Rebuilding Prairie at Home and Beyond

There are times people think I'm too extreme or passionate about native plants, wildlife, and conservation. But if you read this article you'll see why, and it's totally based off of where I'm from. I live on the edge of the tallgrass, an ecosystem pretty much wiped out by our arrogance and misunderstanding. But just to the west is the most well-preserved prairie ecosystem, the Sandhills. As land managers work to restore fragments, they are rebuilding the connective tissue that wildlife need as ecological resilience returns to the Plains. We can have an important echo in our urban world, as well, especially in the former tallgrass region -- an echo that teaches and empowers us to garden smartly beyond the fence line. 

If we experience and know our native wildlife in the urban world -- if we see it every day on our way to work, through office and school windows, at church, when we shop, and as we eat lunch -- then we will understand wildness not as unruly or outside of us, but as an essential core to our existence. More urban prairie might mean more rural prairie, and that will create a healthier, more resilient world for all of us.

Oh So Many Sandhill Cranes!

Every year we drive 90 minutes west to view one of the coolest bird migrations on the planet. And every year before we go I wonder -- why bother? Why do people go year after year just to see the same thing?

And then you stand out there among wave after wave of tens of thousands of birds, each calling out to the other with loud, ancient voices that echo from horizon to horizon. You feel the cool south breeze against your face, knowing that if you, too, had wings it would take very little to lift off with the flocks and settle toward the Platte River for night. There, among birds that mate for life and have been coming through this small area for millions of years, you feel power rise up within. Power you never knew you had but suspected was there. The power is joy and it is also rage. The power is compassion and defiance. You want to go screaming into the nearest city, asking why we pollute, why we turn over the earth, why we have lawn, why we don't see the community as preservation and healing for the self.

So every year we will go see the cranes to be reminded. And we will hope to be reminded in other ways as hands hit soil, place plants for butterflies and bees, and travel to meet new people who have the same power resting inside. Each turn toward wildness is an act of defiance -- and the most profound love one can have.

GMO corn for all!

A massive flock agitates and rises toward sunset.

It is very rare to see cranes standing in the middle of a road.

Cheerios Might Be Bad for You and Bees

The recent Cheerios-sponsored wildflower giveaway to save the bees was fraught with problems. First, saving the bees does not mean honey bees, which are imports and globally stable. Honey bees also out compete are more valuable native bees for resources while spreading disease. Second, many of the seeds were exotics, some invasive. And of the native seeds included, they may or may not be native across the country, thus also potentially invasive. In addition, the seeds were provided by a Monsanto-owned company. Third, a recent study showed high levels of glyphosate in Cheerios, higher than is allowed and that could be toxic, especially to kids who eat the cereal often. Previous studies have shown arsenic in Cheerios. It's clear Cheerios uses ingredients sourced from unsustainable agricultural methods -- methods that surely harm lot of bees, pollinators, and other wildlife.

Cheerios gave away 10x the seeds they were going to, and in very quick order -- only a few days. Folks jumped at the chance to do good, and while I'm all for corporations (even those that greenwash) to help lead the way, tacitly sponsoring a for-profit business with a dubious environmental background does raise some ethical concerns. Of course, we do live in a consumer-based, capitalist society where our leaders are brand names. 

We desperately want to do good by the bees and the environment. And companies like General Mills will play on that goodwill as a marketing tactic -- which is just how the system works. But, because we want to do good, and because we're eager to support any movement that offers a simple solution and confirms our beliefs or desires, we hand over critical thinking to someone else. This is dangerous, especially in a time of climate change and mass extinction. 

This all makes me think about butterfly bush, how so many believe planting it helps pollinators, when for many ecosystems it's a thug and / or supports only a limited number of adult pollinators. Or when we justifuy exotic plants like hosta, daffodil, or forsythia because we see a bee on them, then say well, these are helpful, too, without knowing what species are using the plant for forage or how the plant contributes to the ecosystem beyond its blooms. And don't get me started on using exotics to "extend the bloom time." What did pollinators do before we brought in exotics?

We must think more deeply. Doing so is not being a downer or poo-pooing a wildflower seed giveaway -- instead, it will lead to greater empowerment and action because we are not blindly following what makes us feel good in an impulse, but what makes us do good through research and critical thinking over time.

The Troubling Phrase "Native Plant Nazi"

You've probably heard the term "native plant Nazi" used in one context or another. Over the last few years I've heard it used less and less, thankfully, but someone recently used it in a social media comment and, well, it really set off some triggers for me. Almost always the term is used in a passive aggressive / defensive context, particularly in a highly emotional thought. There's nothing wrong with being emotional, but I want to think critically about the terms and others like it that signal defensiveness or self protection.

A native plant proponent can often elicit doubt, confusion, and even a little bit of guilt and rage in gardeners and landscapers. Native plants imply that we're gardening not just for ourselves -- or even primarily for ourselves -- but that we are gardening for other humans and especially for other species. In a nation founded on personal freedom, liberty, and individual property rights, the idea of a garden as part of community -- or even as part of a larger shared ecosystem -- can be unnerving and complicating. Sometimes, a native plant proponent can come off as being passionately hardline, especially so if their language is earnest, decisive, and puncturing the status quo of both western civilization and the green / hort industry. That latter group thrives on developing new plants, as well as producing the exact same plants (through cuttings), in order to maintain consistency for salable goods. Native plants, especially the benefits of open-pollinated, local ecotype plants, doesn't just seem to subvert an industry, but may appear to attack it and the gardeners it serves.

But the perceived attack or threat is actually just critical thinking. How can we improve cultivating plants, growing plants, designing with plants so that we are helping wildlife and ecosystems revive and thrive? Such questions should be at the very heart and soul of why we garden, not an undermining impulse. Certainly, gardens our emotional places -- they are personal artworks, places of solace, places to deal with grief or find joy or recall loved ones or carefully step into a wild world we've alienated ourselves from. Gardens are psychologically complex. When new ideas of what a garden is or how it is are presented, it can feel very uncomfortable because it asks us to think in new ways, often deeper ways. Add in the realities of climate change and mass extinction, that our hand in the environment has severe repercussions for both good and ill, and suddenly gardens become less about simple joy and pleasure and more about social activism -- or more about an awareness of our complicity in something uncomfortable and terrible.

But for me, being conscious of the social (human and other species) nature of gardens is liberating and empowering. For as much as we destroy nature and erode living systems, we can work to reconnect and bind them together again. Our power is real. If we can recognize that our first, strongly emotional responses to deeper awareness are both natural and problematic -- if we can recognize emotion as not the end step but the beginning step -- maybe we'll stop labeling / dismissing ideas that challenge us. Maybe we'll realize the naturally defensive posture we take in order to protect our world view and sense of self is something we need to overcome in order to evolve as a compassionate species -- one stewarding the earth and learning about its rich complexities.

A "native plant nazi" is a term that conjures up a terribly evil period in our species's history. Using the "N" word is not only unfair but highly divisive and destructive -- it does the opposite of what it probably intends. No Gestapo will show up at your house and forcibly remove your hosta, butterfly bush, or daffodils from their beds. There will be no death camps for your daylily. There will be no laws enacted that demand genetic purity of local origin in your backyard. There will be no blitzkrieg, as long as the exotic plants don't escape cultivation and erode ecosystems beyond the garden fence. Native plants foster diversity and community while reviving the wildness of our ecoregions. In effect, native plants celebrate life, foster empathy and compassion, and ask us to think more deeply about how we influence the world around us as a species capable of being more than we've shown.

It's Coming....

Are you ready for fall? Pre-order and get 20% off. Releases October 10!

Spring Action

Lots going on this spring, and I hope we'll be meeting up or working together soon. So, let me share with you a lovely start to 2017:

Speaking
I'll be appearing at a few places.

3/6 -- Michigan Wildflower Conference -- Lansing, MI -- A New Garden Ethic

4/4 -- Spring Creek Prairie -- Denton, NE -- Gardening for Backyard Birds

4/29 -- Garden and Landscape Expo -- Gillette, WY -- Urban Prairie Gardens; Natives for Pollinators

5/21 -- Westminster Presbyterian Church -- Lincoln, NE -- Garden Club talk on pollinator gardens

7/8 -- Hitchcock Nature Center -- Honey Creek, IA -- A New Garden Ethic

If you know of 2018 events please hook me up, especially as I'll be in book tour mode. 

Garden Design
This year I'll be donating 5% of all garden design fees to local nonprofits that conserve, restore, and educate about the tallgrass prairie in eastern Nebraska. In a time of climate change, extinction, and regulatory rollbacks, it's incumbent upon us to act and think local -- and support the community of all flora and fuana.

I'm also working with the Nebraska Wildlife Federation to design and install pollinator gardens at an elementary school, middle school, and a retirement center. It's very cool!

And of course I'm always looking for more residential projects, both local and across the Midwest. One I've started will feature the extension of a bird flyway, hedgerow habitat for native bees, a bioswale, and vegetable beds.

Book
As far as I know the book is still on schedule for a fall release, date TBD. Cover is still being drafted and copy editing is in the early stages. Title confirmed -- A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future. Again, the subject is the psychology and ethics of using native plants in a time of climate change and mass extinction, and lots of science of flora / faunal relationships with a dash of landscape design history and principles for a healthy urban future. It is very much a deep, reflective, activist style book.

Daffodils and a Hollow Nature

Daffodils, crocus, snowdrops, and tulips do not signify spring to me. Here in the central and northern Great Plains, that role usually falls to pasque flower, which blooms sometime in late March to mid April. While flower bulbs from half a world away may be an aesthetic delight to us, for wildlife and ecosystems they are often as devoid of function as plastic bottles. In garden design circles the belief is that aesthetics is enough because it (beauty) engages us with nature. But that nature has often felt hollow to me -- it's how I feel walking a rose garden or hosta collection, places for us alone, so insular, so absent in a time of climate change and mass extinction. Every garden and every plant should welcome as many species as possible, help us learn one another's language and culture, connect us to our homeplaces, and open the door to compassion that puts other's needs before our own. If a garden is primarily for me, the garden ceases to be a place of hope.

Privilege in the Ethical Garden

Our species has long had privilege over other species. Slowly, our privilege has begun to feel like a right -- something preordained. We can see this with white middle and upper class privilege. When anyone starts talking about the rights of others -- the poor, the immigrant, the transgender -- suddenly equality feels like discrimination for those with privilege. Perhaps the same thing happens when we discuss equality for other species and their landscapes. When we're asked to think critically about our privilege as a species -- where it comes from, what effect it has on others -- we feel marginalized, just like we've made others feel marginalized. And when we're asked to garden with native plants, and for the goal of helping others -- of creating equality -- humans feel attacked and minimized. And yet, there are those who feel empowered by empowering others, ensuring the rights of the poor, the immigrants, the transgender, the bees, the birds. They see equality not as a threat but a grand opportunity to practice our deepest-held beliefs as a compassionate culture and species. 

What happens when we privilege others? How do our ethical codes expand? What happens when we step back from our tunnel vision and expand the viewpoint to the perspective of others? What do you need to thrive? What do you need to be healthy? What do you need to be happy? Your thriving, your health, your happiness is mine in spades. And this is why when we garden for others our gardens will transcend their origins, and in some small way, instruct and be instructed by a larger social ethics and social justice.

A Garden Refugee

I see my garden as an act of compassion and justice. Instead of the tyranny and supremacism of lawn or mulch, there are diverse beds of flowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees. Wide varieties of wildlife throughout the year call the garden home, and I am enriched by their presence and their cultures, not diminished. Together the world and I meet in the garden, we embrace, we commune, we share our hungers, our losses, and our joys. Without the garden I would not know that equality and freedom are milkweed, bluestem, aster, and oak. Without the garden I would know less of the common language that binds us all together.

Quoting A New Garden Ethic

From chapter 5 of my forthcoming garden / nature / philosophy book:

"Native plants are the tip of a much larger iceberg. The conversation goes well beyond what is native and why or how gardens work. The very fact that we keep having this conversation in writing and seminars and podcasts, and that it makes some in horticulture uncomfortable, is evidence that we need to be having even larger conversations about why we garden and who we garden for, and what it means in a time of climate change and mass extinction. Our culture needs to be confronted in as many ways as possible for the sake of future human and non human species."

And how about a picture from our ice storm this month -- because it won't snow this winter. More are at Instagram. 

Native Plant Activism & Social Justice

In most cases, people will tend to believe what they already believe, unfortunately. A core part of my forthcoming book explores the psychology of climate change and environmental issues, which I link up to what often becomes a very heated, very polarized conversation around native plants. I postulate that one reason the native plant conversation becomes either / or relates to how our minds have evolved to process new information as animals, and especially how new information tends to increase risks on our perception of self and our belief about cosmic order. Any time we face conflicting information our brains immediately put up defenses to protect us; any new perspective threatens our carefully balanced sense of right and wrong, our social and cultural beliefs, and our very ethics (and ethics that can't evolve fast enough with technology or climate change). I think the real mystery is how some people can quickly embrace new ideas, analyze, process, be open, and then if necessary reorder their beliefs and cultural viewpoints.

Where am I going? Several times over the past year I've heard folks profess that Doug Tallamy -- native plant and pollinator researcher guru extraordinaire -- has toned back his viewpoint at speaking engagements. In particular, he's become more open to mixing exotic plants and natives in built landscapes, like urban gardens. I don't know if this is true, as it's been years since I heard Doug speak, and I don't know how much of this new change is filtered through folks who previously decried everything Doug said about native plants because, perhaps, it was threatening to their worldview, profession, culture, et cetera. What I do know is that it seems, from my small data set of individuals, that the more Doug apparently opens up his hard-line stance toward using native plants only, previous critics are now pointing to him as a reputable source. I find this shift psychologically fascinating, and would like to learn how to exploit it.

The power of Doug's message has always been one rooted in an activism based on a shift in our ethics, and I think his audience has always been the more progressive regular Joes among us (I'm not one of those Joes, or Janes). Even while his research has asked the horticulture industry to evolve, and they've listened in some ways, I believe his audience has always been homeowners -- and I think this is still where the greatest power resides. It's homeowners who are going to put pressure on the green and landscape design industry to build sustainable wildlife gardens in urban areas, and this sort of grassroots mobilization has always been what's worked -- from other environmental issues to classism to racism to sexism. No doubt we need large design firms to step up and give us moving, functional examples to emulate at home, and that we need tons of them right now, but I'm not yet sure how large their role will be from a cultural shift perspective (this isn't a knock, I just don't know because the majority of new urban areas are still designed in old school methods).

It's my hope, and my goal in the way I've organized my book, to re-energize and go a step further in cultivating a bluestem roots progressivism in garden design, and one that sees itself using the tools of other social and environmental justice movements. It's through such action that we learn to think more critically and begin to challenge and remold our animalistic brains that struggle with the long view, as well as the compassionate view for others -- and other species. I may fail horribly, though, and I can accept that if it happens. I will certainly turn on some folks and turn off others as I seek to complicate, invigorate, and push the garden conversation onward. But I hope that together we can all finally leap into a garden ethic that radically reunites us with the world again, because the real world is quickly drowning in our disconnection with it. It will take all of us together to bring wildness back into our everyday lives as well as in wilder places beyond our everyday lives. It will take homeowners, architects, nurseries, municipalities, federal or state government, and activists / artists whose job it is to make us feel uncomfortable and to speak up for the voiceless in our culture.

What a Year It Will Be

Many new garden design opportunities are coming up, which excites me as I marry that burgeoning practice with the activism I profess in my forthcoming book. I'd still like to get a summer speaking gig on the books, and even one in the fall, as I have three in spring (Iowa, Wyoming, Michigan).

In the meantime, I'm celebrating my favorite social media platform -- Instagram. Here are the top 9 photos of 2016. Have a  favorite?

Our Gardens Need Science and Spirituality

The landscape design world is still far too divorced from actual ecological processes and communities that very much exist in our country, even in urban centers and other novel ecosystems (we can deny those ecological communities all we want, but it won't make us feel any better about our role in climate change or extinction, or lead to effective outcomes). We're getting there as more projects become joint collaborations between architects, engineers, biologists, ecologists, and horticulturists. But if these new gardens do not spur a significant psychological if not spiritual ethic grounded in both reverence and science, an ethic that truly links human and animal culture well beyond even biophilic aesthetics, our species will not endure. How we experience and intervene in our daily environment is how we will experience and intervene in our larger world.

The Ethical Garden as Social Justice

For a while now I've said the environment is a moral and ethical issue, not a political one. Our government has made the conversation one about opinion and belief over fact. Even worse, those who give us the facts more and more admit it is not enough, those facts -- what we need is a total cultural revival of compassion and empathy for others of our own species, and for those of other species. I especially believe we need compassion for other species as well as their home places, and that once we practice this compassion over and over in thought and deed, we will slowly retrain our muscle memory and our relationships with one another will improve. One of the easiest places to foster compassion is in our own immediate landscapes -- suburban backyards and front yards; how we tend these landscapes will say a lot about how we tend school grounds, church grounds, parks, rivers, marshes, forests, prairies, and oceans. And it will say a lot about how we tend to one another.

Urban Nature Before Nature is Gone

If we don't get folks far more intimate with wildness, they won't care about the planet or be critically engaged with issues beyond environmental ones -- issues deeply linked, like social justice. With more and more moving to cities, we need better cities, cities that show nature is not "out there" on a planned vacation or in some refuge, but right here all the time. Sustainable urban and landscape design could not be more important from a psychological if not ethical standpoint. We need people seeing all kinds of birds and bees and butterflies every day, many times a day, learning the language of real life. We need them smelling, touching, and hearing a full chorus of life at work, school, and at home. By god, we need better gardens, better landscapes, more celebration of local place right now. Right freaking now.
 
2/3 of global wildlife will vanish by 2020. 50% of all land areas are dominated by humans, with 9% of that occurring in the last 25 years. Wild plant species including sunflowers, chickpeas, mangoes, and asparagus are disappearing, threatening the ability to breed resilient food crops. If we can't care about our daily place, if we don't wake to the natural world at home and get gut punched by its meaning and power and presence, then we can't do anything about the larger, more important places like agricultural fields, forests, prairies, marshes, etc.

In 2017 let's get more prairie and woodland gardens going at work, church, school, and in suburbia!

Sustainable Landscape Workshop 12/8

This Thursday in Lincoln NSA is putting on a free workshop on why and how to garden sustainably for the environment. Panels of local experts will present their ideas and projects, and there will be a question and answer session along with lots of resources.

In Lincoln there are two sessions on 12/8 at Union Plaza -- 1-4pm and 5-7pm. The first session is geared more toward pros and the evening session toward homeowners, but you can't go wrong at either one -- although I'll be talking at the evening session.

To RSVP and for more info, including the workshop scheduled for Omaha on 12/9, link here.

The Long Fall of Writing & Gardening

I just wrote 40,000 words in one month, and am now taking a bit of a break from the book to gather my wits about me and to process the hardest step of writing -- editing, which is always the real writing. During this time I've been fortunate, or doomed, to have a long, warm fall to enjoy after my intense mornings of writing (some days I'd write 3,000-5,000 words before lunch). I've planted hundreds of plugs around our quarter acre lot, continuing to increase and beef up the total plant areas to some 2/3 of the property. We had such stunning sunlight in the new and old gardens -- something you can see from the images shared on Instagram. 

1 month after peak migration the only food on my street are these asters

Morning

Baptisia australis minor

My indoor buddy getting a rare treat

Mountain mint

The new meadow frosted one morning

New England asters near sunset

Sunset in the oldest of the gardens

Lopez and Williams on Eco Ethics

I stumbled upon these quotes from two powerful writers in just one day. They perfectly frame my book's project, and hit at the heart of a subject I've been trying hard to flush out and express -- namely, how hard it is for humans to act ethically toward other species. What do you think?

“Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer."

"No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself."

 -- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

"Most people are not comfortable making a connection between racism and specism or the ill treatment of human beings and the mistreatment of animals. We want to keep our boundaries clean and separate. But isn't that the point, to separate, isolate, and discriminate? We create hierarchies, viewing life from the top down, top being, of course, God, then a ranking of human races, and so our judgments move down 'the Great Chain of Being' until we touch rocks. This is the attitude of power, and it hinges on who is in control. Who has power over whom? How does this kind of behavior infiltrate the psyche of a culture? And what are the consequences of scala natura?"

"Arrogance is arrogance, and cruelty committed to a person or an animal is cruelty. We would rather not think too much about 'what is being done to those outside the sphere of the favored group,' yet I believe it is time in the evolution of our imagination to make a strong case for the extension of our empathy toward the Other."

— from Finding Beauty in a Broken World by Terry Tempest Williams

Prairie in Fall Reflection

In fall the prairie is dipped in bronze, brown, and ochre. An hour before sunset and the sun is already creating halos around the thick seed heads of indian grass, while bees, skippers, and a few crescent butterflies find the last of the aromatic asters and Canada goldenrod hidden among short and tall bluestem turning crimson. Atop even a moderate hill the air is warm from the day, but follow a path down a few dozen feet and an evening chill swarms my legs like grasshoppers disturbed from the vegetation. If I’m lucky there is silence – no cars on the nearby road, no planes on final approach for the airport, no gunshots from the nearby police shooting range. There is the riptide of grass in the wind rising against the horizon, and the deep breath of getting down on my knees to admire a fringed gentian, so blue it’s almost violet and giving birth to a bumble bee laden with pollen.

Autumn Images

Several photographs from the three main gardens at home base, more of which I share liberally on Instagram.

I add some corten steel to the new back meadow. Love it.

Late September

Switchgrass is a rainbow of flavor.

Last sulphur migrating through on aromatic aster.

Wild senna seed pods need a shave

Sunset in the main garden. Ho hum.

My 15 year old Manx buddy.

Coneflowers in the front, de-lawned yard.

The Environment is Not a Political Issue

I have long said that the environment is not a political issue, which seems confounding to many as it often takes human law to conserve, protect, and steward. And that's EXACTLY the problem. The environment is not a political issue -- it's a moral one. How can we ever hope to conserve, protect, and steward if we don't come to these practices ethically? How can we not see the world through other human classes and regions, let alone through the eyes of other species? Protecting the environment must come primarily from an ethical and moral center that doesn't even take into account human laws. Perhaps if we began with ethics in mind we wouldn't even need laws or politics. Maybe if our culture came at life from the other end of the spectrum -- through the other -- this entire discussion really would be perplexing.

Many political groups twist the spirit of environmentalism and turn it into a political fight, thus degrading and devaluing the ethical center of the primary argument; or, they take out the heart and the compassion and replace it with human-centered agendas of exploitation and hubris. It's like saying we need to protect our natural resources -- but nature is not a resource. Nature is nature, just like you are you and I am Benjamin.

While the political process may make some strides in doing good by our ethics, too quickly and too easily those ethics are eroded or washed away by human wants and the need to make concessions or bridge the aisle. So when I say the environment is not a political issue and is instead and ethical or moral one, I am saying that our world is not the real world -- and it never was.

Gardens Honor & Harm Nature

Gardens already come with a prepackaged, innate illness -- our hubris. The manipulations we make of nature do both honor and harm to it, even if we come into garden making with the most noble and loving intentions. The reality of the latent illness in garden making doesn't negate the spirit of gardening, and it shouldn't undermine why we are out there smelling flowers and touching dirt; what the reality should do, however, is more openly and fully question both our motives and our outcomes. When we are questioned or challenged our garden making can become deeper and more meaningful not only to us, but to all of the species whose homes and lives we are inviting ourselves into.

Keep Smiling, and Avoid Necessary Change or Empowerment

I have long been a critic of our western / American culture's focus on putting a happy spin on everything; why, just the other day I was told to move to Iowa and not be such a killjoy because I suggested releasing balloons at Husker football games was mass pollution. Bummer, all those birds strangled to death, but what can you do? Balloons are fun.

But here's Joanna Macy saying things perfectly (not about balloons) -- and you bet this is going in the new book. 

“To discover what we know and feel is not as easy as it sounds, because a great deal of effort in contemporary society is devoted to keeping us from being honest. Entire industries are focused on maintain the illusion that we are happy, or on the verge of being happy as soon as we buy this toothpaste or that deodorant or that political candidate. It is not in the self-perceived interests of the state, the multinational corporations, or the media that serve them both, that we should stop and become aware of our profound anguish with the way things are.

None of us, in our hearts, is free of sorrow for the suffering of other beings. None of us is indifferent to the dangers that threaten our planet’s people, or free of fear for the generations to come. Yet when we are enjoined to ‘keep smiling,’ ‘be sociable,’ and ‘keep a stiff upper lip,’ it is not easy to give credence to this anguish.

Suppression of our natural responses to actual or impending disaster is part of the disease of our time, as Robert Jay Lifton, the American psychiatrist who pioneered the study of the psychological effects of nuclear bombs, explains. The refusal to acknowledge or experience these responses produces a profound and dangerous splitting. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological imbeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise.”

Hummingbird Rain

First day back from a long weekend up north. Finally lumber out to the garden as my lunch is heating up. I'm not too happy with the landscape and wish I had more time (and knowledge, and money) to do what I really want. There are still beautiful, meaningful things going on -- and dreams abound to plan for. I stake a flopping aster, I sow some liatris, I bend to smell a salvia and hear the booming drone of a hummingbird with its strange, sharp calls peppered in. It lands on a dead branch of a nearby tree. How rare to see them so still. The hummingbird's head darts side to side for 20 seconds before it lifts off and vanishes.

5 minutes in the garden. 5 minutes of waking to imperfection. 20 seconds of being blessed, yet again, for stepping outside of myself to find my world as right as rain.

Lawn to Meadow, Year 1

Here and there I've dropped snippets of what's going on in 2,000 square feet out back. Last fall I scalped and de-thatched the back fescue lawn, seeded in little bluestem and sideoats grama, then planted 80 flower seedlings and divisions.

Up until June I kept the back lawn scalped, and after June 1 stuff began to pop with no mowing needed; it's really been popping the last 6 weeks. I'm on my hands and knees often pulling weeds (a sane person would keep mowing to control weeds, but I'm not sane), and I'm delighted to see purple prairie clover, baptisia, coneflower, aster, milkweed, bushclover, and more seedlings finding their way up through lawn and prairie grass.

The goal will be a uniform base of 2-3 feet with scattered architectural plants reaching up to 6-7 feet. Editing will be needed. I'd really like a 2-3 foot tall ribbon of corten steel, maybe 10-12 feet long, snaking through the middle, but steel is pricey for me right now.

Here are a few images. Feel free to scroll through recent summer posts for earlier pics to compare the growth. Next year should be phenomenal.

Looking east toward the original garden in morning

Indian grass and Liatris ligulistylis

Looking west