Earth Jar: Bringing a part of nature into your home

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Photography by Joe Coca

Viewing nature closely is a luxury for most of us. We live in a hurry, on pavement, in buildings. We thrill to the rare glimpse of Orion through hazy, overlit skies, or to a lone goose catching up with its flock on the long trip south. These fleeting glimpses punctuate our days—when we’re lucky—but there’s an easy way to improve our luck on a small scale. Find a covered glass container, at least a quart in volume, and bring a little bit of nature home. Put it on your breakfast table, your desk, wherever you’ll see it often. Then pay attention.

The terrarium here is nothing more than a kitchen storage jar from the hardware store. The contents are a shovel full of Rocky Mountain subalpine forest I dug up one afternoon in late summer. A few rocks in the bottom, then earth, moss, lichens, twigs, tiny ferns, and much more that didn’t meet the eye—at least not right away.

One morning in October, I found a wee white mushroom popping out of the soil. Its cap was no bigger than the head of a pin. It spread its cap, wilted, rotted, and sank back into the earth, all in the course of three days. The mycelium it sprang from was invisible, but rich with life; another mushroom sprang up a few days later.

About once a week I opened the jar to mist the contents with water. In November this little chore disturbed a newly hatched brown lacewing that might have arrived as a tiny egg attached to one of the plants or as an inconspicuous, slender silken cocoon in the leaf mold. The warmth of my windowsill teased it with a sense of early spring. As it fluttered its delicate, inept wings, I wondered if it could complete its life cycle. I would have the chance to watch and see. (And it did live, for as long as lacewings do—about four days.)