Webs

Living in New Hampshire for some time, I had a chance to wander through second-growth woodlots and see many old stone walls, often decayed and fallen down, marking the edges of what had been fields. No shortage of stones there! These were walls of opportunity – they were built to clear the field for plowing and to mark boundaries. They were often as rough-hewn as the stones they were built with.

 There are walls and there are walls… This one, in the Leventritt Shrub and Vine Garden, has a very different origin story, I’m sure. I’m not sure where the stone came from but it’s clear that this wall was a carefully planned and assembled project, as you would expect at the Arb.

 As different as their origins were, over the course of time animal and vegetable inhabitants seem to have made this place a wild home, even in the midst of a cultivated formal garden. Surely the spiders don’t sense a difference to those old New England walls.

 And we can enjoy them both.