To Garden Is To Have Hope

Giant swallowtail caterpillar

Gardeners are the world's greatest optimists. In my life, I have been called a great many things, but rarely an optimist. I beg to differ. With so much negativity swirling around us these days, it takes a real optimist to purposely plant a landscape and to do so to foster the rest of the living world. The cynics would mock such efforts as being a waste of time and energy. After all, what is the point when the world is only going to crash and burn regardless? The optimist in me tells me to ignore them and plant. We can choose to be impotent or not. If the world is really going to crash and burn, I am going down fighting it - not sitting on my couch cowering.

I rent this home and its concomitant property. Some question (nicely, for the most part) my sanity for investing so much time and passion into a landscape that I do not own. As I tell them, the energy I have put into this has more than paid for itself by what it has given back. Creating a living landscape around me is not tied to my owing it. That is superfluous to the effort. It's about creating life in an area largely devoid of it. It's a reciprocity to the natural world for what it's given me all of these years. In a life filled with mostly taking, it is an effort to give something back in return, and it has enriched my life at least as much as it has provided conditions for the life of other things.

No landscape is truly permanent, whether we "own" it or not. I've just signed my lease for another year here. I hope to finish my days in this landscape, watching the changes that occur, but I may not. For that, I'm a realist, but for the years that I do have here, my gardening efforts provide me endless fascination. I have watched the changes that have occurred - the arrival of bumblebees, hummingbirds, and butterfly caterpillars and I realize how powerful a single effort can be in changing the world around us.

Many of the caterpillars that have been produced in my landscape die. They become food for birds, anoles or wasps. I do not protect them from that. Birds, anoles and wasps need to eat also. If a landscape is truly to be part of the natural world, it needs to be managed that way. I think we, as a species, have meddled enough. Perhaps it's time to just let go and simply be part of nature instead of a demigod - choosing which parts will prosper and which should perish. Last night as I was sitting in my chair in the backyard, contemplating the universe as I often say, a blue-grey gnatcatcher landed in the water dropwort patch behind me and picked off the eastern black swallowtail caterpillars that were busy growing up feeding on it. Part of me was dismayed to lose them as the butterfly is gorgeous and I planted the water dropwort to help generate more of them. The other part of me, however, was thrilled that perhaps a new brood of gnatcatchers would be fed because of my caterpillars and the plant choices I made. Such threads in a food web would not have been possible when I moved here 2 years ago. The fact that this is being played out now is extremely satisfying to me.

We add layers to the living world, the web of life, with each passing year and with the plants we add. We do this best by planting in a purposeful manner; not by letting things "pop up", but by choosing the plant community that will share our space and then by mostly standing back and letting nature take its course. Nature has more than a billion years of experience in managing a landscape. I'll trust it to make (most of) the right decisions once I've put the pieces in place.