A few months ago, I remembered that when I was little and bored in the summer, my mother used to send me out with a jar to catch a grasshopper. I realized that I had not seen a grasshopper in many years. Although I was a city child, and our lawn was the size of a postage stamp, when the grass was allowed to get long, grasshoppers abounded. I drew a grasshopper in my journal that day, but I have been thinking a lot about them since.
Here in suburbia, I have a large "lawn." Although we use no chemicals on it, and as a result there's lots of green (crabgrass, dandelions, mallow, moss and even some grass, along with some invasive ajuga which spreads a purple carpet in the spring) I have never seen a grasshopper. Am I just not looking for them? Or have the lawn chemicals and landscape contractors killed them all off? The monarch butterflies are dying off because the milkweed is gone from the verges. Are the grasshoppers slipping away too? Thanks for these images - perhaps we can make others think about what is being lost to us, silently, through urges we think are good ones (a beautiful lawn!) but perhaps, a little benign neglect is a better path.
A few months ago, I remembered that when I was little and bored in the summer, my mother used to send me out with a jar to catch a grasshopper. I realized that I had not seen a grasshopper in many years. Although I was a city child, and our lawn was the size of a postage stamp, when the grass was allowed to get long, grasshoppers abounded. I drew a grasshopper in my journal that day, but I have been thinking a lot about them since.
ReplyDeleteHere in suburbia, I have a large "lawn." Although we use no chemicals on it, and as a result there's lots of green (crabgrass, dandelions, mallow, moss and even some grass, along with some invasive ajuga which spreads a purple carpet in the spring) I have never seen a grasshopper. Am I just not looking for them? Or have the lawn chemicals and landscape contractors killed them all off? The monarch butterflies are dying off because the milkweed is gone from the verges. Are the grasshoppers slipping away too? Thanks for these images - perhaps we can make others think about what is being lost to us, silently, through urges we think are good ones (a beautiful lawn!) but perhaps, a little benign neglect is a better path.