Life is Tenuous, Even if We Prepare For It


Over the past few days, "my" bumblebee has been visiting each morning - nectaring mostly on the flowers in a large patch of red salvia (Salvia coccinea) I have left alone to expand in the far southeast corner of my yard. Yesterday, it brought a friend and I was ecstatic that he/she thought to do so. Perhaps I've finally become a bumblebee stopping place. This patch of wildflowers is next to a firebush (Hamelia patens) that is growing by leaps and bounds and a recently planted coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) that will all serve to entice hummingbirds to dawdle for as while. I've had a female several times here in the last few days. She doesn't stay long, but she wouldn't be here at all without these plants. My front yard pollinator garden is also attracting the attention of a great many bees and butterflies right now. It is a great time in Holiday for living landscapes.
The problem is that I know life to be tenuous.  Last year, every invertebrate that had been using my yard disappeared one evening after what I believe was a County overnight mosquito fogging event.  What took months to develop was wiped out in a single evening. In the back of my mind, I fear a repeat now that rain events and mosquitoes are more common. Life is tenuous indeed. We can plan and plant  for it, but we have little control of the larger picture beyond the confines of our personal space.
We as yet do not control the weather. We can use some form of irrigation to make up for a lack of rain, but we can't direct the too much rainfall event from landing on our landscape. We also can't do much to control the temperature - either hot or cold. It's the extremes in all of these that most affects the plants we use; it's not the "normal" things, but the abnormal. Rest assured that the abnormal is also "normal". Over the years, I've seen well-established plants die almost overnight after being inundated for a few hours following a major tropical rain event and temperatures dip below 20 F that killed nearly every tropical for miles that had been doing fine for decades.  
This has been a good summer so far, but I always have a bit of fear that an extreme event will occur that might kill one of my prized plants. Have I planned for it adequately, or will some simply drown after a deluge? I know that I have planned adequately for a freeze. Most of my plants come from parts of Florida where that is a common occurrence.
Planning for the extremes is part of developing a sound landscape, but planning can't fix everything that might go wrong. That said, we do our best, celebrate our plants while we have them and understand that death is part of the equation. Good planning allows us to dodge the grim reaper for a while.

Comments

  1. FrankAugust 6, 2020 at 8:33 PM

    Craig, I enjoy reading your posts. This is something I’ve thought about often too... The ecosystems of Florida, and particularly central FL, are shaped by periodic disturbance - fire, flood, drought, wind, freeze... (In fact, if it weren’t for those disturbances, FL would be a very different place.)

    So as hard as it is to lose a plant I’ve nurtured, I try to keep sight of the big picture... In a natural habitat, plants live from disturbance to disturbance, and then some survive, and others make space for a new chapter...

    Our urban environment certainly isn’t a perfect match for those disturbances, but in some ways, it’s more similar than we often realize...

    ReplyDelete

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