Last week marked the second time this season I’ve spotted a katydid up on the rooftop, though never before in the 7 years of the Noble Rot rooftop garden’s lifespan. I always love to log a new creature in any of the gardens where I work because to me it’s an encouraging sign of greater ecological complexity. That’s particularly notable on the rooftop because all we started with 7 years ago was bagged potting soil, seeds, and an assortment of bagged fertilizers. It has taken a while for the soil to complexify, but complexify it has, and it now has an entirely different texture and quality than when we started. Consequently, it seems that this more developed media can then become host to scores of other micro- and mini- critters, who then set the stage for their own little food chains, symbioses, and the like. In other words, ecology is happening, and our friend Katy is merely a signpost on the way that the garden is becoming more and more hospitable to more and more kinds of living things. Of course gardeners do not always welcome new living things to their domain; for example, I can’t think of too many new mollusks I’d rejoice in seeing. Still I want my gardening to be within the larger system of ecological balances, so I trust that if Nature were to send a voracious leaf-chewing bugger, she’d also eventually send a voracious leaf-chewing bugger-chewing bugger, and I would just have to bridge that time gap as best and as sustainably as I could. Now come to think of it, katydids are herbivorous, which means they are leaf-chewing buggers, but since they’re so darn cute and since I haven’t noticed anything like an outbreak of them (pace, cicada-plagued east coasters), I’m hoping Katy will stay and call our place home.