Home » Plants & Animals » Virtual Gardening » Gardening Lightly: Don't Meddle with the Master Plan

Gardening Lightly: Don't Meddle with the Master Plan

© Carol Wallace

Last week, on a whim, my husband and I went to the pet store. We had this big old cage and thought it might be fun to put birds in it.

We didn't pay much heed to the sales girl's admonition about the spacing between cage bars. We bought tiny finches because they were the cheapest the pet store had to offer. They were also incredibly cute. The white doves might have been more practical but I'm a sucker for cute.

I'm afraid we may have thought of them as disposable, somewhat like the feeder goldfish I put into our pond right after we finished it.

The little finches turned out to be small enough to come and go through the bars of the cage at will. Or for the cat to frighten right out of their safe haven. Which is exactly what happened, only two days after we brought them home.

Today there is one small and very frightened bird dying somewhere in my house. I have been looking all day. I have been doing my best imitation of the "ek!" sound that they make. A lone finch doesn't respond. It goes silent. And so, because I have been unable to uncover its new "safe haven", it is not safe at all, but doomed.

My fault. I was cavalier about life.

We gardeners often are cavalier about life without thinking much about it. Plants, insects, birds and butterflies - there is so much life all around us that it is too easy to take it for granted, to waste it. Even to unthinkingly murder it.

This is not the first lesson I have learned this way. There was the second year of my garden, when everything was seemingly overrun with caterpillars.

I didn't hesitate, but ran to the home and garden center and bought some kind of poison for them. It worked. All around me I saw the dead and dying - did you ever watch a caterpillar die from poison? It was slow, and agonizing, as they shriveled from thirst, but persisted in trying to live - often dying in the midst of a crawl. Watching them, I was already sorry. And then I spent the rest of the summer wondering why we had no butterflies.

Even sadder - the plants were now "poison" - not just to me but to the bees. No bees, no pollination. No pollination, no seed pods, no rose hips, no seeds. It was a sparse year in my garden, but the flowers looked fine - no chewed holes.