Still Life
The land we live on is a small patch of coastal scrub in San Carlos, California. When we moved here in 2007, it looked like a picture from a magazine, with Japanese maples, Chilean jasmine, French (via China) roses, all kept in a tidy corral by an English Box hedge (from southern Europe). But the garden was just that, a picture. A "still life." The plants were picture perfect, tidy and pruned. They would have fed the ecosystems in their native countries, but here, far from the insects they co-evolved with, they were simply pretty objects for us to look at. Our gardener came and meticulously clipped the plants, mowed the lawn and aerated it. He clipped seed heads from our Mexican sage and kept things looking, well, picture perfect. Before: Our garden as a "still life" picture, with imported plants, providing no food for local ecosystems. But as it turns out, this picture has a very steep price. My husband and I were so busy working that it did no...