I was shearing a large boxwood hedge at the corner of our house recently when I had a little Planet Earth moment. As I reached down to clip some low hanging shoots that rested on the ground, I noticed a striking pattern of small gray-colored balls covering every leaflet of several shoots, actually somewhat suspended above the deep green of the leaf. A tiny pattern of beauty for the eye of whomever would pause long enough, stoop low enough, and look closely enough to see and appreciate it. The pattern extended even to some dead boxwood leaves on the ground and even to a section of rubber garden hose lying in that spot. It was a slime mold . . . one of God’s most ancient and mysterious of creatures . . . part fungus, part animal. Biologists and taxonomists must throw up their hands and classify it somewhere in-between, in the Myxomycota.
Slime molds actually move! Or ooze or flow, actually. Generally unseen, beneath the surface layer of decaying leaves and mulch in your yard, and in wild forested areas all over the world, they scarf up bacteria that are decaying the fallen vegetation. At some point, this gooey blob of ooze dries up and forms itself into little balls of dried spores, like powdery seeds, often climbing onto some vegetation, or even a garden hose, and lifting itself on a home-made stalk to catch a breeze and scatter itself hither and yon to a new spot to colonize. This process has been going on probably for hundreds of millions of years.
My house is quite old, by human standards (especially by Arkansas standards)—a little more than one hundred years old. Julie, my wife, planted that boxwood I’m trimming maybe 20 years ago. Now, at one time, this valley I live in didn’t exist. The tops of these “mountains”—the Ozark Plateau—were actually the bottom of an ancient, shallow tropical sea. Ever since the waters receded and land plants colonized and covered the land here, slime molds have been doing what they do, year after year, over countless millennia. Only recently have me and my boxwood shown up on the scene.
All of this—the beauty, the complexity, and the incredible span of time and years—just reinforces in my mind those same qualities of God which He possesses to an even greater degree. Who or what is older than God? Who or what is more creative, more complex, more full of beauty than the One who dreamed it all up in the first place . . . a long time ago.
Happy gardening . . .
