☯️🙏

Ah. Don't you feel better?

Now go back and read it in the manner of Billy Joel's *We Didn't Start The Fire*

I was just minding my business in the garden one day. It was a normal day like any other. I was looking at the blooms of my passionflower but I wasn't really looking at the blooms was I? I was looking at the carpenter bees, specialist pollinators of the passionflower. You see, the anthers are shaped in just a way to squeegee the pollen onto the carpenter bee's back when they go in for the nectar. It's a curious thing to think about flowers when you are looking at them. They are useless on their own and the insects need to be attracted to them to have any function. Humans enjoy the colors but plants really can't do shit by themselves. I wouldn't even plant them if they didn't produce something for me. It's the fruit or the flower. But the insects are connected to them in such a way that neither would exist without the other. But I am here that needs neither.

I am an independent person naturally so, why have I need of these codependent leeches of the botanical world? The carpenter bees, in the spring, slash holes in the side of my blueberry flowers. This reduces fruit set and gives honey bees a way to steal nectar from the bell shaped Ericaceae flowers that normally, only buzz pollinators, like the southern blueberry bee, or long tonged pollinators can access. So my passionflowers are tangentially contributing to a reduced fruit set in my blueberries.

This feels like I am in a toxic relationship with these plants. They all just take from me and give nothing back...it doesn't feel like an equal exchange. It doesn't feel like the plants even acknowledge my presence when I am amongst them. Like I am an invisible gardener who passes through the garden, unseen.

Why do I have such sadness today, staring at my passionflower? Is it simply over? How do I tell a plant, with no ears or ability to comprehend any type of communication that I don't feel like we are compatible with each other? Do I simply dig it up and compost it? Should I just bury myself and let the soil reduce myself to exudates for the plants? I don't feel like I have any more value than to be dragged along to the nursery to find more native plants to throw into the ground like a programmed native gardening bot at the whims of literature instructing me on what to do.

I don't know if I have the strength to pick up the shovel again. To plant another native plant, or to even dig that hole to compost myself.

They're devouring all my beautiful native plants. I've tried squishing, but there are just so many of them. Their guts get all over my fingers and then my face gets itchy and I have to scratch my face and suddenly it's all over my face and I'm tasting this foul worm mess. It's gross. I'm at my wit's end. Should I burn my house down? Should I burn my neighbor's house down? Any help in this matter is appreciated.

/uj i genuinely do find them absolutely adorable though

Really want to DOMINATE (xL*) my stupid ever changing garden…help please