May 6

I am thinking of yesterday’s Dogtooth find and am torn between the pleasure in discovering them and the realization that such treasures are increasingly rare, I fear.

To read the naturalists of 100 or even 50 years ago, it’s painfully true that such wildflowers are vanishing as landscapes are given over to cultivation, management and development. What it must have been like to walk among the roadsides and forests and come upon what these authors so frequently extol as wonders of nature we can now only imagine.

We treat the landscapes as entities to be molded and controlled, with fashioned pathways created and bordered by mulch and plantings. Our spring nature is becoming a composite of predictable series of daffodils, tulips and hyacinths, carefully spaced along synthetic trails amid cultivated and manicured lawns that front roadways in which the remnant salts from last winter await the street sweeper to tidy.

There is simply less wild in the wild, and what threatened bit remains will be gone soon enough. Sadder still is that the artificial created landscapes we experience are increasingly considered as wild nature by those who do not know better.