Posted by Erin Autio on Thursday, May 27th, 2021 11:16 am
What a beautiful long weekend we had! I’m sure a tonne of gardening happened out there in the sunshine. The garden centres were lined up everywhere as people tried to get their summer annuals and new interesting perennials to spruce up their flowerbeds.
With all this being at home and restricted social calendars, many people have been inspired to spend more time or even attempt their first time growing things. If you are one of these people, know that you’ve made my heart happy!
Growing things is pure magic when you think about it. Taking a dry, often tiny speck of a seed and turning it into something beautiful, edible, medicinal or wild is to witness a miracle right here on earth. One tiny seed can turn into a basket of tomatoes or a towering tree. One sunflower seed turns itself into 1000 or more new seeds! Trust me, the more you learn about plants, the more you begin to understand that nature will always find a way to be abundant and how little we actually know about the whole process.
There is a team of key players in this process of abundance that we are just beginning to emphasize; our pollinators. Bees of all kinds, moths, butterflies, beetles, flies and even bats, play a critical role in the health and abundance of our natural world. So much of the food we eat depends on these important creatures but also, flowering plants produce oxygen, purify water, prevent erosion, provide medicine, fibres, oils, dyes, resins, etc. etc. etc. This list goes on and on.
These plants can’t survive without pollinators and pollinators can’t survive without plants. This is just one example of the complex interconnectedness in nature.
You throw one stone and the ripples cross the whole pond.
I’m going to ask you to read that again but this time erase the image in your mind of the environmental extremist yelling at you about how you are responsible for the destruction of the rainforests and the melting of the polar ice caps.
You throw one stone and the ripples cross the whole pond.
Throwing a stone doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Throwing a stone is the natural instinct of any child standing by a body of water. Maybe it’s in our DNA to want to make some joyful ripples? Right now your one stone can be planting a perennial that feeds pollinators or growing colourful annuals on your apartment balcony. Anyone can plant something for pollinators!
Just stand at the water’s edge and toss in your stone and let’s make our ripples count for something!!
