Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
"Inversnaid" -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

This quotation is the last line of the poem "Inversnaid," written by Hopkins after a visit to this town on the east bank of Loch Lomond in the Scottish Highlands. For me, the poem evokes the power and necessity of wild places.

Our world is losing its wildernesses at a terrifying pace and, even with dedicated efforts to protect and restore them, their future looks grim.

It's a tiny thing, but I have been trying to bring some wilderness back to my garden.
I've slowly been removing some non-native plants, adding native plants, and trying to create habitat for insects, birds, and animals. At this point in the transition, my yard is a miniature wilderness. Golden rod, pokeweed, and ironweed tower over billows of asters and Carolina snailseed vine and Virginia creeper drape the shrubs.

The shrubs, trees, and other perennials I've planted are still small so these hearty natives are having their heyday as my yard progresses.

It's been satisfying to talk to neighbors and friends about the importance of native plants and wildlife, and to show them a different way to look at my "weeds."

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins