BEYOND GARDENING IN THE YARD

SOME ARE happy and content with choosing, digging the hole, planting anything, watching it grow patiently, eating, observing the beauty or smelling the aroma of this
object of our attention and care. But perhaps there is more.

Others complacently propagate not those plants with better possibilities to survive
under the required conditions, but those selling faster, growing faster, the higher
the price of selling after measuring the costs of planting/growing and the heck with
aesthetics, ecological considerations that would make a garden in the city useful to flora and fauna in any other context.

Some Asian philosophical ways to look at reality are worthy of reviewing for their
simplicity at conveying the uniqueness of nature and men parts of a whole.

Here a brief poem from Lao Tzu,


Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub
By vacancies joining them for a wheel's use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

The Way of Life by Lao Tzu
Translated by Witter Bynner

The emptiness above also applies to your garden.
Empty spaces allow your plants to
demonstrate their real beauty and form.

To end this chapter I want to thank the following
for their kindness and professionalism. Something
rare, at least from my neck of the woods.

Christianne White, Project Assistant
Cornell U Lab of Ornithology
www.CelebrateUrbanBirds.org
and
Veronica Mendez Gallardo, Coordinator
Puerto Rico Ornithological Society
sopi_aia@yahoo.com

They responded to my emails requesting info about birds in the urban context
in Puerto Rico. I appreciate their prompt help. Which in turn allowed to write
a short article and to expand my understanding of gardens as an ecological whole, instead of a space
planted without focus, perspective and meaning. Time to go...