SUMMER

Summer is here, the season of pollinators.  All the flowering plants in the Tawes Garden will do their best to attract them—bees, butterflies, moths, and many smaller or less charismatic (to us) insects that are no less important as far as the plants are concerned.   It’s for them that flowers flaunt their colors and emit enticing scents to advertise what they will offer in exchange for fertilization in this age-old trade.  And us?  We’re just onlookers with no part in this spectacle; why does it attract us too?  But it does; we’re as much drawn in as the dizziest butterfly or the most bumbling bee.  But if we tire eventually of so much color (and heat!) in the open garden there’s a spot further along the path where a tide of ferns laps up against pale rock on a shaded slope, projecting coolness and easing the eye.