Of all the potential insect visitors gardeners may encounter, perhaps none has more charisma than the praying mantis. “The ultimate insect assassin” is how famed British filmmaker David Attenborough describes it. You can forgive Sir David a bit of hyperbole when you realize that this is the only insect in the world with a martial arts style modeled after it, Praying Mantis Kung Fu. The story goes that one Wang
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden She side-bends and stoops after decades of puttering limber-up work-in-dirt yoga, knee bends to growing graces. Her garden sprawls on its back, open palms to June sun, humming a hover and rest like the blue darner. Her fingers spread compost, sifting the strumming of vegetable patches into mantras – mantras learned in years of garden work – Welcome guests – flyers, buzzers, diggers, peckers, chewers.
One skin-tight bite of this sweet tarty tomato cancels all dominion of the self. Tasting the flesh in this flesh one easily becomes translucent. Criss-crossing the tomato heart, brigades of sensations sensate my mouth. So what’s this shake-out between eating tomatoes and making love? This skin blushing red to a simple touch, this full fleshy feeling plump in the hand, aroma divine of the love apple from the vine, the
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways and be wise: Which, having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, [and] gathereth her food in the harvest. –Proverbs 6:6-6:8 Scripture praises ants, children are mesmerized by them, and yet ants in the garden are so commonplace as to be easily ignored by us adults. That however, would be a lost opportunity. Ants provide us a
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the unsung beetle. We share the planet with over 400,000 species of beetles. (For perspective, there are only 50,000 animals with backbones: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals combined.) In fact, according to Berkeley entomologist Jerry Powell, beetles make up “almost 25% of all known life-forms.” How many kinds of beetles are there yet to be discovered? Scientific guess-timates range into the millions. Beetles
A garden full of sweet odours is a garden full of charm, a most precious kind of charm not to be implanted by mere skill in horticulture or power of purse, and which is beyond explaining. It is born of sensitive and very personal preferences yet its appeal is almost universal. Fragrance speaks to many to whom color and form say little, and it “can bring as irresistibly as music
