The Yin and Yang of Gardening

If you have a garden, you learn about the duality of nature. In winter everything is in a potential state. Leaves and flowers are hidden, locked up in seeds, roots, tubers and rhizomes. Insects are hibernation. Biological processes are almost at a stand-still.  In Winter I see my garden as being a yin state.

June has arrived and  the garden has exploded in growth.  All that potential energy has manifested in kinetic form. I was surprised to see some plants return that I thought I had lost to the winter cold. Even the unwelcome weeds are showing vitality. The garden is fully in a yang state.

The insects are back too. I like seeing some of them like the bumblebees that are pollinating my  Comfrey plants.

The birds are back too. The Baltimore Orioles and Hummingbirds have returned.

The yin-yang duality is apparent throughout the garden. As the bees spread life through pollination sometimes it can bring death. I noticed it in a photo I took of a pair of Rosa rugosa blossoms. When I looked carefully I could see that a Misumena vatia spider had captured a wasp. It is barely visible  on a petal of of the upper blossom. I'll include a photo I took back in 2012 which demonstrates how this spider can develop a color patch to match the flower.

I enjoy checking each day to see what is coming next. In this period of social isolation and the rising death toll from COVID-19, watching these plants emerge is a great comfort.

I've made plenty of gardening mistakes. One of my biggest blunders was planting shrubs too far into the wooded border of the property. If I could do it again I would have located this  Chinese Fringe Tree right in the middle of the yard instead of under a hemlock tree. Yet it manages to survive and send out fragrant flowers.  What a gift.