A fusion of Buddhist retreat and science lab: That is how I characterize the garden. As if embodiments of that notion, a few of my longtime teachers — frogs, chipmunks, a diversity of birds — regularly show themselves to me by alighting on the head of an antique bust of Buddha that watches over the backyard water garden.
“Look at me, and all that I can teach you,” they seem to say as they pose on his ushnisha, the crownlike protuberance symbolizing his expanded wisdom.
Such able guides and other organisms, as inconspicuous as lichen or as bold as a black bear, have led me down countless rabbit holes of learning, but neither those figurative passageways nor any burrows in the ground here were dug by an Eastern cottontail, the most common North American rabbit species. No matter what the idiom implies, cottontails don’t dig their own hideaways in the earth.
It’s something I never would have known, except that as a frustrated gardener frantic to discern who was eating her asters and bush beans, I devoured everything I could find about possible suspects, hoping for clues, and came away with that bonus mouthful.
More pertinent to my plight, I learned to closely examine the point of damage on the plants. A rabbit’s signature is a clean, 45-degree angled cut, versus the messier handiwork of, say, a woodchuck (who is in fact the master tunneler) or the messiest perpetrator, a deer, who lacks upper incisors and therefore doesn’t bite but simply grasps a plant and pulls, ripping it unevenly.
It’s all in the animals’ very different dentition, or character of their teeth, another unexpected topic I found myself doing a short course in. And speaking of unexpected: The whodunit forensic exercise turned me into someone who owns a field guide to animal scat, too, in case that other possible clue is left at the crime scene.
Before the garden showed me, patiently conjuring its empirical evidence until I looked up from my compulsive weeding long enough to take notice of what was always there, I didn’t know a katydid from a cricket or grasshopper, or that what I’d called a daddy long legs since childhood was not a spider. (A telltale difference: A true spider’s body is composed of two segments, the head and abdomen; daddy long legs, or harvestmen, just one.)
I certainly hadn’t yet grasped how little I knew about so many words I thought I could define, like migration, hibernation or metamorphosis — that they were not some one-size-fits-all terms, but had various shades of expression. I was ignorant of science’s own elegantly precise vocabulary, with entries like “marcescence” (when dead leaves of certain oaks or beeches, for example, hang on all winter) or “stabilimenta” (decorative zigzags of silk that females of some orb-weaver spider species incorporate into their webs — and who knows with certainty why?). The locomotion the yellow garden spider musters to create such embellishments is not something I will ever forget witnessing.
Bonus learning: Those mistaken-for-spiders harvestmen lack a silk gland, so they don’t spin webs.
A Diverse Science Education
The garden is the best science teacher I’ve ever had, and it has also taught me the soul-sustaining skill of cultivating wonder (not just plants). It is a nonstop showcase evoking what the naturalist John Muir wrote in 1911: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Perhaps studying science in school would have laid the groundwork more solidly for this gardening life, but that’s not how it went, and thankfully, the garden has been a generous substitute teacher. Along with the expected harvests — asparagus, tomatoes, dahlias — it offers not just botany classes but ones on entomology, ornithology, evolution, geology and more to any pupil possessing curiosity, and the willingness to slow down and crawl around.
Other prerequisites for enrollment include the mettle to confront the visceral ick factor and even occasional terror — like snakes, for instance. Caveat emptor: Both may occasionally merge into a double-whammy, like when a snake devours a frog, an especially indelible illustration of the food chain in action.
Everybody’s got to eat (she says, having reconditioned herself not to run screaming from such sights). Everybody’s got to try to avoid being eaten, too, and I could fill my days identifying examples of plant and animal anti-predation strategies outside, like the anti-herbivory chemical defense in a milkweed’s leaves, or all manner of distractions and deterrents, like the “don’t eat me” warning colorations of bee look-alikes such as hoverflies or locust borer beetles. My favorite mimics are stick caterpillars, the larval stage of certain Geometrid moths that, as their common name implies, can pass for a twig — the perfect get-up for dining safely incognito in the shrubbery and trees.
Of Burying Beetles and Hairworms
One chipmunk delivered his unforgettable lesson posthumously. Spying a tail and hind paws poking out of the soil and wondering simultaneously what and why, I watched and waited — and learned about burying beetles, which work in male-and-female pairs on the freshly dead body of a small animal someone else has killed to transform it into a nursery.
Before a scavenger can eat or carry off the carcass, these expert little gravediggers quickly maneuver their prize underground. Then they remove its fur or feathers, kneading its flesh and otherwise transforming it for the female to lay her eggs in, creating a birthing suite that doubles as a built-in baby food supply. As ever, evolution overlooked no detail; a fungicide in the beetles’ saliva retards the corpse’s decomposition.
Another unforgettable nursery design, on view right about now each year: the podlike galls created by the sumac gall aphid on my cutleaf staghorn sumac — specifically the plant that grows above a patch of moss, because the insect requires not just sumac but moss, too, as an alternate host to complete its life cycle.
The garden has put me on a first-name basis with so many birds, and it made sure I got acquainted with my share of porcupines, bobcats and weasels and their basic life histories. Even in the offseason, the sharpened attention it has instilled is in force, like on one damp December day when what appeared to be a foot-long strand of twine on the doormat started moving, arching upward in very un-twine-like behavior. It was my first hairworm, or nematomorph, an ancient sister group to nematodes, a parasitic organism that from its larval stage develops within the body of an invertebrate host like a cricket, mantid or beetle that ingested it.
When the worm is fully developed, it impels the host to jump into water, where it can continue its life and reproduce. One scientist described this special power to me as “zombifying” the host since going for a swim is not something such arthropods typically do.
The garden has fostered my appreciation of not just butterflies but moths, and in the beam of my headlamp one night while moth watching I spied something tiny on the ground. I had met my first bristletail, a wingless creature that was already ancient when the first winged insects evolved, and has remained largely unchanged in some 400 million years since. A number almost as breathtaking: an individual bristletail’s life span can reach up to four years.
In May, what looked like a 15-foot-long sooty stain along the bottom courses of a stone wall caught my eye, but I almost didn’t stop what I was doing to really look. Thankfully, the garden-explorer mind-set ingrained in me through decades of witnessing kicked in; I fell to my knees and saw that it was many thousands of tiny individuals pulsing together. They proved to be springtails — another of the earth’s most ancient arthropods, also wingless. A few minutes later, they were gone.
This act of gardening feels like an art of attention, a form of cultivated awareness, like meditation. What discoveries await when I go cut the basil later for a batch of pesto, I wonder, or when it’s time to trim around the steppingstones of the backyard path? The chore list is endless, but so are the other possibilities — these bits of almost sacred-feeling science on offer to those who dig and rake and weed.
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
The post The Teachers Lurking in Your Garden: Hungry Rabbits and Ancient Insects appeared first on New York Times.
