We rent a room on land, which happens to be attached to a little patio and big wild yard. Over the past year I have done countless experiments back there – nest composting, cardboard mulching, a weaksauce veggie patch, wild salad foraging, seed saving, spider husbandry, frog chorus appreciation, smothering vine annihilation – truly I could go on.

Overall, it is an exercise in my favorite type of gardening: Gardening By Deletion.

My foreign-born husband periodically gets to “be American” and rumble through the weedy expanse with a lawnmower, maintaining a large loop path. Along the path, I have attempted to exhume the “good plants” out from under the pokey vines that levitate out of the underbrush and coil around all and any available appendages.

Any plant with an interesting leaf or bark gets freed up so it can show what else it can do. They use the window of unburdening to bloom right quick, show off a seasonal color change, push out some tender buds. In doing so, they qualify for continued assistance in warding off hangers-on. A plant shall also be spared if it has delicious leaves or flowers.

A plant makes it onto kill list primarily if it smothers or has grabby seeds. There are few things more annoying than coming back from the yard covered in little barbed hitchhikers that cannot be laundered and only come out if meticulously picked at one by one.

Sometimes, however, it is hard to stick to my own deletion rules. Here is one plant, with whom I have had a kill/save relationship for over a year, and I do not even know its name. Lets call it Grabby Butterfly Weed.

We have A LOT of it, and during the winter, it coats our sleeves with barbed seeds from even the slightest of brushing-bys. 

…But this time of year, it is swarmed with butterflies, bees and a gajillion other critters.  Wasps build their nests in their lower stems, where they blend in with their dried leaves.  Teenage lizards blend in perfectly with the top leaves. All major thumbs up.

So the moral of this story is that sometimes I just have to trim back something before it goes to seed instead of ripping it out entirely. There might be a metaphor for life in there somewhere?

Finally, I have no idea what this plant is – anyone know its name? Another metaphor?

Here the soil is sand. You scratch down a bit in most places and it’s a bright white sand. I have seen only a few worms so far, where the leaves mound up around a debris clot and spark an organic anomaly. For the first time in a long time, I now have access to some soil, sandy or not, for a stretch of time. It’s a wild, fenced lot, with a spooky shed and many shade trees dropping a bounty of dead wood, leaves, epiphytes and spanish moss.

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We went out and mowed a path for walking, plus we spun a bunch of downed branches into a nest. So far the ratio of food waste from our kitchen and the heaps of moss and leaves that fall down/blow into the yard balance out nicely and the nest is populating with beneficial organisms.

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I have it somewhat booby trapped against charismatic macro fauna like r/cats and raccoons. I placed a ring of pokey vines and a cap of clattering palmetto branches to momentarily deter any such curious types, but the real defense is in the core recipe. I am optimistic that with proper feeding protocol, I should be able to (re)summon my wormy hoard in no time.

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Last week I got to help out with Georgia DNR’s Wildlife Resources Division, placing bands on endangered woodstork chicks. It was messy work (they emphatically unload from both ends the moment you pick them up) but it was incredible to do field work with these pros, and visit this particular site – a former industrial site in St. Mary’s that is now a massive rookery. When we were in St. Mary’s earlier this year, I was dying to get into the property and poke around.

It made me think of Newtown Creek and the birdwatching trips we do, where we see many of the same shorebirds I see here regularly. Even in this wild place, the woodstorks are venturing into a disturbed site and thriving. “Teeming” is the word.  Along with the storks, there were cormorants, pink spoonbills, and every kind of egret in there.

Holding a football-sized wood stork chick is: warm, floppy, sloppy and aromatic.  I can’t say they are cute in the classic sense, or even very charismatic, but they are special nonetheless.

This trip also made me think of my field work days in Ecuador, when I found myself in the cloud forest/paramo/rainforest/Galapagos thinking over and over, “I can’t believe I am getting to see this first hand.”  As much wilderness as we have in the US, it is still a continual surprise to me to be on the East Coast and have so much wildlife (Teeming is the word…) literally within arm’s reach.