Discovery in the Garden

For the past few weeks I’ve been crazy busy with work, tasks generated by the wants of people. It sucks you in until it seems important, urgent, even vital. But in reality the pushing of paper from one pile to another, the sprinkling of well-placed words and the measuring of spaces between lines of text is a never-ending job without surprise or discovery. In other words, most of us humans are engaged in lifeless pursuits.

This morning, I went out into the yard for just a few minutes and watched two different species, a valley carpenter bee and an Allen’s hummingbird drinking nectar from the same “lipstick sage.” The amazing thing was they each approached the plant in a different way. The hummingbird drank directly from the red trumpet flower. The bee grabbed onto mature flowers that had turned white and licked at the outside base of the bloom. When it did this, the flower trumpet dropped under its body and the bee was put in a position where its legs went into the flower thereby delivering pollen.

The variety of species that are living in this small suburban plot of land has increased dramatically since I first started documenting and replacing “traditional” landscaping with plants and features that would create habitat. (hummingbird territories)

Discovery is a daily occurrence in a natural habitat; and that natural habitat doesn’t have to be a distant rainforest. Everyday the habitat that surrounds my home offers me real moments of life–survival, birth, death, discovery and change.