Nature In My Neighborhood - a etc

When people think of nature, they think of large expanses of trees, marshes or plains. Often I find natures ability to blossom in the hardest of places magnificent. For this assignment I didn’t go far at all, because you really can find life growing natural and beautiful almost everywhere. Walking around my neighborhood I saw trees growing up along roadsides, flowers and weeds sprouting out of sidewalks, and bushes fighting against meshing. Even a very tired bush drinking a cold beverage after a long day doing verdant things.

We are lucky to live in such a place that is still lush, especially for this time of year. Trips to more sprawling cities, I’ve found it much harder. LA and New York are concrete jungles that I found I missed the green of home. There parks are designated and nature is segmented, allowed to thrive in only artificial conditions. I love being able to walk out here, and be in dense woodlands in minutes.

While I saw a lot of flora there was a definite lack of fauna. Although most typically I see deer sometimes around my neighborhood, mingling with the much more metallic creatures roaming the roads. For our part we have seeked to tame nature, to mold it to fit our designs, to be pleasant to our spaces. Nature inherently isn’t that. Nature is chaotic, robust, unyielding. Try as we might to capture, to have it fit into our visions it sprouts up just the same. From rocks to cinder, to concrete to tarp. 

I think once we stop worrying about the perfect shape of fruit, color of leaf, or heft of branches we can realize that in an interurban landscape nature is perfectly imperfect. Beautifully rebellious and remarkably resilient. We should learn to live with it. We should learn to stop and smell the flowers on the side of the asphalt.