Wholesome: My crew went out to weed one of our pollinator gardens and some stranger already did it.

The best thing about a pollinator garden is its social function. You're using horticulture as pedagogy to teach new beauty standards through a new value system, all of it very antithetical to the perfect environmental control and ornamental discipline of western landscaping. Space becomes something dynamic and local and community-driven, with each new month and year bringing something different as the systems begin to reinforce each other. In the end you have a community gathering place, wildflower seedbank, and destination in that park for learning about the landscape beneath it. You can see a native bee that isn't present in your yard and learn exactly how to attract it, with the seeds there for the taking.

For the first 3-5 years that's a rough process. It needs biweekly maintenance to keep bare ground from being colonised by weeds, but that's also very specialised labour since you're differentiating young plants that aren't grown in a clear ornamental pattern. It's so easy to fuck up that we don't usually bring volunteers in for weeding unless they're briefed first and we've already taken out the lookalikes. I guerilla garden constantly but am usually the only one tending these spaces outside of work.

Today we got to the site of one of our new crevice gardens. These use rocks to mimic the microclimates in mountain settings, letting you plant extremophiles and a wide variety of natives without using extra irrigation as water and nutrients become trapped in the crevices. It's a big space that was severely degraded before we redeveloped it last year, only planting this year. We were expecting several hours of work today.

The entire garden had been anonymously weeded by some member of the public, in a very exposed area during a heatwave that's giving the crew migraines. None of the good plants had been taken out and we only had to quickly clean up the paths between the beds. The time it freed up let us work on all of the other beds in the area.

I love seeing it all come together. Community stewardship to grow seeds that flow back into the community. An authentically local and productive space is going to fuel our municipal native plant nurseries, propagating hundreds of our best plants to give away next year and cultivate more community involvement. The public gets something beautiful for free and they're challenged to see new beauty in dissonance before spreading it in ways we can't predict. Chaotic good is working because the people are learning through observation and participation.

[that person] :solidarity: :ecoterrorist: