By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

I once had a scrub jay named Boo who would collect and hide buttons, rings, bits of chewing gum foil, and just about any other shiny thing he could find around the house. Maybe he was mimicking my own compulsive collecting: my house plants have long shared space with feathers, beach rocks, a wren’s nest, and even a chunk of Las Vegas caliche whose hardness shames concrete.

But the best collector I ever met was a 14-year-old (then) naturalist named Saide Dupar. Sunset garden editor Kathy Brenzel wrote a compelling story about her family’s Decatur Island garden in the September, 2008 issue of Sunset. Saide got her early education in the island’s one-room schoolhouse, but it’s clear that the island itself was her classroom. The family’s cordwood house—a remarkably constructed log-round potting shed—is full of her treasures: skulls, nests, antlers, shells, geodes, wheat stalks, bird eggs, and more.

It is fitting that all this resides in the place where each year’s vegetable garden gets its start: as you’re sowing seed and nursing new life along, you have constant reminders of both the beauty of natural design and the transitory nature of life past and future. It makes for fairly rich planting experience. I recommend it, and I expect Saide Dupar does as well.