A simple bank of rusty Buckwheat blossoms against an amber sandstone background. Hundreds of glorious scenes worth stopping at to take notes, sketch, photograph, or simply gaze. And each of them provides some benefit, often essential, to the animals that live there. Of course there will be differences between our gardens and the real thing. In our nearby wildlands the plants grow because a seed washed up behind a boulder and stopped long enough to germinate.
Dead plants serve as a perch before slowly decomposing into mulch.
No additional water is added. Gardens, however, are by definition a controlled environment. Even those gardens designed to imitate some natural association of plants we have spied in the wild are still designed and so require some maintenance. Rather than growing as chance dictates since space is often very limited, individual plants are carefully placed, overly competitive plants may be thinned or removed, dead plants, rather than slowly becoming mulch, are simply removed, and water can be provided when rain fails. Still the overall concept follows a natural pattern and its maintenance is relatively low, and most importantly, the gardener is more than rewarded by the forms of life that adopt the garden as their home.