An entire ecosystem buzzing into view

This piece was featured first on Jun 11 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

A couple of years ago, we planted a purple scabiosa in our yard. It had dark purple, verging on black, flowerheads with little pink and white accents. Scabiosa “flowers,” like a lot of my favorite plants, actually have an inflorescence composed of many florets. Scabiosas are circular disks, hence their name “pincushion flowers.”

My scabiosa blooms were gorgeous and the plant was very happy in its spot. It tossed off dozens and dozens of blooms for months. I didn’t intentionally toss the seeds all over the yard, but I did lop off a lot of blooms that had gone to seed.

Fast forward a few years, and now our front yard is filled with different colors of scabiosas. I planted a lighter purple at some point and it was wildly productive, too. But other than that, the profusion of flowering plants is a result of just two those two. Now, however, I have white scabiosas. I have a dusky rose kind of flower. And I have various pinks and purples, too.

It’s not hard to see how all these crosses happened either. Every time I let my eyes focus on any of the plants, I see all kinds of pollinators buzzing about them. Multiple types of bees, the occasional fly, little wasp-looking guys, sweet little white butterflies and big slow monarchs. As I let the scabiosa take over the yard (there are probably 60 plants now at various sizes and stages of life?), I realized that I was really inviting in all kinds of happy insects.

They are, in my own particular typology, independent flowers. They neither need nor want much of my attention. They bloom when they will lean how they might, and I see them as more a part of the outside world than my own garden. I love them.

Maybe one day, my entire yard will be scabiosa, filling out the entire gradient from darkest purple-black to whitest-white. And I will marvel at the raw exponential productivity of a good plant. From two, all this many, and from that many, an entire ecosystem buzzing into my view.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum