Lamentation for mowing machines

 Aldo Leopold used to mark the arrival of Silphium blossoms every July. Silphium looks a bit like a sunflower. It was found on the prairies when settlers arrived in Wisconsin.

Leopold watched for it to bloom in a cemetery dating to the 1840s. One year, the highway crews moved the cemetery fence so they could mow. Leopold knew that the plants like Silphium would survive the mowing once or twice and then simply die.

Leopold told how 100,000 motorists a year passed that spot. Many of them had taken a course in botany. He wondered that so few people would look or would care.

All that came to mind when I discovered the mowers had been through a lot where I’d found dewberries, nightshade, spiderworts and tall grasses.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, pp. 48-50.