Life and Death in the Landscape

 The reality of creating a living landscape is that some of the life that is created dies. That's the way nature works. A few evenings ago, I watched a great egret hunt anoles along the fence that separates my backyard from that of my neighbor to the east of me. I'm told that this hunting behavior is relatively new, but it should have been easily predicted. Brown anoles are virtually everywhere in my yard and the landscapes of all my Florida neighbors and they constitute a food resource that has been underutilized. Nature detests that. One niche opens up and a species comes in to fill it.  Egrets have been hunting and eating reptiles and amphibians along wetland edges for generations. It was only a matter of time before they learned to exploit this overabundant food source in the uplands nearby.

We often assume that we know how nature works, but our knowledge base is founded on such a very short time geologically; our "normal" is founded on a very limited database. Nature evolves and it will continue to do even as we upset the balance that has existed in our recorded history. Nature is not static nor will it "die" - it will evolve to a new norm. We can do nothing more than witness that. 

In my new landscape, I have worked diligently to put the pieces in place for nature to play out on its own terms. The plants I have been adding have been chosen mostly for their habitat value. but now that they are planted it is time to let nature, once again, rule this piece of land. It is not for me to play God and try to encourage one life form over another. It is often tempting... A few days ago I watched a giant swallowtail butterfly caterpillar that had grown large enough on my key lime to likely make to the chrysalis stage and then on to adulthood. Until that day, all of my caterpillars on this plant had disappeared much sooner. It seemed that I was finally going to shepherd one into a butterfly. After all, that was the end goal of me adding a key lime to my landscape. I took several pictures with my cell phone to document my success only to find that all of them were in poor focus. I stepped inside to get my real camera and macro-lens to get a better photo. As I attached the lens to my camera in the room facing the key lime, I saw both a Northern cardinal and a Carolina wren fly into the foliage of this tree. It took a matter of 5 minutes, but when I emerged from the house with my camera the nearly full-grown caterpillar was gone. Obviously, it had been eaten.

A number of my gardening friends shudder at the thought that their caterpillars might get eaten and they take great pains to raise them in protective cages where they raise them into full-fledged butterflies that can be released. I understand their empathy, but I don't fully understand how we make decisions regarding what species deserve life and which do not. In a living landscape, it is my opinion that we let nature dictate that. Wasps, birds and other predators need to eat also. They are a part of the natural ecosystem and I do not try to make one component more deserving of life than another. I want more butterflies to emerge from my plantings, but I also want food for the birds as well.

It is my belief that we should let nature make the decisions regarding life and death for us. I know that most of my caterpillars will serve as food for something else, that egrets and black racers will eat some of my anoles and that if I leave everything alone there will come a balance within my created ecosystem. My role is simply to put the pieces in place for that to happen. . I hope I have dome that well.