Baseball hall-of-famer and accidental sage Yogi Berra once commented, “You can observe a lot by watching.” Words we can all heed, but especially gardeners. Next to their hands, gardeners’ best tools are their eyes.
One day I saw a blue jay making repeated visits to a small tanyosho pine by our back path. What was drawing it there? Was it checking out a nesting site? Or perhaps building one of the incomplete nests as part of the blue jay courting ritual? His/her visits continued throughout the afternoon — there had to be something there, so I went in for a closer inspection.
A few minutes of intense scrutiny unearthed a caterpillar infestation, well, sawfly larvae infestation to be more accurate, something I wouldn’t have known of if not alerted to it by the jay. The bird’s voracious appetite helped reduce the caterpillar population and, once my husband recognized how and where the little creatures were hiding, he squished quite a few. So no need for sprays, chemicals or any nasty toxic stuff. I discovered later that blue jays are important natural controls of tent caterpillars — the pupae of which are delicacies to blue jay babies.
A slow meander around the garden every day, preferably with a beverage in hand, allows you not only to nip potential pest and disease problems in the bud, but also to understand better how plants grow and to appreciate more deeply this complicated web of life of which we are but a single part.
Seeing peony leaves unfurl, gazing into the freckled face of a hellebore, watching ladybugs wolf down aphids, even grudgingly admiring a weed’s determination to sprout through asphalt, makes us realize how incredibly intricate life in the garden is. And allows us to re-establish ancient ties.
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson writes that our connections with nature are deeply rooted in our psyches and spirits. He says it harks back to our Stone-Age ancestors, hunter-gatherers for whom “the smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a plant stalk mattered.”1
For them, paying attention to their surroundings was a matter of survival. Wilson came up with the term “biophilia” to describe our natural affinity for life that is the very essence of our humanity and that binds us to all other living species.
“The brain appears to have kept its old capacities, its channelled quickness,” he writes. “We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.”
You might have read Nathan Thompson’s post here on Life As A Human about watching squirrels, not giving them just a passing glance but really stopping to watch, to be in the moment, seizing the opportunity “to dig in and really wake up to who we are.” Catching glimpses, in other words, of the brain’s “old capacities.”
There’s consciously paying attention and then there’s the more abstract state of distraction. How many times does the gardener go outside to putter for half an hour and, before they know it, a plaintive voice is asking if we’re going to eat before darkness descends? I have yet to make the trip to the shed to retrieve a tool without stopping en route, my attention snared by those snowdrops I have no recollection of planting or that bee probing a bloom for nectar.
This state of distraction is not a sign of feeble-mindedness; in fact, as I discovered in my delving into people/plant connections, it’s really good for you. Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who have done extensive research into the restorative effects of nature, found that the dreamily distracted state we so easily fall into outdoors actually relieves mental fatigue and refreshes our ability to concentrate.
No wonder office workers released from their cubicles at lunch flock to the nearest patch of green grass. Even having just a view of green surroundings is beneficial, so perhaps we should reassess what those kids who insist on staring out of the classroom window are really doing.
After considerable research, the Kaplans conclude that nature is not simply something pleasant to visit on a sunny Sunday afternoon. “Nature is not just ‘nice,’” they firmly state. “It is a vital ingredient in healthy human functioning.” Wow.
I spent years working in an office with no windows nearby. Years under great banks of fluorescent lights with no inkling of whether it was day or night, summer or winter, sunny or stormy. And doing a stressful job. No wonder I came to realize that it was doing me in. The wonder is that I did it for so long.
Now I’m lucky enough to work at home surrounded by greenery and able to heed the advice on a little plaque my mother gave me when we moved to this beautiful place: “Brighten your thoughts and clear your mind with a stroll in the garden.” And keep those eyes peeled.
References
1Biophilia by Edward O. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1986).
The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective by Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Photo Credits
All Photos © Karen York
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