It's #PollinatorWeek

Do you remember the beginning of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Fable for Tomorrow?

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

a friendly, local pollinator

Photo by J. Harrington

As the old saying goes, "today is tomorrow's yesterday."  We've mostly banned DDT in the US, but there's a plethora of other pesticides, herbicides and insecticides that have been approved for widespread use since 1972. The number of pollinators has diminished precipitously. Now we are faced with a prospect of a colorless Spring, lacking blossoms and blooms because we lack pollinators. Faced with that prospect, and the potential loss of many food crops, a few years ago, National Pollinator Week was established.

I'm not sure if it was the weather, or a lack of pollinators, or both, but the pear tree is looking quite barren of fruit despite an abundance of flowers this spring. The "abnormally dry" conditions, not quite a real drought, seems to have suppressed many of the prairie flowers we often see in our patch of the Anoka Sand Plain. Today we downloaded a copy of Selecting Plants for Pollinators, A Regional Guide for Farmers, Land Managers and Gardners in the Eastern Broadleaf Forest Continental Province. We'll see if that offers strategies for keeping pollinator-friendly plants alive for more than one season around here. It seems as if the deer don't eat the plant, pocket gophers eat the roots! Then again, I'd really like to establish a field of bergamot so we'll see what the guide suggests.

To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

Lucia Perillo

Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood
swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance
while a helicopter chewed the linings
of the clouds above the clear-cuts.
And I forgave the pollen count
while cabbage moths teased up my hair
before your flowers fell apart when they
turned into seeds. How resigned you were
to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli
as they swept past. And soon those gusts
will mill you, when the backhoe comes
to dredge your roots, but that is not
what most impends, as the chopper descends
to the hospital roof so that somebody's heart
can be massaged back into its old habits.

Mine went a little haywire
at the crest of the road, on whose other side
you lay in blossom.
As if your purpose were to defibrillate me
with a thousand electrodes,
one volt each.

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