20 April

I post this every year because it’s wonderful, to me anyway. The wonders under our feet we don’t always notice. First picture is a man-made path through a park, on my way to work. After recent storms, a lot of plant matter has blown and been washed across some of the path. Second picture shows though how this is far from some random process. The forces of the water and wind interacting with the plant matter shapes it into semi-circular dams (the yellow line), behind which silt starts to build up (the black stuff). In that silt new plants germinate and grow. This is how grass and other plants spread by themselves, you can see these little islands in any piece of self-sown grass. The area will feel bumpy until these little dams fill completely with soil and the grass has fully grown. Life isn’t just ‘living’ things like plants and animals. It’s the way all of these components interact.