While I don’t have a garden per se, I do have a green lawn behind my apartment that is teeming with examples of Mother Nature’s gentle benevolence. Many creatures visit my feeder, including one that most people would shoo away, but I can’t. Each bird, rodent and “pest” has a special place in Earth’s ever-evolving lifecycles and I love them all, whether they are cowbirds, chipmunks or squirrels, even if the latter will eat me out of house and home. When I’m outside, I try to picture the backyard the way it would look from their perspective – when I do, it seems like the lawn is a vast expanse fraught with danger and excitement. Thankfully my feeders don’t attract bears, but we live in an area with a lot of farmland and bears tend to approach feeders that are in wooded areas. There are towns around us that ban bird feeders and I’m glad that we don’t live in them because  I enjoy the magic of my backyard and its garden spirit.