Paradisal Plant Islands---La Rosa and Bloom

Almost everything we do as humans has its prototype in Nature, whether we want to admit it or not. And, prototypes are certainly relevant to our gardens. Of course, the mystics, poets, and artist-observers all know this. They saw reality as a continuum comprising the lowest and the highest levels of the cosmos.
   In our arid climate we need to effectively use every drop of water that we are given, and this is especially possible with the creation of Plant Islands in our gardens. A Plant Island exists in Nature as an ecological unit of flora and fauna. The best examples of Plant Islands are Pacific coral atolls and the hammocks of the Florida Everglades. We all know those Pacific atolls lushly ringed to the edge of the sea with clumps of breeze waving palm trees. And within these tree-ringed islands are plants and animals of a wide variety.
   The same ecological unit exists within the vast marshes of the Everglades, and they are called hammocks, not to be equated with those slings of summer sloughing-off. Hammocks are patches of land only a few inches higher than the surrounding marshes, appearing from a distance as green dots of trees, or, as islands; they are tear-drop shaped because of the flow of the Everglades, "the great river of grass," the seasonal waters that flow toward the south and ultimately reach the sea. I well remember walking a few miles out to those magical islands. Once I stepped inside the hammock,  I felt as though in another world; there was a sacred silence, a spell. My ears were deafened and had to adjust, and new sights and sounds emerged. The thick, black water moccasins were silent, basking in the mottled sun, emerging slowly into my sight and awareness.  Birds waited and sang. The hammock-island-home was their hidden, secret sanctuary: there were large mammals such as deer, (I saw only their foot prints) and smaller ones--possums and racoons; reptiles--snakes, frogs, lizards turtles, and gators only to mention a few; and there were a myriad of insects and crustaceans. The orchids clung to the trees and offered no challenge. Within a very small island area, plants and animal life created an ambiance richer than I have ever experienced in any zoo inclosure. It is this ambiance that zoo-keepers use as an archetype and try to create. Walking out of the hammock was like returning to another world, the world of bright sunlight and vast marshes of wind-driven grass and a kind of surface reality. Now it was time for the mile or two walk back to the roadway, hear the occasional  traffic and drive away in my car.
   So what does this all have to do with our own gardens? Well, in a "vast" area of  suburban lawn or dry substrate, we also can create Plant Islands. This is nothing new as Alan Bloom (1906-2005) created islands of perennials at his Dell Garden and nursery around his home called Bressingham in Norfolk, England. Bloom created 170 new varieties of perennials, and wrote over thirty books, his most known being "Island Beds," Faber and Faber, Ltd. His plant-island-concept fertilized the gardening world like a great swarm of honey bees.  Bloom popularized a garden feature that had been waiting to burgeon into full bloom. Just a brief addendum: Bloom quit school at fifteen, read books, and loved propagating plants. His sons still administer Dell Garden which thrives to this day.

   My own Plant Islands are ringed with mortared bricks, one or two courses high. Or, when cobbles were free for the picking, I mortared those together. The stones or bricks were shaped into circles or free forms. Gradually, over time, detritus, mulches, and added good earth have raised their interior levels two or three inches above the lawn (I am chopping it all out gradually), and now I have Plant Islands of plants. Each island contains plants of a similar kind, and I even have an island near the green house and in the back near the canyon for cacti and succulents.
   So, here it is. Plant Islands make an ecological (from the Greek, oikos, for home) environment that builds  up rich earth, retains water, and contains plants suited to each other--plant communities or neighborhoods. And, the butterflies, lizards, insects such as beautiful fig beetles, and birds find sanctuary. Oh, those beautiful birds, my favorite being the Black-Headed Grosbeak, and the many others, about fifteen varieties which include Orioles and Tanagers and Hummingbirds. I call them  my "constituents" because I love and take care them and they always vote for me, without any pressure or leaning from me of any kind! If Nature is respected with Work, Intelligence, and Sensitivity, there is no need to lean---it will take its own course, be itself, like the meander of a living river.
   I believe that our garden Plant Islands are the microcosmic mirrored images of the cosmic galaxies that Hubble observed night after night in the skies. In Nature everything is similar, but at a different level.