Mothers Day, 2015

All things bright and beautiful

All creatures great and small.  . .

Were you humming along? 

This favourite old hymn had become one of those ‘earworms’, burning a hole in my brain for days, begging me to do something with it. 

It began with a stinkbug (there’s likely a proper entomological name for it).  It’s that prehistoric looking, largish creepy-crawly that invades my house in early spring. 

I gathered it from the carpet into the palm of my hand, carried it gently to the door and bid it fly away.  It was, in my limited perspective, neither bright nor beautiful, but the hymn burst into my head – or maybe my heart – and would not quit.

So here I am finally, almost reluctantly, following through. 

I always loved that hymn, by any tune, and there are at least two.  It evokes bygone summer days at Pony Club rallies where, on Sunday morning, the young riders would stand in a circle beside their pony/horse, both looking splendidly turned-out, hard hat in one hand, lead line in the other, belting out ‘all creatures great and small’.  The four-footeds always stood silently, seeming to sense the sacredness of the moment.

Now journey with me from there to a poem that I, among many gardeners, have lettered on a garden stone –

              The kiss of the sun for pardon,

                 The song of the birds for mirth.

                    One is nearer God's heart in a garden

                      Than anywhere else on Earth.

But IS one?  I suspect that each gardener would answer differently.  If I answered honestly, I’d have to say, ‘most of the time’.

What of the moments when I see the leaves of my hostas nicely perforated by God’s voracious slugs?  Or when I come upon my tomatoes still hanging from the vine but munched out by hornworms?  OR when my gentle deer friends have swallowed whole the hydrangeas that I had been saving to dry for the winter? 

Ah, there’s the rub.

We get all defensive and territorial about ‘our’ stuff – from the raccoons that rototill our lawns to the ants that invade our homes.  And the question becomes:  Can we co-exist with ‘all creatures great and small’?

The answer seems obvious:  We had better learn to do so.  And that evokes the famous words of Chief Seattle –

“Man does not weave this web of life.  He is merely a strand of it.  Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”

So let’s flesh that out a little.  In straight talk it says that if we decide to poison the slugs, bugs, beetles and coons that invade our territory we begin a tangled web of consequences that we simply cannot predict. 

There was a bumper sticker – “Pesticides don’t know when to stop killing”.  It could have been spoken by Rachael Carson when she rang the first alarm bells on pesticides with Silent Spring back in the sixties.  It is an inconvenient truth that birds ingest the bugs, poison and all; we inhale the air, toxic spray and all; aquatic life intakes the water, pesticide runoff and all.

How house proud, lawn proud, garden proud must we become before that truth dawns?  We lose our bearings.  Lose sight of the burden of poison that Earth, our Great Mother, is carrying. 

At the end will we be pleased with ourselves and have written on our tombstone that: She had a perfect green carpet of a lawn?    Or would we choose: He loved this Earth?

Words like Agent Orange, Roundup (one of the two chemical ingredients in Agent Orange), and Neonicotinoids will, I suspect, be added to the stains on the 20^th and 21^st Centuries by historians.   We know that all of these agents move through the food chain, but we often confuse priorities.  What exactly are we willing to sacrifice for lawns and gardens that ‘look good’?

There are, of course, better practices.  I cannot begin to list them here (although I am going to try using cinnamon for ant control this spring) but it behooves us to find out how to ‘control’ what we call pests in a way that does not take everything down with it.  The Internet is at our fingertips.  If you live in Caledon drop in to “Plant Paradise”. 

On this Mothers Day, my greatest request and prayer is that we honour, love, and respect our Mother Earth/ Father Sky always, in all ways. 

                  . . .  All things wise and wonderful

                     The Lord God made them all.