This week's photographer is Laura Shaw Stevenson of Franklin, Maine. Fiddleheads are indeed a Maine Thing. 

Laura Shaw Stevenson
Laura Shaw Stevenson
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Fiddlehead greens are the furled fronds of a young fern which are harvested for use as a vegetable during the short period before they would unroll into a new frond

Ostrich fern fiddleheads, picked throughout Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick and euphemistically known as green violins or fern croziers, are powerful antioxidants, rich in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and high in iron and fibre.

For at least 10,000 years, The Maliseet, Mi'kmaq and Penobscot peoples of Eastern Canada and Maine have traditionally harvested fiddlehead ferns.  The greens became important in the diets of Acadian settlers in the early 18th century, and to loyalist colonists settling in New Brunswick a few decades later.

The Maine Fiddlehead Festival is held in Farmington. Tide Head, New Brunswick, bills itself as the "Fiddlehead Capital of the World." Plaster Rock, New Brunswick hosts a Fiddlehead Festival every Canada Day, July 1st, and boasts a 24-foot wooden fiddlehead sculpture at the Plaster Rock Tourist Park. Madawaska, Maine even has an online newspaper called The Fiddlehead Focus.

Each week, we bring you Maine and New Brunswick landscape and natural world photographers from the Just Looking Around Facebook group.

 

 

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