Few of us grasp “the whole of nature” the way Einstein did. His mind ranged freely, well beyond the time and space that confines the rest of us, to describe the esoteric escapements, verges, and balance wheels in the clockwork of the cosmos. With great turtle-like galaxies, 10 billion years old, crawling outward beyond the rim of our dull and distant imaginings, our ordinary consciousness seems stuck in the mud like… well, like real turtles.

I’ve been watching the painted turtles at a nearby pond when they drag themselves up on a sunny rock these late-summer mornings. The turtles are poikilotherms, which like other cold-blooded creatures, vary their body temperature to match their environment.

As mammals, we are homeotherms, maintaining a constant internal temperature. Our dogged devotion to 98.6 degrees and metabolic constancy comes with a price; we expend a great deal of energy maintaining our core temperature when our environment gets too cold or too hot.

So the turtle’s experience of climbing onto a sunny rock on a late-August morning is considerably different from what ours would be, even if we were game enough to immerse ourselves to the cool depths of a funky pond and emerge through the scum to claw our way onto a rock. Lying in the sun, our skin would warm, our heart wouldn’t have to work as hard to pump blood to our extremities, and we wouldn’t have to burn quite so many calories to keep our core temperature steady. The turtle on the rock, on the other hand, has a completely different body temperature and metabolism than it had at the bottom of the pond. I can’t imagine what kind of sensation that transformation must add to sunbathing.

While we’re considering the sentience of turtles in their peculiar environments, let’s consider this: over at the opposite end of the calendar, in late February, these painted turtles I’ve been watching will be buried two or three feet down in the mud of the pond, beneath a few feet of super-chilled water, beneath another foot of ice, beneath the cold discomforting countenance of a New England winter in its full maturity.

Midway through the turtle’s epic winter hunker-down in its bed of mud, the lack of oxygen, or anoxia, will suppress its metabolic rate to roughly 10 percent of what it would be if it were still breathing at the same temperature. Being 90 percent dead lowers a turtle’s energy demands to the point where its life is fueled solely by the reserves of the carbohydrate glycogen stored in its tissues.

According to Einstein, the “optical delusion” of my own human consciousness is what separates me from the many metabolic lives of turtles — and every other thing that crawls deep into the mud or far out to the rim of the universe. So repose on a sunny rock is assessed by me solely in terms of human repose. Winter survival is human survival. Even dull imaginings on the nature of consciousness are human imaginings.

There is irony in this. In taking a moment to consider the conscious experience of these painted turtles, who carry all of their remarkable existence in a hardened shell across the seasons, a few feet up and a few feet down, I run quickly into my own narrow limits. Fortunately, the “whole of nature” accommodates both turtles and me just as we are.

We go through the motions of weeding, watering, trimming up the tattered trailers of plants bent on mischief, but Kate and I are already telling each other that we’ll do better next year. There is an air of surrender in our work. But in surrendering ourselves to a hot summer’s cruel indifference to our efforts to bring some refinement to our largely untamed yard, we have found some consolation on the wild side.

Without the benefit of gardeners – master, or otherwise – the summer scene has arranged and ordered itself into beautiful displays of wildflowers: red and white clovers, roadside chicory and, outdoing everything else, … Queen Anne’s Lace.

Daucus corota – yes, it is a wild carrot – is growing everywhere in great profusion this summer. There is even a healthy clump of it that pushed itself up through a crack in the asphalt where I park my car at work. Its blossoms grow in umbels, cupped inflorescences that open like a palm for alms conferred by the summer sun. And at the center of some of these little levitating doilies, a single dark red flower can be seen. This oddity accounts for its name.

The Queen Anne reference is to Anne of Denmark, queen consort of King James I, the English monarch who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in a time of much lace and languor for the ruling class. In an idle moment of inattention, as the story goes, Queen Anne pricked her finger with a lace-making needle and spilled a single drop of blood on her work. And since monarchs never do anything that isn’t commemorated forever in some form another, Queen Anne’s Lace spread across the world to keep the story alive. Ironically, none of us would know of Anne of Denmark except for the majesty of this summer wildflower.

Queen Anne’s Lace isn’t above doing favors for us peasants laboring in gardens. It happens to be a great companion plant to a number of vegetables and flowers afflicted by insects. It attracts beneficial ladybugs and predatory wasps to its tiny florets.

Mostly, however, it blesses us with its simple, and ubiquitous, beauty, arranged and ordered perfectly by its own designs and devices.

It’s berry season, and there is plenty of contention over the spoils of fruiting plants.  It’s war, and as always, the victors in this particular war are the plants.

The fruit lovers in the animal kingdom, ranging the least wisp of a wren to the earth-thudding elephant have been led by the palate down the evolutionary path by plants with a critical interest in seed dispersal. Every fruit is a conveyance system wherein a seed rides in its own lunch bucket of nutrients and sweet calories. It is more than happy to share the bounty with those birds and beasts willing to give it a ride to some far-flung ground where it won’t compete for sun and sustenance with its immediate ancestors. Often the seed is planted at its destination with a generous dose of contributed fertilizer.

In her wonderful book, The Ghosts of Evolution, science writer Connie Barlow traces the parallel evolutionary paths of plants and animals to show how plants reached across the flora/fauna divide to hitch rides with animals. Some did it by developing Velcro-like burrs and attaching themselves to passing animals, and others did it by making the embryos for their seeds delicious. Both plants and animals adapted to each other with varying degrees of success. Birds routinely gorge themselves on pokeberries that would poison us.

Some fruiting plants are anachronisms, according to Barlow. There are still some large tropical fruit pods in Costa Rica waiting at the base of Cassia grandis trees for mastodons that haven’t shown up for the past 11,000 years. No other animals have developed the size or masticating prowess to eat them. So the pods lie where they fall, limiting the range of the trees.

Even though Kate and I are eating pecked-at leftovers from the raspberry patch, and ours will be a pauper’s portion after the catbird’s blueberry feast, we don’t feel too bad about our capitulation to the birds in berry season. They are fulfilling the plants’ evolutionary imperative far more efficiently than we ever could by eating berries on our cereal at the kitchen table.

These questions arose for me as our back porch fell. Not of its own accord – though that day was near – but with the help of a couple of carpenter brothers who show up at our place periodically to keep things upright or, in this case, to pull them down when the cause is lost. The screened-in porch was the size of a living room. It was attached to the back of the house, I’d say sometime 40 or 50 years ago, and it sheltered innumerable summertime porch suppers over the decades. Its wobbly wooden underpinnings had rotted with the help of poor drainage behind the house, and it had to come down.  We replaced it with a much smaller and simpler open-air overhang that returned the house to its original profile and created a terrace for plants and people in the footprint of the old porch.

Kate and I now spend a lot of time sitting out there in the lengthening summer evenings, enjoying a benefit we never thought about when we undertook this residential subtraction. We now have a beautiful piece of sky we didn’t have before. Birds, planes, treetops, and clouds make full use of it by day, while bats stir up static in the shadows at night, sparking constellations into view.

Without humans, the sky would be a paltry thing in this part of the country. I get a view of New England’s prehistoric sky from our hammock, which is strung between two hundred-foot spruces in a quarter-acre stand of trees planted decades ago as part of a Boy Scout project, I’m told.  It is possible to swing there in the breeze, supine in the sibilant murmurings of the spruces’ nostalgic boreal invocations to Presque Isle, or is it Sebago, or Ossipee? I can never quite hear. But the sky is spiked and splintered as it sifts down through the branches.

The old forests were stingy with light. It took men and women unafraid of bone-bruising labor to work those spikes and splinters first into small patches with some discernable dimension, and then to quilt those patches into cropped vistas of successive clearings in tight association with vertical rock and steep pitches of round-topped hills.

Even after all these years, there is a lot of competition for the New England sky, except along the coasts, where the sky opens up to swallow whole harbors, bays, sounds, and even the sea itself. But inland, the sky is constantly being jostled and is re-framed in a new pose around every corner. It’s not like the Great Plains, where everything east of the Rockies from the Dakotas to Texas is smothered by sky, and the landscape has to do something astonishing, like the otherworldly Badlands, just to get noticed.  In New England, the settlers first had to pull the sky out of the trees before they started pulling the stones out of the fields.

So we are counting our new patch of sky as a home improvement wrought by deconstruction rather than construction. Rafter by rafter, post by post, the porch obstructions were pulled away to reveal an ethereal addition,  renewed by every sunrise, scrubbed by every storm, the quintessence of climate control. Fast-forward another 200 years, the sky will still be there, as good as new and guaranteed for eternity.

Perhaps the silence we seek, then, in our quest for peace and quiet is the cognitive hush that attends those rare moments when the incessant clatter of  our own thinking stops to listen to something outside of ourselves. Natural sounds always rock the cradle of my own relaxation: waves on a beach, wind in the trees, and birds – always the birds. For me, these sounds carry no messages, need no interpretation, and require no response, which can be quite a relief. They are nothing more than quiet sensations of the moment, passing manifestations of an untethered present. My ignorance is bliss.

And it is ignorance. There are few natural sounds that are not fully freighted with information about the past, present, and future for those sensate creatures who have learned the language of nature’s aural articulations. Even the pampered pets that loaf around our house in a super-sated state have a fluency in the language of random sounds that I can only guess at. Mid-snooze, their ears pivot and pirouette picking up information out of thin air about the doings of proximate bugs, rodents, mailmen, and the occasional ghost. And this is just inter-species information. The signal goes to hi-def when species are trading sounds with their own kind.

Take, for example, that long, languorous two-note bee-bay song of the male black-capped chickadee now playing near you. It may produce deep relaxation in me sufficient to launch a mid-afternoon nap, but to another male chickadee it is a warning of territorial boundaries to be ignored at one’s own peril.

Not much gets by the curious and alert chickadees, even on the laziest of afternoons. They are usually the first to find new food sources and the first to notice threats, which is why so many small perching birds tend to go where the chickadees go. Five years ago researchers from the University of Montana discovered that their namesake alarm call – chick-a-dee-dee-dee – conveys some very specific information about predators in the neighborhood. (I’ve heard the call in response to our barking coon hound mutt, and it sounds pretty much like laughing to me.)

The scientists noticed that these chick-a-dee calls varied depending upon the type of predator threat. They describe them as “mobbing calls” because they result in a flocking defense or “mob” that gives predators pause as they consider pressing an attack. The call variant associated with impending predation by the small pygmy owl, for example, brought a more intense mobbing response than the call associated with a great horned owl. While the latter is bigger and looks more fearsome to us, the smaller owl poses the greater threat to small birds because of its maneuverability. Raptor body size and wingspan are a good predictor of risk for chickadees.

Once an unwelcome raptor leaves its perch and takes to the wing, according to the researchers, the chickadee raises the alert level, abandoning the detailed chick-a-dee report in favor of a more urgent and to-the-point high-pitched seet call, which I suppose loosely translates to “Everybody duck!”

And everybody ducks – even non-chickadees – maybe even ducks themselves.  Well, nuthatches, anyway. These same researchers conducted subsequent experiments that showed that eavesdropping red-breasted nuthatches could understand the subtle variations about threat levels in the chickadees mobbing calls and responded appropriately to counter that threat.

Somewhere along the line, they learned not to be seduced by my ignorance-is-bliss version of peace and quiet, known more commonly among small birds as sudden death. And, sadly, I am learning that a little bit of knowledge can ruin a good nap.