Here is a grassland missing its flowers. Cows ate them. While thousands of people have been going to work in the valley below, and back, and forth, only the deer and a curious man have been walking this trail. Well, and the coyotes.
My front lawn to the rescue. I planted it in flowers 6 years ago. Here’s a leaf hopper.
No insects in the “grassland.”
Two Years of Introduced Crested Wheat Grass, Pretty Lonely
But here’s a beetle (I think.)
And a little shadow bee, camouflaged for sagebrush.
And this beauty.
And this little fly. Everyone comes.
Every year, I find a different collection of species. I’m over fifty now. I don’t know their names. I call this golden bee.
Isn’t this one beautiful? All this was within five minutes, in one garden.
There should be flowers in the grass. The bees evolved for them. And now? Well, a deer trail. Somebody ate all the flowers.
At least there’s my garden.
Aphids, even. Everyone needs a home.
Even aphids!
Up on the hill? Ravens cleaning up.
But down here? Ah.
Everyone else. Now I have to help them find their way back. Here.
That is a poet’s work. In this country, the country of the people driving back and forth to work and never coming up on the hill, there is this, pretending to stand in its place:
Toronto’s Ken Babstock as a poetry judge. Sad, really.
Source:Â http://prismmagazine.ca/2015/01/15/three-questions-with-poetry-judge-ken-babstock/
Love a planet, today.
Stuff like this doesn’t happen on Mars.
Categories: Grasslands, Nature Photography
Okanagan Okanogan 
Encouragement to all gardeners to make space for fellow creatures!
I have more hope than Ken Babstock. Eventually the deepest that lies within our hearts cries out against hell (and perhaps even longs for more than Taylor Swift!) but maybe the catastrophe will get worse before that happens. I have some pretty basic desires here. I just want a world in which my children will be happy and I want them to make other people happy too.
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A great set of desires.
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Thank you for your living poetry! Always thought-provoking and hopeful.
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You’re welcome. In midsummer the poetry readers are more different yet. What I like is how the garden reveals wonders, but only if I stop and sit with it for a few minutes. It also has a resident mouse. She lives under the wooden walkway I built. I watched her climb way up a stalk of millet one day, then, hanging down almost to the ground on this bow of seeds, snip the stalk off and fall with it to the ground. Then she had a feast under the cover of the leaves. I think the birds will be annoyed in January. They had their eye on that stuff, too!
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