NATURE

How Planting a Garden for Pollinators Helped Heal My Screenbrain

Immersing ourselves in aliveness helps us stay alive

Screenbrain Syndrome

My work is mostly on the computer, writing, editing, uploading or zooming. It got worse with the pandemic. There is nothing like the particular kind of exhaustion screenbrain can create. I began to feel non-human, disconnected and confused. So I asked myself: What can I do that is not on the screen that will feed and nurture my wholeness? What came to me was to plant a garden but not just any old garden: a flower garden and flowers the pollinators will love. For some reason watching and being around pollinators feeds me and gives me hope.

“The greatest Mesozoic creativity in the plant world was the flower in Cretaceous times. The sexuality of the flowering plants (angiosperms) was an order of magnitude more fecund than that of the gymnosperms. Where a conifer would require eighteen months to produce its seeds, a flower could grow from a seed to amateur plant capable of releasing its own seeds all in a few weeks. Added to its fecundity was the symbiotic relationship between the insect world and the flower. Insects drawn to the nectar unknowingly transport pollen from one flower to the next, fertilizing the plants on which they feed. Often a particular insect will feed only on a particular flower, thus assisting in the process of creating a new species”(Swimme 122).

It’s obvious to most of us that digging in the dirt is the number one thing to do for getting back in touch with Gaia, to ground ourselves, so to speak, back into a relationship with the earth and all its life systems. To remember that we are but a part of it, perpetually embedded in this brilliance. And to me the number one activity for curing screenbrain is getting back in touch with Gaia.

So this was the first step. To sit in the sun and dig in the dirt and prepare the soil with my own hands while thinking about which flowers I would welcome into my garden, in my yard, located within a suburb in northern California. Digging in the dirt, weeding out space for new life, planting starts and seeds, watering, then watching them grow and bloom and then — then seeing who comes to the call.

“The vast majority of pollinators are called to their plants by specific chemical compounds made uniquely for them, which are active in extremely tiny quantities. . . Because of this kind of specificity, plants create a wide range of volatile compounds that appeal to pollinators. . . However, most chemical cues, millions of them, have no ‘smell’ at all”(Buhner 191).

If you plant it . . . .

After planting it, they came. For a long time, the first few years, I let myself believe that it was the same hummingbird that came every year. I don’t know why I wanted to indulge myself in this deluded fantasy but I did. Every year I planted flowers and then more flowers. When the hummingbird came I greeted it with a grand, sweeping gesture of my right arm which encompassed the whole of the garden, saying: “Come! Enjoy! This all for you. Come and feast! I did this all for you.”

Other pollinators came. The garden was full of bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies, dragonflies, beetles. But the hummingbird — it was the hummingbird I most wanted to invite. I wanted to believe I could create something that would attract such beauty, such magic, such a perfected being. I considered it my friend.

The wild interconnectedness of life is on full display in the garden of pollinators. The flowers need the pollinators to move the pollen around so they can create seeds for the future and the pollinators need the flowers for food and habitat. Yes, we all know that but do we humans know how much we need flowers and pollinators, that we have coevolved with these simultaneous occurrences as well? Flowers are called angiosperms. They first appeared on earth 100 million years ago. And since that time, they have flourished and dominated the ecosystems of the planet. Humans and pollinators have made such use of flowers that this has differentiated the evolution of pollinators and humans. Now we are in very specific need of flowers and each other. I don’t know if the pollinators and the flowers need us but we sure need them. Hey, maybe we are just here to perpetuate the lives of flowers. There could be worse reasons. We tend to think we love flowers for their beauty and inspiration but truly we couldn’t live without them.

“Virtually every nonmeat food we eat starts as a flowering plant, while the meats, milk, and eggs we consume come from livestock fattened on grains — flowering plants. Even the cotton we wear is an angiosperm”.

Think about this. Once there were no flowers on earth. None. There were ferns. There were flowering trees, conifers but there were no flowers and even when flowers first appeared they did not initially have petals. Petals. Think about it, once there were no petals on earth. Then flowers developed petals. And then flowering life on the planet exploded along with their insect and pollinator friends.

The Emergence of Petals

In an article by Michael Klesius on nationalgeographic.com, paleobotanist, Else Marie Friis tells us that:

“sometime between 70 and 100 million years ago the number of flowering plant species on Earth exploded, an event botanists refer to as the “great radiation.” The spark that ignited that explosion, said Friis, was the petal.“Petals created much more diversity. This is now a widely accepted notion,” Friis said. In their new finery, once overlooked angiosperms became standouts in the landscape, luring insect pollinators as never before. Reproduction literally took off. Interaction between insects and flowering plants shaped the development of both groups, a process called coevolution. In time flowers evolved arresting colors, alluring fragrances, and special petals that provide landing pads for their insect pollinators.”

Do you understand that you are living in a moment where there are flowers with petals, and pollinators, pollinators who have evolved exactly for those flowers and those petals and petals of flowers that have shaped themselves exactly for the pollinators? Do you understand that you live in this moment in the universe in the Milky Way on a planet called earth, this moment of flowers, petals and pollinators and a human mind with a consciousness that evolved itself to begin to understand this connection between pollinators, flowers and humans? It is a moment because in universal time, 80 million years is just a moment. This is our moment.

The pollinator garden locates one in that moment, in the here and the now. The pollinator garden resets one to local time as well as time eternal, to infinity, it permeates one with beauty, bathes one in delight. The pollinator garden breathes ecstasy, promotes creativity, is fueled by sexuality, attraction, hunger, love and lust. The pollinator garden is a bath in earth’s bounty, earth’s potentiality, earth’s creativity, earth’s yearning, earth’s fecundity, “earth’s imagination.”

And that is why the pollinator garden helps heal my screenbrain. Get one.

©Theresa C. Dintino 2021

Works Cited

Buhner, Stephen Harrod. The Lost Language of Plants. Vermont, Chelsea Green. 2002.

Klesius, Michael. “The Big Bloom — How Flowering Plants Changed the World” ( https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/big-bloom).

Swimme, Brian & Thomas Berry. The Universe Story. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.