My 14 month-old son says maybe five comprehensible words, but my favorite is flau-wa. Most of his new words ( ball, mama, dada) start as just a play on sounds or an onomatopoeia, then they have amazing specificity (amazing for a mom!) as he points directly at the named thing. In the third stage he generalizes and goes-to-town, and suddenly the moon is a ball and a circle is a ball, and balls are literally everwhere. Flau-wa has hit the third stage and now seems to name not just all the flowers in our garden and neighborhood, but all things plant-like at eye-level. Working with a baby in a garden (even a small 500sq foot one) , letting him dig, teaching him what is edible and what is not, or how not to torture a snail, is an extremely relaxing activity. We notice bees, hummingbirds, robins, finches, and sparrows, which plants they frequent and which days of the year they seem preoccupied with our garden and when they have moved on. The sparrows, which played and hung out in packs of 40 or 50 on the telephone wires, diving and performing aero-acrobatics between our small trees, have moved on. The robins seem bigger and the lesser gold finches dropped in for a week or so in early April. I always notice their entrance on the scene because of their calls. I suppose I should teach Jackson how to collect and throw out all our snails or learn to enjoy escargot, but I haven't the heart for it yet. We could get a duck to eat them (and wouldn't he love that!).
What I couldn't know empirically is that their presence means the environment is reasonably unpolluted (says Pam Peirce in "Golden Gate Gardening", an awesome resource book for our area) and that the mockingbirds and robins control pests. The robins eat wireworms (their big 1/2 inch leathery, pale yellow larvae found in the soil around our plants look like something unearthed from Pan's Labyrinth), cutworms and caterpillars and the mockingbirds eat beetles, grasshoppers and other insects. Ironically, among the reasons why we have so many birds in the first place is because there are insects. I do my best to keep my pesticide-happy husband from using toxins. Tiny ants thrive as do probably a whole host of other pests. We were fortunate to inherit a garden intended for local fauna. We have what is officially called "attractant flowers" which are "especially valuable in late winter and early spring when little is blooming" (GG Gardening, p. 131). We have Mexican Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) bushes, drought-resistant, beautiful hummingbird lovers with small throated red and pink lips for flowers. Apparently, this sage's leaves can be used to make tea or to flavor fruit dishes. The flowers can decorate a salad or dessert. We also have two Japanese Plum trees (Nubiana's, I think) that are famous in the neighborhood. The white-crowned sparrows feast on new buds in February and local human families, with a similar seasonal knowledge, stop by around in June to eat plums. One such neighbor asked me if he could bring his daughter to show her the fruit he ate when he was as kid growing up around here.
The middle school where I teach does not have a garden except for the ruins of a long neglected garden beside the front door. It has a black top, which is an effective space for basketball, handball and gossip's required space for clique dispersal. We have no curriculum around food though I am developing a project about waste for whole school in June. Perhaps because we don't own the property or that as a community we have been chronically ambivalent about the pittance of a play yard, this area of school life is sorely lacking. Compare it to Martin Luther King School's Edible Garden a few miles away that is now world famous thanks to Alice Waters and Prince Charles and Camilla's visit, and we clearly lack vision in that area of middle school life. Even though all we have to offer the birds is uneaten lunch, huge seagulls and crows guard the blacktops like savvy bullies.
("speechless sorrowing of Nature")
(you will get lost you will be left)
bending over looking for the trinket lost
(most quiet heaven)
-- "Middle Distance," from Swarm by Jorie Graham
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