Now that we are firmly in the southwesterly grasp of habagat, the monsoon that ushers in the rainy season in the Philippines, our typical ventures into forests and up mountains are paused, lest we labor through knee-deep swathes of mud and are bled dry by the limatik (leeches) that abound. This is, however, the perfect time to tend to our gardens.
Watering schedules are thrown out the window thanks to the constant deluges, and humidity levels are at their highest, providing the perfect environment for growth. I’ve planted some seeds of Barringtonia racemosa, gifted to me by the Philippine Native Plants Conservation Society, and some heritage eggplant from Ilocos Norte in anticipation of the season, hoping that they germinate in these fecund conditions. My garden is a particular mess during habagat; all sorts of floral families emerge from the soil, deposited there previously by birds or wind, waiting for the right conditions to grow. In years past, I would aggressively weed out these newcomers that disrupted the intended vision of my garden. It was a constant rally, a resistance, against the wilderness that inched, stole, and tendriled its way in. As Maria Popova points out, however, there are “certain things simply beyond the reach of resistance, impervious to our passions and protestations — spacetime, gravity, the fundamental laws that gave rise to our existence and will eventually return us to the stardust of which we are made.”
Despite my best attempts, I will never be able to resist the ecological machinations that occur in my garden fully. Diane Ackerman, in her lovely book on gardens ‘Cultivating Delight’ helps put me at ease by stressing that there is no essential definition of a garden. They make statements about our place in and relation to nature, forcing us to “think about wilderness, other species, interdependence, the passage of time, the limits of control.” The garden I have planned in my noggin is always at odds with what grows in real-time, and I’ve grown to accept and embrace this disconnect. As a result, some of my garden interlopers have made themselves permanent fixtures, in humble recognition of the environmental forces that know better than I do regarding which species grow better where.
It would be interesting to see, if I were granted immortality and if environmental conditions remained relatively fixed, what kind of attributes I would select for in immigrant species and how these species might evolve over the millennia1- maybe my penchant for pendent leaves would produce some spectacular foliage. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) a gardener’s lifetime is not long enough to naturally select for attributes to create ecotypes2 or new species from these dispersed individuals.
Outside of my garden, natural selection is at constant work amidst the innumerable, complex interactions that occur in environments everywhere. Survival of many animal species often depends on the ability to predate or not be predated on, how quickly one can reproduce, and in many cases, how good of a gardener one is. It is fascinating to take a gander at these non-human gardeners in the animal kingdom and see what they’ve been tending to, and how they’ve shaped or been shaped by their environs as a result.
Over in the land down under, males of the spotted bowerbirds (𝘗𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘢) enjoy life as avid avian gardeners. While many of our other feathered friends are seed dispersers, they do so as a by-product of their feeding habits, not out of a willful intention to plant seeds in certain areas. Male spotted bowerbirds, however, specifically cultivate 𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘮 𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘮, commonly called potatobush, for personal use. As their name implies, these birds live in bowers, where they plant potatobushes all around their immediate vicinity. They use the fruit of the potatobush during sexual displays by prancing about, holding them in their bills! The potatobush is a bowerbird’s indicator of wealth, and the more of them that surrounds a bower, the more likely a male is to mate with a female successfully. Seems like a pretty good reason to get into gardening.
A hop, skip, and a jump over to the neotropics brings us to the lovable sloth (suborder Folivora). Arboreal creatures, they live out their lives in the treetops. Some sloths descend from the canopy once a week to urinate and defecate, often digging a hole to do so and covering it afterward. In a tropical rainforest, this tends to be a dangerous activity as it increases the change of predation, particularly for creatures that live in slow motion. Now the exact reason why they take such a massive risk is still up for debate, but one theory is that sloths do so as a means of nourishing the tree. Sloths spend a lot of time feeding on a single tree- in an ecosystem where every single resource is fiercely competed over, ensuring that nutrients are fed directly back into the tree could provide mutualistic benefits. Every gardener knows to fertilize their denizens, why not a sloth?
The care they give to this activity is reminiscent of my own fertilizing habits. It won’t do to chuck Osmocote willy-nilly; placement is highly intentional. In the same way, a sloth could defecate from a branch up high and have marginal success, but perhaps their host tree would grow better if the sloth were instead to descend, dig a little hole by the roots, and cover up their nutrient-rich doody to ensure nothing is lost. While good gardening practice for sloths, this also happens to be good advice for hikers out on the trails. Please employ good sloth practice when defecating in the woods, friends!
Animal gardening practices across species drive home the lesson that we (humans, sloths, bowerbirds, and everything else) are, as Oliver Sacks put it, hortophiliacs. The majority of life on Planet Earth is dependent on plants, whether directly or indirectly. It makes perfect sense then, that the desire to interact with, manage, and tend to nature, is deeply instilled in us. And why wouldn’t it be? We are not just a part of nature; we are nature.
There is a beautiful word, panmixis, which Diane Ackerman claims Darwin invented to represent how the ‘everythingness of everything reminds one of the everythingness of everything else.3’ John Muir echoed this, and we would be wise to take heed of his words in our gardens, that ‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ As habagat continues to inundate our gardens, we at PlantVision enjoin you to release your inhibitions on horticulture just a little and allow your local ecology to manifest itself in whatever way it desires.
Gardens are gateways to the universe, let the universe in.
This issue of Plant Visions was written by John Altomonte. Before you go, maybe share this newsletter with a friend, and then enjoy this poem.
The Glory of the Garden
By Rudyard Kipling
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You will find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all;
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks:
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knivesThere's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick.
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!
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References
J. R. Madden, C. Dingle, J. Isden, J. Sparfeld, A. W. Goldizen and J. A. Endler, Male spotted bowerbirds propagate fruit for use in their sexual display, Current Biology, vol. 22, no. 8, 2012.
D. Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden, Harper, 2001.
M. Popova, Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise, 2021.
Natural selection:
Species that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. Good ol’ Charles Darwin first expounded on this theory, which is now widely regarded as the process that leads to the evolution of species.
Ecotype:
A distinct geographic population within a species that is genotypically adapted to specific environmental conditions.
The origin of the word ‘panmixis’ is in doubt, and may not actually be attributed directly to Darwin, though his works on Natural Selection certainly did contribute to theories on panmixia later on.