MACDOWALL, Sask. – It’s like stepping back in time.
Marie Symes-Grehan’s log house, nestled on a quarter section of land south of Prince Albert, Sask., evokes an era when settlers arrived in the province.
Heated by two wood fireplaces, Symes-Grehan’s home looks like a cozy location to hibernate, but it’s also where a small business is growing.
Her house borders the Nesbitt Forest, which boasts berries and herbs that have been around for hundreds of years. Four years ago, Symes-Grehan decided to put those wild plants to use.
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She was reading a Victorian recipe book with her sister, France, and came across a recipe for wild rose petal jam. Her sister remarked on the number of wild roses growing around her property so they began to pick the petals.
“We ran out and picked rose petals and our hands got coated with rose oil and the smell was in the air. It was really quite heady. We came back and made this jam and it was really quite delicious,” said Symes-Grehan.
So delicious that she began to make more jars and sell them to people in her area.
Now the original jam that tastes and smells like wild roses has bloomed into a small business with more than 12 products in a line called Lily Plain Summer.
Symes-Grehan said it’s not enough to support her and her teenage son, Joshua, but it is an adequate supplemental income to her contract teaching jobs at various Saskatchewan colleges.
Before starting her small business, she was a member of the University of Regina social work department, teaching community development for the last 20 years. She has also worked with First Nations’ land claims in Canada. But the traditional workforce no longer suits Symes-Grehan.
“I don’t want to, at this point, to work nine to five and just sort of be plugged in like a workaholic like I was before.”
Instead, she spends the better part of her days outside in nature, picking berries, tending to her herb garden and concocting recipes to add to her product line.
She said her isolated location has been positive.
“It’s really given me time to reflect on what I like to do. And what I like to do is to be outside and in among things that grow and buzz around me and be in nature.”
In the beginning, to get her name known to more customers, she toured local craft shows selling her wares with little ribbons tied around the bottle and home-made business cards attached. All the products were made in her tiny kitchen at home.
But, now she has expanded to a health department-approved kitchen in Prince Albert, Sask., and she buys labels and bottles from professional manufacturers.
“With the craft market, you could work out of your house, but once you’re selling to stores you have to have an approved kitchen.”
Symes-Grehan’s products are available throughout Canada.
Her teas are also in demand from places as far away as Taiwan. The teas are a blend of fragrant herbs like wild anise hyssop, which smells like licorice, and wild bergamot, chamomile and wild mint.
Symes-Grehan has reached outside Saskatchewan by attending shows around Canada. She won an award for best overall specialty food booth at Uniquely Prairies 2000, an annual gift and specialty foods showcase in Edmonton. The winners of this event go on to participate in the Western Canada Gift Show, also in Edmonton. Symes-Grehan attracted many buyers. Her best sellers are the originals: Wild Rose Petal Jam, of which she produces about 1,000 bottles a year, and Wild Blueberry Chutney. Her products sell for $7 and up.
Despite her success so far, she still wants to get into some of the finest food shops in the world, like Harrod’s of London. To do that, she wants to work with other small producers in the province so they can market collectively. She would like to call it a taste of Saskatchewan.
“There are a lot of amazing products around in this province that are coming by people, mostly women, from small home productions. Food that could be in the finest food stores in the world.
“We don’t have a concept of regional or specialty food, it just
doesn’t exist. People think you have to go to Provence or Tuscany or wherever the hell, anywhere but Saskatchewan, for fine foods.”
Symes-Grehan is beginning to make her idea of collective marketing a reality. She has joined two other women in Saskatchewan to start a mail order catalogue called Saskatchewan Summer. She said she hopes to move Saskatchewan products into stores everywhere.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to part of a huge company.
“It’s no fun if you open a bloody jam factory and you’re buying these berries from goodness knows where and you’re sort of pouring them into a hopper and they’re spreading out from a stainless steel thing into a bottle somewhere. It loses its point and I also think it loses its taste.”
She wants people to appreciate what Saskatchewan has to offer and, she said, to think “of flavors past, times past, a simpler world and a cleaner world.”
