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Backyard biodiversity

More plants (weeds? invasives?) have decided to live in the garden. Shepherd's purse, for example, has just appeared.


How I love those heart-shaped seed pouches!


The residents continue to thrive - more roses, more honeysuckle, the caterpillar-eaten lilac responding with more little leafy shoots, baby poplars as playful as puppies and the mock orange cuttings not yet dead (all the others are except one which may or may not be guelder rose).


It's time for the sweet peas. So so beautiful, they are!


The garden-sweepings heap smells bright and fresh, strangely fragrant. Warmth and rain making everything alive.


Above, swifts stream and scream across the sky - often too high to see.


Here, there was a special visitor.

He or she had flown by then - a brown hawker! Brilliant as a phoenix with golden wings and metallic gleaming body, eyes like precious stones.


A hoverfly basked in evening light on needlewort...


As a white tailed bumblebee supped the nectar of the lonicera. Where the bee sucks...


One evening, as I sat on a brick that lines the path, I saw the lily-of-the-valley leaves moving, clumsily, and not in the wind. I could hear, oh so quiet, a rustle. Then I saw a snail climbing and climbing. It was on the underside of the leaf and had to get to the top - an incredible process of suction and hauling - before ascending the fence.


Still enough to sense the speed of a snail.

Silent enough to hear a petal touch down.

Low enough to let all around you be large.

Lost enough to find yourself found.



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2 komentarze


maplekey4
12 lip 2023

ps The Brown Hawker is beautiful. I haven't seen one like that before!

Polub

maplekey4
12 lip 2023

Love that you HEARD the snail moving on the leaf. Love your beautiful poem of praise.

Polub
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