Neotropical Eco Foundation

For some, a garden has to have flowers, not even the best well cared for and green grass is enough. For others a garden means an herbal garden with all the aromas from geranium, pelargonium, and jasmine. A medicinal plant garden is a choice for some others. All are in fact beautiful and they attract people the same way that they attract bees and birds.

To be complete a garden in the Americas, from far down in South America to high in the North American temperate zones, has to attract hummingbirds, one of the most beautiful creatures in nature.

The following article tells a story for children describing how a specific place can be transformed after being occupied by sugarcane plantations. After all, the future of this planet belongs to the children.

They used to be there, crossing the ecological route that connects the Joaquim Egídio district of Campinas to Itatiba. We traveled this itinerary many times and saw them among the cattle in the pastures and fields with bushes and wild grass, singing, jumping from one branch to the next. They are the seedeaters, among many others, like the Double-collared Seedeater, the Chestnut-capped Blackbird, the White-browed Blackbird, the Yellow-rumped Marshbird, the Siriema, the Whistling Heron and many other species that depend on the wild grass and marshland to feed themselves and their babies. And then, going back to that old dirt road, we were surprised to see the sugarcane plantations surging like a green desert that offers nothing to the native fauna, just more profit to those that already have so much but want much more. They don`t care about the animals, they never looked up in a tree to see the colors of a bird, they ignore the native flora and the future of the planet.