If you’ve read this blog more than a couple of times, you know I’m crazy about bees. Actually, about most wildlife (and yep, bees qualify). Starting next month, my patient, long-suffering husband & I are taking a beginning beekeeping class. I’m very stoked…

In the meantime, given the changes in local climate (a LOT hotter & drier — today it was 107˚, and it hasn’t rained but drops in ages), I’m replanting a lot of our yard. We’ve always had a habitat-friendly yard: no insecticides, lots of feeders for birds, and many butterfly plants. But bees don’t always ‘get’ butterfly plants: they lack the long tongues that make the tubular flowers work for butterflies.

Anyway, I’m in that lovely gardening stage called ‘dreaming.’ Looking at catalogs, combing websites, and re-reading the zillion books I have on gardens, bees, habitat gardening, etc. It’s a great summer pastime.

A few years ago, one of the nurseries I buy from featured something called a ‘chocolate mimosa,’ basically just a dark-leaved hybrid of the usual Southern mimosa. Now, if you’re a Southerner (and Okies really are, despite what Mississippians think…), you either love or hate mimosas. My sister’s best-beloved calls them ‘trash trees,’ but she still managed to talk him in to one. I adore them — their pink feather flowers are one of my favourite fragrances, and they’re a boon for bees, hummers, & butterflies. Couple that w/ a lovely red-brown, chocolatey leaf colour? You’ve got an impossibly wonderful combination.

The only catch is that this is a  HYBRID. Meaning, somebody ‘invented’ it. And so it’s terribly expensive. Rats. And remember — we just retired? Wellll, my own best-beloved isn’t too excited about totally re-landscaping. Or even buying one $100.00 tree (well, the smaller one is less, but who wants a teensy treeling??).

Friends, this is Buddhist attachment in its purest. I am sooo attached to this tree idea. And to the replanting of the garden and yard… And of course I can ‘justify’ it (it will save water! we won’t lose plants! it will feed wildlife!), but at least I’m still sane enough to realise: it’s attachment. Pure & simple.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still dream of my re-designed, newly planted beds… W/ the (totally NOT cheap) wooden hive to one side, and a small water feature to provide 24/7 water… And echinacea, and buddleia, and coreopsis, and.. and… and… Bees. Lots of happy, drowsily humming bees.

I do think there ought to be something to do about this other  than get past it, though. Any great ideas? How do you combat attachment? What are you attached to these days?