“Look at that caterpillar,” Andrew J. Brand stated one particular afternoon as we passed a hummocky outdated bottlebrush buckeye shrub in my garden.

What caterpillar, I believed, swiftly coaching my eyes in the route of his gaze somewhat than uncomfortable myself by acknowledging that I hadn’t recognized nearly anything.

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What he had spied looked to me like nothing at all additional than just yet another of a lot of twigs, jutting from a branch at a slight angle. But it was not a stick. It was a stick caterpillar, the effectively-disguised larval type of some geometrid moth or other — a creature so inconspicuous, so cryptic, that it can try to eat without having staying eaten, hiding in simple sight from every person — other than for Brand name.

Maybe it’s not astonishing that a person with a master’s degree in tissue lifestyle — propagating plants from little parts or mere cells of the initial — should really have a keen eye for the finer factors of residing organisms. His undertaking when he was earning his diploma, aided by magnifiers and microscopes: “working with teeny-tiny items, chopping them into small parts and truly looking at the minutiae.”

Very little has changed given that then, it would seem. But Brand’s present-day mandate as director of horticulture for Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, in Boothbay, is to make specific that big-image scenes get us, far too.

The 300-furthermore-acre community area, which welcomed additional than 250,000 site visitors in 2021, incorporates far more than 20 acres of show gardens with nature-targeted capabilities like an apiary for honeybees and a native-bee exhibition. A indigenous-butterfly-and-moth residence is planted with host and nectar crops — meals for both of those larvae and older people — diligently matched so that each and every species can finish its complete life cycle there.

Further than the cultivated locations, trails invite website visitors deep into the Maine woods, alongside slender paths by woods of towering spruce and pines, towards a tidal river with seagulls and ospreys.

The community component is a single of the factors that Brand name likes finest about the area exactly where he began functioning in 2018, soon after 27 yrs at Damaged Arrow Nursery, in Hamden, Connecticut, which specializes in exceptional and strange…