~many (too many) meetings~

While I was in the first meeting of the morning, the black swallowtail butterfly caterpillar (often called parsleyworm) was devouring the bronze fennel growing in the corner of the middle vegetable garden.

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Before the first meeting of the day was over, the gardenia flower (just budding out in early morning with stripes of green and white ) began to unfurl, its fragrance spreading throughout the branches of the old azaleas, the hydrangeas, and the camellias - finally reaching the open area beneath the canopy of the live oak trees and slowly drifting upwards.

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In the thirty minutes between the end of the first (and long and tedious) meeting and the start of the next one - Hydrangea macrophylla 'Blaumeise' began to show hints of blue - blue that in a week will be rich and deep, a blue that will stop you as you walk by, that will catch you thinking 'how can such a blue even exist?' even though each year it graciously appears.

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During the laboratory's weekly meeting, the bee balm (Monarda didyma), transplanted from my mother's garden about five weeks ago, is opening, revealing flowers that compare in color only with the veins in it's upper leaves, flowers that reach four feet up, as if on tip-toes, reaching for the warm southern sun.  The bee balm stretches towards the sun as the lab talks about biofilms and the influence of pH on Burkholderia biofilms and... where to go next?  The bee balm doesn't need to ponder these questions, as it stretches, just a bit further, towards the afternoon sun. 

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The laboratory meeting ends, and another meeting with a colleague begins - this one with a summer student and several postdocs and a graduate student - all joining efforts to study how a Gram-negative microorganism's metabonome changes when grown on different media, under different temperatures, and in the presence of (potentially antagonistic) microorganisms.  All the while, the elephant garlic flower heads explode, it's imperfect sphere hinting of a mysterious inner region that one can only hope that an insect (or two or three) chooses to explore from time-to-time, an area that makes one think 'perhaps I should dissect this flower head, just to see'...while in the conference room, we try to get closer to this 1-2 micron organism in order to better understand why it seems to be showing up in so many places, to the detriment of many corals in many different parts of our own imperfect, and equally mysterious sphere.

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As the salvia continues to open up and reach for the sky, I walk - 15 minutes late - to the last meeting of the day. I didn't mind being late, once you've spent an entire day in conference rooms, your presence seems vaguely unnecessary - and I stood through much of this last meeting, sometimes standing against the large glass window (looking towards the inside of the room, but wanting desperately to be looking outside, into the parking lot flooded with sun) - trying to pay attention to the log-in approaches (separate accounts...or through a curator's institutional log-in?), trying to remember a prior discussion about potential problems with downloading previously published data that is publicly-accessible (meaning the original curators of the data won't be terribly motivated to 'play' with it again for the 'general good').  Between such discussions, the salvia unfolded a few more petals of rich purple-blue, oblivious to the chatter in the conference room, oblivious to the objectives of the last meeting of the day. 

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That is just what I have imagined, this evening, while I wandered the garden - it is what I imagined was going on while I spent my day in meetings.  The garden - a scientific marvel for sure, if one were to truly understand it - rolls along well on it's own, in my absence - and without a single meeting being called.  So then...what was I doing all day?

Comments

[K Schneider]

Amazing photo of the parsleyworm.

[Blackswampgirl/Kim]

Posts like this make me love feeling insignificant and unimportant. (In the grand scheme.) Because it's comforting to know that the world of the garden (at least) goes along quite well even when you are not there to tend its every moment.

[theManicGardener]

This is lovely--so quiet and yet urgent.
--kate

[kate]

All that goes on in the garden while we were occupied elsewhere ... quite humbling and magnificent.