I wish I could say that over the years I've gained some insight into the intelligence of my worms, but the most I've seen them do is act out of instinct or hunger, moving up to higher ground in the bin if water pools in the bottom, or gravitating towards food they like and away from food they don't. If they have an intellect, I don't suppose I've provided much to stimulate it.

People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms? Well, why catalog anything? It's how we learn about the world we live in. Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you're losing if you don't know what you have?

Are we so hierarchical that we can't respect a creature that lives beneath our feet?

If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.

Why is it that a worm can regrow most of its body, but we can't replace so much as a finger? I am left with the troubling conclusion that the worm's survival may, in the grand scheme of things, be more important than my own.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too much of an imposition on earthworms to push them into polluted ground, or to force-feed them a particular bacteria because we'd like to see it spread around. Darwin noticed that humans tend to exploit any characteristic for their own good, writing that "in the process of selection man almost invariably wishes to go to an extreme point." Are we taking advantage of earthworms? Shouldn't we clean up our own messes, or learn not to make them in the first place?

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.