Opinion | Long Live the Fireflies (and the Wildflowers and Mosquitoes, Too)

I honestly don’t get it. Isn’t escaping expectations of tidiness and order a big reason we go outside in the first place? And isn’t wildness something we hope to encounter when we get there? How on earth could an ecological dead zone possibly seem prettier than a tangle of wildflowers populated by beautiful and fascinating insects? And by the manifold creatures — bats and birds and mammals, reptiles and amphibians — who survive by eating those bugs?

Mosquitoes play a crucial role in this ecosystem, but it’s definitely more pleasant to spend time outdoors if you are not serving as part of the food web yourself. Fortunately, mosquitoes can’t fly in wind, and an oscillating fan can keep them away without killing them and everything else. Mosquitoes, which do not venture far from home, also can’t reproduce without standing water. To keep your yard more or less mosquito-free, just eliminate all other sources of standing water and build a “mosquito bucket of doom” to trick mosquitoes into laying eggs in water where their larvae cannot survive.

We don’t have an easy answer yet for how to feed the world without chemical fertilizers and poisons, but taking a live-and-let-live approach to the yard — or the city park, or the apartment balcony or the public roadsides — is easy. It also frees up time and money, lowers our own carbon footprint and increases ecosystem biodiversity, all while reducing our own exposure to the health risks of environmental poisons.

A couple of weekends ago, I was looking for a peony to give my brother for his birthday. Peonies aren’t native to the American South, and they feed none of our wild neighbors, so I consider them a waste of garden space. But they are Billy’s favorites. And since he had just spent an entire year making the artworks that will accompany the essays in my next book — nearly every one of which involved some version of the question “Is this a native plant?” or “Is this a native bird?” or “Is this a native bug?” — I figured a peony would be the kind of gift he would recognize as more than just a celebration of his birth. A peony would say, “There is room in this world for your flowers and for mine.”

But at the nursery, none of the peonies were in bloom. How was I to choose one not knowing what its flower would look like?

Then, at the very back of the enormous peony section, I spied a plant with a bloom emerging from its center — a flower that was not a peony. Owing to some miracle of haphazard poison application, a tall stalk of butterweed emerged from the center of the peony plant. And tucked under the plant’s leaves was a bit of American speedwell, too. The speedwell wasn’t blooming yet, but the butterweed boasted a spray of those glorious yellow flowers that I love with all my heart. These wildflowers had somehow found the one pot in the entire nursery with soil that hadn’t been treated with a pre-emergent poison to keep weed seeds from germinating.

And that’s the best part, the most joyful, heart-lifting truth about what happens when we make even a little space for the natural world to live safely in the built landscape: Wildness stands ready to move right in as soon as we get out of the way.