Over millions of years, plants and animals have adapted and become specialized in myriad ways. It’s one of the wonders of nature that fascinates me. It’s as if the plants and animals thought, “How can I best fit into my environment, attract the best mate, or spread my pollen most efficiently?” So they developed this perfect adaptation, or that particular specialization in order to achieve these goals.
Two particular flowers made me stop and research why they had especially odd shapes.
The 60-70 species of columbine are found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and can be cultivated in gardens. What makes the blossoms peculiar looking are the long spurs that extend off the back of the petals. These spurs are filled with nectar that attract their pollinators—moths, butterflies, and humming birds. Moths and butterflies uncoil their long tube-like “tongue” into the flower’s spur and siphon out the nectar. Hummingbirds use their tongues to lap up the sweet liquid. While they are drinking in the nectar, pollen attaches to the legs, wings, and bodies of the pollinators who then fly away and distribute the pollen across their territories.
What’s amazing to me is the variety of spur shapes the columbine flower takes. The spurs may be long or short, straight or curved. Each species of columbine has adapted their spurs to fit the length and shape of their particular pollinator’s tongue and/or beak. Likewise, each pollinator’s tongue and/or beak has become adapted to fit a particular spur shape. It’s mutually beneficial.
The mountain laurel flower has a unique method of distributing its pollen. The stamen, the parts of the flower that produce pollen, are not upright as they are in most flowers, but are tethered down into pockets within the petals of the cup-shaped blooms. When a pollinator, such as a bee, lands on the blossom, the weight of the bee causes the spring-loaded stamen to pop out of their pockets like catapults and shower the bee with pollen.
How did these flowers “think” of these ingenious ways to ensure their species? The answer is probably evolution—the plants whose pollen was more successfully distributed had a reproductive advantage.
I invite you to take a cue from nature and evolve your approach to caregiving for a loved one who is living with dementia. You even have the added benefit of being able to think and learn in real time, not in the millions of years it takes for the natural world to change.
A first step would be to mentally enter their world. If you can see the world from their point of view, a solution may present itself.
Then if you try one approach, and it doesn’t get the desired result, adapt and change your tactic. And keep shifting and trying new approaches. It’s a necessity, too, because dementia is a moving target. What worked well at one stage of the disease just might not work at all in the next. Trying the same failed approach over and over just isn’t ever going to work.
If at first you don’t succeed, try something else!
For a blog post that illustrates my changing approaches to helping Harvey get dressed, go here.