Just quickly...
I was weeding milkweed out of my garden one day (it's as persistent as mint or raspberries) when I learned that monarch butterflies would be extinct without it. This is just one of nature's many ways of balking our ideas about independence. Psychologically, independent = healthy, budget-wise, independent = healthy. But in the natural world (of which we ARE a part, no matter our resistance to the idea), independent is simply IMPOSSIBLE. Like silence, it's an abstract concept, rather than an actual reality. After a road trip with some botanists where we did quite a bit of roadside plant identification, I was eager to put these two lessons together. I am more than ever interested in the invisible relationships between animals and plants. When I was a kid my mom had two friends in a relationship. Their names were lois and jan. We said Loisandjan so quickly. They were always together when we saw them. It got to the point where I really identified them as two parts of a whole. When Lois and Jan broke up I just couldn't get used to saying "Jan" or "Lois". It was as though some part of the word and the unit were missing. I want to start seeing plants this way. To see trumpet vine and think humming bird. To see sunflowers and think bees or golden finches. I've started doing research into pollinators. Here are some images I've collected while looking around on the internet. They are on an ImageSpark Page, which is a cool way to collect images online.
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