This is the place I've come to, too. Nature is a boiling tumult of constant change and shoving my categories into it seems increasingly presumptuous. I live on

This is the place I've come to, too. Nature is a boiling tumult of constant change and shoving my categories into it seems increasingly presumptuous. I live on 6 acres of what feels like barely contained chaos. This summer in particular the wet and heat have conspired to cover every surface with a froth of green. In the woods I have at the back it would be hard to say what's native and what's invasive; the fantasy that one could classify anything as either seems to me to come from the mindset that really wants to see the world of flora and fauna as a self-balancing system with some sort of natural equilibrium. It just isn't it's constantly changing. I do 'encourage' things that are native and that I find interesting, but not clear my interventions accomplish much. But what I know is what's here is alive so much more than the cultivated fields and yards around me. And that's my excuse for avoiding my yard chores. Because of climate change this area around the north side of Lake Ontario has become a kind of moving target of what's "really" native; every year it seems like more "southerly" plants become established here. Plants whose "normal" home is US appalachia ... sassafras, tulip trees, pawpaws, vitis aestivalis, all plants that only seemed before to only thrive down in the valley closer to the lake ... they're establishing themselves up here above the escarpment. Are they native because they're from the same continent? Where does the boundary lie? They weren't here before.... For the first 10 years japanese beetles decimated my vineyard every summer; this year is the first year I've noticed the birds have decided that they're an acceptable snack and they're not causing me nearly so many problems. I've heard they've been a bit of a 100 year wave slowly making its way north across the midwest and northeast, causing crazy disruption and then settling down to a periodic annoyance. The vines I grow in my vineyard are hybrids with native north american species; and yet those same native vines growing along the fencelines and edge of the woods don't have problems with the beetles at all. The shelter of the woods probably housing birds and other insects and fungus that make quick work of the beetles. In the end, we're all just "Becoming Native to this Place" whichever that place might be https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/becoming-native-to-this-place/ https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/becoming-native-to-t...