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Beauty is alluring and captivating
Suet, safflower and sugar water feeders dangle from branches of a pink dogwood tree immediately outside my living room’s bay window. Downy woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and hummingbirds routinely feast an arm’s length away from my favorite armchair while squirrels zip up and down the trunk of a volunteer bur oak’s arching branches, gathering nuts in mid-August.
Beauty is alluring and captivating. It distracts and draws you to it. My garden qualifies in that way. A familiar chirp or subtle motion causes me to look away from my laptop computer, even as I blog about beauty for KIBI. I dash for my camera to “capture” a hummingbird sphinx moth sipping from plumbago, impatiens and lantana. Other times I grab binoculars for a closeup look at cardinals and catbirds plucking small purple fruits from tropical looking pokeweed and American spikenard, a showy relative of ginseng.
Throughout the seasons, this garden blooms in shades of pink, lavender, gold, corral, deep purple, periwinkle, blue and green. Superficially beautiful, life-giving sustenance underlies it’s panoply of colorful blooms encircling my 630 square-foot front garden. Goldfinches land on maturing heads of black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers and pluck their seeds. Swallowtail and monarch butterflies search and find nectar. Hummingbirds devour tiny insects caught in delicate spider webs, their strands glowing like fine copper wire in early morning light. And as the sun begins to set, crickets and katydids, hidden amidst the garden’s foliage during the day, begin their intense drone that continues into morning’s dawn.
Can the word beauty be an active verb? My garden beauties? Yes, it definitely does. My garden is alive - and beautiful.
Ruth Ann Ingraham lives on the north side of Indianapolis where she enjoys gardening. Author of a book featuring her cabin and its environs in Brown County, she spearheads the effort there to thwart the spread of invasive plant species into the county's forests.
