Welcome to My New Blog

Over the years, I have written extensively about the connection between native plants and wildlife in an effort to make the landscapes where we live and work more "livable;" landscapes filled with life and not just designed for aesthetics.  My writing and my public speaking have been objectively focused. My goals have been to disseminate practical information about plants and wildlife in such a way as to allow others to create their own living landscapes.  All of this has been a rewarding part of my professional and personal life, but I have yearned for an opportunity to write more creatively from the subjective side of me. From this is born my new blog.

In the years ahead, I'm going to take you with me as I transform my new, completely sod-covered, yard in south Pasco County, Florida into a landscape welcoming to wildlife - especially pollinators and birds. I'm going to do this through short stories of my progress, insights into my joys and frustrations, and my very subjective thoughts about why all of this is important. Throughout, I sincerely welcome your comments and involvement.  This is my blog, but it is our best way of connecting to each other and the world outside this sphere we're creating together.

I have chosen to title this blog - "There Were No Fences" - to reflect one of the most life-shaping elements of my youth; the reason in many ways that I became a nature lover and an ardent believer in its power. I grew up in an era where neighbors knew and cared about each other. They did not put up fences to keep us out.  As a very young child with a fascination for flowers and butterflies, I would wander my neighborhood daily to explore their flower gardens. I'd sniff the blooms and I'd watch the pollinators. Instead of asking me to leave, or calling the police as is often the case today, they would come out and talk to me. Often, they would cut a small bouquet that I would give to my mother. It was a welcoming world that I grew up in; a world lost to most children living in today's world. Nature and gentleness seem to have left the developed areas where we live and work and been replaced by an attitude of "this is mine and not yours."  When we approach our landscapes that way we create serious problems with the living world. The disconnect we create by putting up fences between nature and our largely plastic yards of turf grass and non-native plants, designed for an aesthetic that should never have occurred to begin with, has deprived us of the very real benefits of sharing our space with living things and the habitat these "living things" desperately need in this rapidly changing world we are all trying to survive.

In the world I grew up in, there were butterflies and bees to observe in my yard and throughout the yards of my neighborhood. There were birds nesting outside the living room picture window and in the branches of the American elms that lined the street outside. I collected caterpillars as I roamed about and raised them in jars to be released again.  I climbed trees and fell out of them more than a few times; watched the machinations of bees and got stung a few times as well. I learned nature not just from books, but from personal experience. What's more important, I did not learn it from well-meaning adults teaching me "concepts" and the names of things. As a child, I learned by total immersion. These was time for concepts and names after that. Without living landscapes, we deprive ourselves and our children of the opportunity to be immersed first and I believe that this type of immersion is critical to our health and the health of the planet. As Senegalese author and naturalist, Baba Dioum, once wrote:

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.” 

What I would add is that we cannot effectively love and understand nature and its creatures without having a real and meaningful relationship with it. It cannot come simply from books and teachers. It must first come from immersion into the natural world without facts and figures. The best teachers send their students afield and let them explore without a lot of preconception getting in the way, and what better place to start than our own backyards? In the end, who really cares what the Latin name of a plant is if we don't also know the plant itself? What does it do, what does it support, why is it unique and different? 

The natural world is waiting outside the fences we've erected and is desperately waiting to rejoin us. Many of these species, plant and animal, will not be conserved only by love but by our conscious efforts to tear down the fences.

So, welcome to my blog. I'm glad that you've chosen to join me in these pages.