birdieopolis

maceratedlately i've been fascinated by the form of flowers as they are ravaged by the elements. my early mentor, angela danadjieva, used to buy a single stem of orchids and left them on her desk for months, watching and relishing the sublime forms as they withered and decayed. in college we studied "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", by edmund burke, and i was rapped by the notion of beauty in decay. this has permeated my perception of idealized landscapes, and i guess in a way buttresses my devotion to providing habitat for wild species. when i see developers wipe a site clean of all it's indigenous materials i feel a blow to the stomach. degredation of habitat not only happens in china or south america but right here in a place where nature commands attention by it's enormous scale. when a builder, just for the heck of it, stripped the understory from the forest behind our house did he know that all the critters that used that place for forage and shelter would be displaced or killed? it was nesting season. the pheasants are ground nesters. was a generation wiped out? with a verdant garden the pheasants are here far more than they used to be when the forest was replete with hiding places. i just wish more would not see native habitat as an object to subdue, but as a nursery for a myriad of interconnected indigenous species.