the development of the music garden, there was an emphasis on how music, “can resonate and enrich the experience of public places” (Kruse 2023, 256). Much care and attention were paid to bring it to life in the plants, performances, plaques and tours, highlighting that music is always around us and meant to be appreciated.

Toronto’s Music Garden is meant to be an experience, serving as a tribute to music that goes beyond a mere statue (Kruse 2023, 259). Similarly, we hope that our tribute to Queer music in our garden is an experience that leaves you with an appreciation towards the lives and works of Queer musicians you encounter.

I stay in the garden with her
Though the night around me be falling
But she bids me go in a voice so low
Yet still I hear her calling

References

Deely, Annie. 2024. “What’s So Gay About Gardening?” Hunter Urban Review, January 17.

Elliott, Jemima. 2024. “TopSoil: gardening as radical queer resistance.” shado, June 26.

Doyle, Kathleen. 2023. “The Queen Mary Psalter.” In The Book by Design: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Greatest Invention, edited by P. J. M. Marks and Stephen Parkin. University of Chicago Press.

Gilmurray, Jonathan. 2016. “Introduction.” In Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words, edited by Frederick Bianchi, and V.J. Manzo. Oxford University Press.

Henderson, Buck. “Rooted in Joy: Queer Ecology and the Future of Farming.” Garden City Harvest.

Heritage Toronto. “Toronto Music Garden: From Barriers to Baroque.”

Johnston, Eddie. “Four flowers that have become queer symbols.” Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

Kopylova, Masha. 2023. “Queer Gardens: Care, Resistance and Ferality” Syg.Ma, November 5.

Kruse, Robert. 2023. “Bach on the Harbourfront: Geographies of the Toronto Music Garden.” Area 55 (2): 254-63.

Prager, Sarah. 2020. “Four Flowering Plants That Have Been Decidedly Queered.” JSTOR Daily, January 29.

In Bloom: A Queer Music Garden

Gallery