Your Garden Is a Mere Dot on Nature’s Canvas

Puddock Hill Journal #55: When you consider nature’s scale, you realize you can’t have everything.

Earlier this year I read an interesting piece by someone who pursues regenerative farming on a small plot. I wish I could remember where I saw it so I could give her credit; alas, the specifics are lost to memory. But I do recall a clever, almost poignant, detail.

Relating tales of her first year, when she experimented with planting different vegetables in and out of the shade of established trees, the small farmer noted that she allowed some squash to rot on the ground, where it was eaten by wild animals, its seeds scattered. The next year, wherever those seeds germinated, she allowed the plants to stay, nature having decided those were the most fertile spots for them.

The overarching implication was that her plot—indeed the whole Earth—is a tapestry of microclimates and microbiomes. One patch of soil may hold exactly what a particular plant needs while that same plant could struggle just feet away. Lean into what nature wants.

To some extent, anyone who gardens knows this. Even in the most manicured garden, “holes” develop where a plant struggles right next to others just like it that thrive. The mysteries of the soil run deep. Just one teaspoon holds more living organisms than the number of people on the planet.

Ecosystems and geomorphic provinces are collections of millions and billions of these micro-plots with specific characteristics in common—climate, soil texture, water availability, etc.—that support specific types of plant and animal life. And yet, the life in that teaspoon of soil exists within a greater web of life, and likely cannot exist outside the broader context.

In other words, microclimates matter but so does scale. This first occurred to me many years ago when I was serving on the board of the Eastern New York chapter of the Nature Conservancy. TNC had been founded to protect open land, but when it became clear that local land conservancies had picked up that mantle, the organization pivoted to a science-driven approach, which soon brought into focus lands that contained threatened species or had other unique properties.

They refined this into a program for preserving larger landscapes called the Last Great Places when scientists realized that isolated smaller plots of land would not sustain threatened species of plants or animals if everything around them eventually got turned into parking lots. In other words, wholeness matters.

The entomologist Douglas Tallamy makes a similar point in his work, and we now also know that one main driver of the Holocene extinction—sometimes called the sixth mass extinction—is not just habitat destruction but habitat fragmentation, which affects arthropods as well as larger animals.

What are we to make of this as backyard stewards?