I had the pleasure of growing up on a little less than an acre of land. It was wild, green, and lush. It fueled my love of nature and built my fantasy. I built fairy houses out of bark and twigs. I used to run through the tall grass and find buttercups to hold to my throat. One time we planted a field of corn and the stalks grew higher than my head. My dad would mow the tall grass with a riding lawnmower that always broke down, and then we adopted a retired racehorse who did the mowing for us.
We had apple trees left over from many, many decades ago when the land behind us was an orchard. One of them fell and made a perfect canopy over the ground that I would climb into, my own secret hideaway. Deer would make it a burrow in the winter.
Sometimes a snake would rear up in the garden path, or we would find them under rocks. Big, fat bumblebees wandered around, bumping into us occasionally. Our outside cats had kittens every spring who lived with the horse, treating him like their much larger, much crazier older brother.
Ivy made its way everywhere. Seeds would get blown from one place and sprout in another the next year. Sunflower seeds would drop from bird feeders and sprout giant stalks in the cracks of asphalt.
I was a muddy little wildling that lived beside all this nature.
Along the way, as we do when we grow older, I forgot what that was like.
When you become an adult, you realize other adults look at these things as pests. Dandelions on lawns are vilified. Bees are not allowed to share a structure with you. Creatures that burrow or dig in your lawn have to go because god forbid they ruin the clean lines. Flowers are too much to take care of, so flowering perennials are replaced with low-maintenance shrubs. But birds aren’t allowed to nest in them, or rather they aren’t given the chance because they are sculpted into a perfect shape every week.
Now I live in suburbia and my goal has been to make it a food and flower haven instead of a strip of pointless grass.
This year I have four raised beds. When I moved here last year I started with two. Because I have more now, and I started an earlier growing season which included lettuce, I put up a simple fence of deer netting and T posts.
Last year I planted pumpkins in-ground and the shoots were almost immediately eaten by something that came through. Could have been a deer, could have been the fat groundhog I see catch glimpses of sometimes (mostly of his fat butt.) Who knows?
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This year I have…bunnies.
We have always had bunnies in our yard and neighborhood. Their names are Dennis Hopper, Quintin Hoppentino, Scarlet Johoppsen, and Janis Hoplin. We don’t know who is who, but those are their names based on the order we see them. The first one we spot is ALWAYS Dennis Hopper, the second one is Quintin, etc. Except Janis is the backyard one, she doesn’t venture to the front.
Anyway. Some of them have been digging in my garden. It seemed at first one of them was trying to make a burrow. They dug a big hole around the rootball of my perennial thyme and stuffed dry grass in there. Miss Janis Hoplin was so determined that she came back immediately after I went inside and continued.
A few days later, more little holes.
The day after I planted my heirloom tomatoes, there were little bunny beds and holes all over the raised bed.
I was getting really mad, and trying to figure out what to do to keep them out and then I realized, why? Why am I mad? They just want a place to sleep. They’re not even eating my vegetables! What harm is it?
So now that I am older and rekindling that child-like, wild love of nature, I will try to be more like Beatrix Potter and let Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter…or rather Dennis, Quintin, Scarlet, and Janis, have a good lay-down in my garden.
“What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common sense”. - Beatrix Potter
Where the wild things may lie down for a while