a new pest
Giant Coreopsis (Wed, 30 Oct 2013 21:09:45 PDT)

There has been a resurgence in recent years of wild life returning not just
to urban interface zones, but to metropolitan areas in North America. There
is a small community of mountain lions in the hills visible from my house
in central Los Angeles (see http://www.urbancarnivores.com/); coyotes and
bears come through my parents’ property spitting distance from Washington,
DC and someone mentioned turkeys in view of Manhattan. I personally find
it inspiring and hopeful – despite sprawl, highways and climate change, we
still get to experience some of the natural world without a camping trip to
Yellowstone. Over the years I have had plenty of animals have their way
with my plants and projects. It can be a challenge to outsmart them, or
deter them, and I aim to treat this as a challenge and part of the
adventure. I garden (nowadays with natives) primarily to experience a
connection with the natural rhythms of my area. That brings birds,
pollinators, soil fungi and some ‘pests’. It’s all part of the game. I
put my precious free time, my money and my creativity into my garden
projects. So I guess I rationalize shooting an pesky animal, and it would
die, and perhaps the babies it’s nursing would slowly starve somewhere out
of sight, and at some point (because this is the way nature works), another
of its species will take its place and eat my plants again. But I
won’t. Because
the way I see it, that would be cruel and futile, and worst of all, it
would miss the point of why I garden.

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Kelly Irvin <kellso@irvincentral.com>wrote: