Various white and black glazed ceramic
Knapped blue glass
Blue crawfish claw
Heavy polished black stone
I went and picked cherries on the tree line. I saw a mockingbird in the cherry tree and we exchanged some unpleasantries. There are three cherry trees in the Sacred Heart tree lines that I know, and they are growing among fragrant cherry laurels, chasseparaille, wild grape vines, pecans, hackberry, and elderflower bushes. Today there was a light drizzle paired with the smell of bonfire out on the blue coteau. There were nettles gone to seed underfoot with no sting. I picked cherries until it started to really rain. I stored them in an empty plastic apple I got for teacher appreciation.
I gathered there, at home and also along the Bayou Fuselier Road. I reviewed the name of wild cherry in Choctaw italikchi, doctor tree. Tomorrow I plan on checking my other trees and researching the uses of the cherry leaves, bark and root after Marius' first communion.
Ashlee Eastin Wilson is an artist, musician, writer, Cajun radio announcer and teacher from Ville Platte, Louisiana. She is an autodidact in Louisiana (Cajun/Creole) French and is known for her documentation of the folklore of Evangeline Parish and Prairie des Femmes in Saint Landry Parish through her bilingual commonplace books.
Ashlee Wilson was raised in Ville Platte, Louisiana and graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in Secondary English Education. An anglophone by birth, she became fluent in French by attending University Saint Anne in Nova Scotia. This began a solid base for Louisiana French, which she reclaimed through documentation both written and visual. Ashlee is a diarist and draws endless inspiration from hundreds of handmade seasonal journals and books that she creates. She taught English literature and French for over a decade in the Louisiana public school system, namely Beau Chêne High School and the Academy of the Sacred Heart at Grand Coteau. With grants procured by her French student’s work, she was able to furnish her classroom with sets of the Dictionary of Louisiana French as well as other cultural titles.
She used her environment to become not only fluent but also knowledgeable in the different dialects that exist across Louisiana society. Ashlee dedicated years to careful documentation of the radio program La Tasse de Café on 92.5 KVPI, transcribing stories, local folklore, word play and herbal remedies, as well as modern commercials and snippets of modern Louisiana French life. This work culminated with being hired by KVPI as the youngest female host to announce the news in French, the Tasse de Cafe Radio Program, and even hosting the world-famous Saturday morning French broadcast from Fred’s Lounge in Mamou. The written and recorded documentation from these years serves as the source for her current work in self-taught folklore. Additionally this work prepared her to act as the French announcer for “Bonjour, Louisiane” a morning French music and news program at KRVS in Lafayette, Louisiana. She replaced the long-time host Pete Bergeron who initiated the program and held the position for 40 years.
She serveed on the board of directors for the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) from (2009-2012) and as a Louisiana ambassador to the Center des Francophonie des Ameriques in Montreal in 2010.
In 2012 she began the Prairie des Femmes blog that became an early online resource for authentic information about Louisiana language and culture. The blog began as daily documentation of the place known in French as Prairie des Femmes (Women’s Prairie) and research on the origin of this place name. It grew to include photography, memes, writing, French transcriptions, recordings, folklore, music, lessons, and more. It was one of the first websites to offer visual media in Louisiana French and incorporate local folklore and music lyrics into modern media for a younger audience wishing to learn. Ashlee uses her knowledge of modern American culture and blends it organically with the archaic knowledge found in Louisiana French. She has served the community by providing bilingual announcements at the Lafayette Regional Airport, translating the Opelousas Travelers Guide to French, appearing on radio and podcasts such as Louisiane en Vers and Charrer Veiller, as well by hosting the monthly French table in Opelousas as well as the Arnaudville French Table at Nunu's.
As a writer she has created hundreds of hand decorated journals in Louisiana French, as well as dozens of niche zines. She has published as a guest columnist in local papers such as the Advertiser, Advocate, The Current, Les Bonnes Nouvelles, New Orleans Magazine and Acadiana Profile. Her work has been featured in 64 Parishes, Bitter Southerner, Country Roads Magazine and the New York Times. She published her first work ‘Ô Malheureuse’ on UL Press in 2019, a first of its kind collection of modern Louisiana women’s writings in French. The collection began on the PDF blog and was published by UL Press and released in time for the 2019 Festival Acadiens and Creole dedicated to the contributions of women in Louisiana music.
As a photographer, Ashlee has self published three books, The Plains of Mary, a photo book of Marian yard shrines, Prairie des Femmes: Portraits of a Place, a collection of surreal photographs from the countryside of Acadiana, and finally A Prairie des Femmes Field Guide, a collection of art and writing from the PDF blog. Her work has been featured in Louisiana Cultural Vistas, 64 Parishes, and she has shown her photographs with photographers Denny Culbert and Jo Vidrine. She had thirty of her photos shown as part of Frank Relle’s New Orleans in Photographs exhibit in Moscow in 2014. Her work has also been recognized by photographer Zack Smith’s project « My Louisiana Muse » as well as Nick Slie’s « Cry You One. » In June 2024 her land work, as well as her work with the rare medicinal plant vinéraire was featured in Monique Verdin and Rachel Breunlin's Botanica exhibit at the Cabildo in New Orleans.
Her family and home were featured in the Home and Garden Section of the New York Times in 2012. As recently as 2021 her work was featured by National Geographic and in a documentary that won the CreateLouisiana culture grant, Intention, by Olivia Perillo and Syd Horn. It is a film project that seeks to explore the untold feminine narratives of Cajun and Creole artists and healers.
She is a musician, well known in south Louisiana as a professional triangle player. She also sings and writes in Louisiana French, incorporating modern music with that from the Cajun and Creole archives. Her first original song ‘Maison Blanche’ released on The 78 Project in 2014, and in 2020 Nouveau Electric Records released her ‘Trois Rangs’ on 45rpm vinyl, remixed by Korey Richey (LCD Soundsystem). She has played triangle on the recent PBS documentary American Epic.
In 2024 Ashlee's work for the Prairie des Femmes was included in the exhibition Botanica at the Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo in New Orleans. In 2025 she showed her paintings, journals and plant research with the medicinal known as vinéraire in Prairie Stories, a collaborative show at the Acadiana Center of the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana. Prairie Stories featured a collection of artists and their work on the folkloric and environmental realms of the Louisiana Prairie. She has spoken at the Louisiana Folklore Society meeting on the Prairie des Femmes Blog and digital folklore, as well as at the Bayou Culture Collaborative meeting where she spoke on her ethnobotany research. Most recently in May 2026 she presented in the Folklife Village's Past to Pixel tent which featured digital folklore
at the New Orleans' Jazz fest.
As of 2023 Ashlee is the lower school French teacher at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. In August 2024, she began leading the Arnaudville French Table at Nunu's Cultural Center.
Ashlee raises her sons in the Prairie des Femmes.
When I was a girl I read in a Susan Branch book about the folkloric belief in the healing and beautifying powers imbued in the dew of May 1st. Since then it's been thirty years, and I have made a point to celebrate May 1st by touching the dew, gathering flowers, crowning Mary and eventually collecting ounces of dew in bottles and pyrex measuring cups.
Images from my Instagram Memory entitled "May 1"
Vale Rosa Palustris
Swamp Rose season comes with the arrival of the painted bunting's persistent song, blue cardinal eggs in the blackberry bush, red Mamou flower shoots, mulberry trees in full fruit. Both the male and female cardinals tend the nest. The mama bird is so intelligent. She has made her nest in a little Celeste fig tree overtaken by blackberry vines. Within the protection of the blackberry bush’s thorny cage, all surrounded with red and green fruit, her nest is suspended. It is next to a blue kiddie pool of fresh water and a few feet from a mulberry tree in full ripeness. There was a big storm from the west last night and the sound of the rain on the metal roof woke me up at midnight and just before sunrise. I wondered how the mama cardinal protected her three baby birds, and imagined she did so with her wings. The rain turned the nasturtium yellow. I repotted it. I am tending a small garden edged with unused firewood and filled with compost from the Saint Landry Parish landfill. There is a blue runner who visits the garden. Daily I check the cardinal nest and the swamp rose blossoms. Often I have to balance myself on an old bathtub covered in honeysuckle vines in the side yard to reach some of the roses before they fall. This year they traveled up the bamboo, so some blossoms are 15 feet up. Their scent is like baby powder, water, citrus, rose and pink pepper. The chirp of the cardinals and the song of the painted bunting always accompany my gathering. This morning there was a big swamp rabbit in the white clover I observed as I pulled out a loaf of bread I had risen all night from the oven. I'll have to leave prairie in a few days to go to New Orleans and reveal myself by speaking about Prairie des Femmes at the Jazz Fest folk like village. I'll miss the observation of the cardinals, the painted bunting's song, the gathering of the swamp roses and ceremonial dew on the morning of May first, as well as the ritual procession and May crowning of Mary at the Academy on the coteau. The girls will wear white and silently process to crown Mater with flowers. We present her with a bouquet of blue Louisiana irises at the grotto while we sing the Magnificat in rounds.
La pluie tombe sur ma reineaume
Mes larmes font une prairie tremblante
La terre ondule en bas de mes pieds
Je suis la Prairie des Femmes
Quand ils disent
C'est plus pareille
Ca me donne les blues
D'attendre les cardinaux après chanter
Medicine I made since the early spring
Vinéraire oil and balm
Wild orange flower enfleurage oil
Sweet olive flower enfleurage oil
Poke root oil
Pine sap balm and oil
Cleaver infusion
Lizard's tail infusion
Chickweed oil
Plantain oil
Nettle tea
Nettle powder
Violet hydrosol
Violet tea
Clove, nettle and poke hair tonic
Clove spray for face
Cinnamon Florida water
Wax Myrtle infused alcohol
Pock Pock Talk with K4 and 2eme
Cypress washhouse
Sprouts from the spearmint patch
Sharecropper barn with license plates attached
Manche des Prudhomme blue hatchback
Wild onions and the red sassafras
Chicken trees, soco vines
Brick cistern, fig wine
A child's gumbo, balles de foin
Catalpa tree at the coin
Appalousa paint horse
Under the chinaball
Nonc grows the chat-bouillie and lilas parasol
Point Blue rice pump
Barbwire fence
Beyond the cove
The tops of the trees in
Pointe Aux Pins
April 11-
Heard the first song
Of the painted bunting
In the prairie today
April to August they sing
J'espère comme j'espère le printemps se montrer
Je ramasse les violettes sur le coteau saint
J’observe les pécanniers
A Grand Coteau les fleurs de catalpa après tomber
Tu peux espérer le printemps comme tu veux
Mais ça vient
