one clover and a bee

Remember our frog pond in the Catskills? (I wrote about it here.)  There's a word used to describe pond life, succession, that in this context means the progressive replacement of one biological community by another. When a new pond forms naturally, plant life grows as wind and birds carry seeds. Those plants are food for insects, frogs, and turtles that come upon them in their travels, and stay. The pond habitat is dynamic, constantly changing. Ponds are shallow enough that rooted plants can grow in them, and eventually they will be covered with vegetation, and, over hundreds of years, become marshland and then grassy prairie or forest. Or, as Emily Dickinson wrote:


   To make a prairie it takes a clover 
   and one bee,
   One clover, and a bee,
   and revery.
   The revery alone will do
   if bees are few.