Complimentary Blueberry Juice

We’ve spotted a Yellow Lady Slipper orchid Cypripedium parviflorum in a ditch near the farm.

This beautiful flower lies a mere six inches (or 15 centimetres) from where the grass in the ditch is dutifully mowed by the neighbours.

I have always found the term “development” as it relates to urban planning or suburban expansion to be an ironic misnomer. The implication of the term is that “we” (humans) are “improving” the land, and making it somehow more “productive.”

Now I know the folks mowing this ditch a mere six inches (or 15 centimetres) from our beautiful Lady Slipper here do not intend to destroy it, this is just regular maintenance…mowing the ditch. The Lady Slipper is lucky this time, perhaps next time the mower gets it. But like with many other human activities we often don’t care to look or understand what is actually there. The ditch after all, is just sort of…wasted space, a crude substitute for what waterways were formally present to move (or retain) water.

Now that this landscape has been “improved” by “development,” there is no room for species diversity or even for Nature to take Her course. What we are imposing on the world around us – which we are from – is antithetical to development; it is regression. We literally prevent Nature from being her most productive self. By excavating, filling and mowing.

In learning to live with Nature and inspire Nature to do her best, we must embrace that which lives around us. Nature has her own aesthetic. It shifts and changes with seasons.

If you’re patient and lucky and curious enough, she may even bring you Orchids.

Graham