Up in the sun

Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens var. glauca)

Planting: the ground unpacks to a heap of twice the volume. The bottom of the hole becomes paler and cloggier.

Swollen heap. Disinterred, seasoned with air. As life on this planet, the slow eruption of trees crowned with leaves, the bee swarm, the starry flowers on a bank, flocks of birds aloft, and their melody.

 John Innes No. 3, the last of the bag; pour in water to make a beef gravy, then the tender lavender plant

A surprising amount of the spoil-heap wedges back in around the sides.

Almost all of life inhabits a layer very close to the Earth's surface. The outliers, the microbes of the high atmosphere and deep rock, are almost unknown, unimaginable. There's a desert vulture that can soar up to 11,000 meters, scanning whole nations for a fresh carcass. The exceptional is sometimes possible.

But the mainstream of life is down here (or up here), in the horizontal envelope of our gazing and our listening. Life snatches the opportunities of green eruption and brown mulch, of churn and change, where water pools or streams, where the winds and the currents meet.

Prunus 'Pink Perfection'

Silver Birch (Betula pendula)