I’ve been outside all morning, transplanting tomato seedlings and planting sweet-peas in tubs on the upper deck. Sometimes the things we do are by chance — I like to have roses near the table where we have our mid-morning coffee and I always put some sticks in the tubs for sweet-peas to clamber up. Flowers bring bees and the tomatoes need pollinators. We sit with our coffee and watch the timeless process of attraction and pollination, year after year, decade after decade. In the trees nearby, birds are courting and locating nesting places, some of them the cedar boxes made for one species but nested in by others. And the image here? Just a chunk of cedar with holes drilled into it for blue orchard mason bees. The other day John noticed that this year’s bees have already chewed their way out of their cocoons and the mud last year’s females used to plug the holes. While I was planting sweet-peas, the mason bees were buzzing around, looking for flowers. And hummingbirds were darting in and out of the flowering currants.
Every year the bees, the flowers, the birds, the tomatoes. The roses, entwined with sweet-peas. A corner of pots becomes a garden.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.–Emily Dickinson
...Theresa Kishkan 