We don’t have to—indeed, we neither can nor should—each provide all habitats, every sort of food. You plant nut treees and I’ll plant spruce, you keep a berry thicket and I’ll do the tall grass, or the bog, the woodlot, the crowds of fruiting shrubs and beds of wildflowers. But let us weave them together into something big enough to matter by connecting each patch with others at the corners and along the boundaries. This is the rich, new landscape; this is the new kind of gardener who asks not whether he should plant this ornament or another but which patch is missing from his community, how he can provide it, and how animals will move from his patch to the next.

This is the ark.

Sara Stein—Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards