Nature has a way of humbling a gardener. I had my gardening schedule beeping along in my organizer but the weather sprang one surprise after another last week. First we had five inches of rain in a day, and we missed the worst weather of that storm. Then about the time that drained away enough to look like gardening weather again, a polar blast dropped temperatures twenty degrees below the yearly average. I layered paper shreds over the cabbages outdoors and hoped for the best.

The severe cold passed and more rain threatened again. I went out and uncovered the cabbages, discovering that the biggest ones looked like they survived the freeze. The smaller ones are still limp but green. I had to leave them uncovered in the chilly light rain, since they would have smothered under wet paper.

It is one day before potato planting day and I am a planting day behind on everything from this steady chill and rain. There won't be anything going out in the sodden garden for a while. I still haven't seen any spinach up, and my pea trenches have been excavated by chilled-to-the-bone squirrels and birds looking for a meal of soft, sprouting peas.

I'm not sure if this first yearly miracle of pea shoots is going to be wiped out by desperate wildlife scrounging for calories wherever they may be found. I do have more peas to plant, but they can't go into cold, sloppy mud. Once again the chaos of the world has overcome the mathematical precision of the birth of life.

It is remarkable to consider how a lump of chemicals is reorganized into a living plant by the DNA lodged in the plant embryo sleeping in the dry seed. DNA itself is a wonder, an arrangement of specific chemicals arranged in a binary code like a computer program. Thousands upon thousands of instructions must be passed from a plant to the seeds it makes to entrust its kind to these dried bits of promise, stable enough once ripened and dry to last a year or more to await suitable conditions to create another plant. For the species to survive, the duplication of instructions and their housing in a suitably stocked larder must recreate the same instructions with only minor variations within the species.

Yet, the theory of evolution proposes that somehow enough new variations must occur and accumulate to make the species turn into something else. It is rather like waiting for bugs in a computer program to turn it into an ever better program. Somehow it doesn't seem to work in computers or in my garden. It is my best plants that are often devoured by hungry creatures which bypass the lesser ones. Certainly, I do the same thing when inspecting produce, picking the best to eat and leaving the rest with the only slim chance to perpetuate its genes in next year's garden.

If I were to save seeds to propagate the best, I would have to deliberately leave the best plants alone to ripen their seeds. Nature doesn't seem to function that way. The predators don't leave the best prey animals alone if circumstances permit their capture. Supposedly they have to flee for their lives, thus causing the species to become better at avoiding predators. Yet, how does a plant flee from its enemies, especially those relatively tender and defenseless food plants? They can't escape being devoured or they wouldn't fulfill their role in the nourishment of other life forms.

One would expect that animals maximizing their nutritional intake would tend to selectively consume the most beneficial plants, leaving the worst behind to reproduce. That happens when a species overgrazes its environment, eating preferred plants until they are so scarce that less palatable plants must be eaten. When the available forage plants have been exhausted the species starves or moves to other pastures, but what happens when the last pasture is exhausted?

One could suppose that evolution had caused the fittest plants to survive because they had survived the attack of their devourers, but how then would the animals evolve to higher forms if they are driving the evolution of their food plants towards less nutritious and digestible forms? One reason that I have to deal with the wildlife is because I unwillingly feed them with part of the crops that I raise for myself. Without my efforts to replant those varieties, the yard would eventually be filled with varieties that are inedible to the local creatures.

That happens when humans take over a piece of meadow to make a new subdivision. They uproot anything edible that doesn't suit their tastes, forcing the wildlife to flee or adapt to whatever the humans plant, set out for the "cute" species, or whatever garbage is left unguarded. The web of life largely collapses, much to the anguish of the environmentalists. Yet they never seem to make the connection to what can happened in nature by the action of the animals.

Postscript: I went out on potato planting day, February 10, and discovered another sunny, spring-like morning. I gently lifted a few soggy paper strips from the cabbages and noted that the biggest ones had survived a mid-teens frost with only a little damage. The smallest ones may not make it, but there is still hope for some of them. The cabbages are a hardy tribe indeed, with a little help from their impatient human gardener.