National Gardening Day happened this week. Don’t feel bad if it wasn’t on your radar, because, honestly, it wasn’t really on ours, either: Every day is Gardening Day for us!
Instead, we had our eyes on the April sky, fringed by the lacy foliage of blossoming trees. If we had wings we’d flap up there to chit-chat with the chickadees about the changes they’re feeling: body weight burgeoning, organs reorganizing, and nights of sleepless flights for the great migration to a final nesting place (did you know many birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, which they use to navigate?):
The least we ground-bound builders of things can do is reduce the impact of our various pollutants, by, say, turning off the lights that cause avian accidents, slapping on the best brands of eco-makeup and quietly crab-walking in an electric Hummer (but definitely not by taking a lawn mower road trip.)
If you’re stuck with internal combustion, at least consider puttering around in a petalmobile, although real flowers have something to say about those emissions. They are already increasing pigmentation in response to climate change. At least our grassy seas are eliminating carbon from the atmosphere over 30 times faster than tropical rainforests, according to this article.
Let’s preserve these briny prairies so prizefighting octopi can lurk in peace. While they may have eight arms, they can’t use any ergonomic gardening tools to cultivate a hideout.
All our staring at the soil is probably freaking out the perennials popping up this week, so we’ll sow new terranean trust in the form of longer-blooming annuals, specifically the ones that smell nice. Until they flower, we can strike up a stick of incense in the garden because we’ll need all the help we can get after eating crocks of these national park delicacies.
Another week of scouring the internet for buzzworthy nature news (this buzz is so ancient it’s news) reminds us how funny it is that we get our hands dirty because it feels good. We get to ‘Tok, memeify and illustrate our fractured experiences of nature’s frenzy, but nothing will come close to mourning cloak butterflies untucking themselves from tree-bark hideouts, or being the creature that actually eats and lives in your compost, or shaking off hibernation to find yourself being gawked at by zoo-goers.
We’re not opposed to gawking at people either, like IG’s black femme green thumbs and the 80-year-old mango man we wish would invite us over for 300-breed fruit salad. Kind of makes the trendy tomato seeds we ordered look a little less triumphant, but hey, it’s all about the small victories—growing into juicy ripe ones!
Ardently gardenly yours,
Aerate