plants

garden : butterflies

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First of the Gay Butterflies Butterfly Weed assortment to bloom.

One of my goals in selecting plants to add to our garden is to attract more butterflies and predator insects. As with the desire to have more birds, it’s my hope that the mosquitoes can be kept to a minimum by natural predation. So far, we’ve seen some improvement over last year; it’s now possible to walk around in the yard and work in some areas without getting eaten alive. There are still a few problem areas, notably the puddle-ish area at the foot of the basement stairs (where we’re going to install a drain as part of the work on the basement) and the bumpy black plastic downspout extension on that same side of the addition. So, that corner of the yard is not so great. The rest is pretty good on a sunny day though, and even working outside at dusk I was able to make do with just the citronella bucket and not a DEET coating. Between our water management work, the birds, and the insects, we seem to be making progress.

In terms of butterflies, I’ve so far seen only the most common ones. They’ve appeared in greater numbers than I remember, Spring Azures and Cabbage Whites being the most frequent visitors. We had a larger black and blue butterfly hang around for a few days in the spring, however I wasn’t able to identify it. I’ve been using a poster that I picked up in Hilton Head, Butterflies of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, as a way to narrow down my options and then Peterson’s Eastern Butterflies or an online guide to our county to confirm the identifications. In addition to the two common white butterflies, I’ve noted several Eastern Tailed-blues in the yard, and caught visits by a Clouded Sulphur and what I believe was a Hobomok Skipper.

During trips farther south, I’ve seen a few other species. During our bi-annual farm party we saw a large number of Cloudless Sulphurs grouped along a puddled lane. We also spotted a Tiger Swallowtail and a variety of small and medium orange-and-black butterflies that were just too fast for us to identify. Similarly, we spotted a large orange butterfly that looked like a Great Spangled Fritillary during an outside wedding last weekend, but had neither binoculars nor book at hand. I’ve seen orange butterflies in our yard, but haven’t been quick enough to get a good look at them. I’m hoping that once the flowers start coming into bloom I’ll start to be able to get a good look at them at rest.

garden : butterflies

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

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There have always been a lot of birds around our yard, but this year we seem to have hit a sweet spot in terms of cover and food because we’ve seen a greater variety of fledgling birds than ever before. It’s possible that these birds have been here every year and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t been as active in the yard after April. It’s also possible that I was finally sufficiently threatening with regard to the neighbors’ cats being in the yard every other day for three years, as I haven’t seen them around in months. We’ve also sprayed the cherry trees for Eastern Tent Caterpillars for two years now, which has enabled them to fully foliate and have enough energy to actually produce cherries. Most likely the proliferation is a combination of all of those factors plus the near-constant rain keeping fresh water in the birdbath.

At any rate, I’ve seen rumpled no-tail-feathers wobbly-flying young of 13 species in our yard (or on the street in front of the house): American Crow, Blue Jay, Catbird, Eastern Phoebe, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Grackle, European Starling, Brown Thrasher, Mourning Dove, American Robin, and (just this morning) Carolina Wren. Of all of these, I was most pleased by the ones I hadn’t seen before. The phoebe was a wonderful surprise, as I’d read they were shy nesters; in addition to being a pretty little bird (I have a northerner’s affinity for the gray species) they eat mosquitoes almost exclusively. I was excited about the crow, too, mostly because it’s one of those large birds about which you joke of never seeing a juvenile. And, truly, the young one would have been indistinguishable from an adult were it not making such plaintive cries for attention and had I not witnessed its parent actually feeding it. Finally, the woodpecker was a treat just because it was so cute. Without tail feathers, it was the quintessential Weeble ™ fluffball as it tried to peck for bugs up and down the limbs of the red maple.

My father rightly observes that all of these birds are ‘the loud ones,’ which is likely related to being the large ones, which is definitely related to being the voracious insect-eating ones. After years of effort, I seem to be finally developing ecological balance. We have numerous predator bugs in the yard, most noticeably fireflies, and just this week I discovered a beautiful spider—I bet you never expected me to use those two words together—camped out in the daylilies and another of the same in the climbing rose in the backyard.

Now, if only the slugs would attract some toads, I’d be set.

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig

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The front flower bed, newly planted.


The front flower bed, one month later.

A month after planting the foundation bed with flowering perennials, we’re seeing all kinds of growth. It doesn’t look like a mature flower garden yet, but it’s showing signs of how it will be when it fills in. When the plants first arrived, I was disappointed; I had expected all of the plants to be in pots and all of the potted plants to be larger. Now that the bare roots have sprouted, we’ve been able to tell which had crown rot and need to be replaced and which are likely going to survive. I probably should have been prepared for how scraggly it looks with just sprouts, but I have never done this kind of planting before.


Lavender buds just opening.

In terms of flowers, the bellflowers were coming into bloom when they arrived, so they have been a nice splash of purple. The scabiosa took off, and they are also sprouting multiple pale purple blooms. While lovely, neither is the true blue that was advertised, and everything looks washed in purple with the lavender in full bloom next to the bed. The butterfly weed grew like, well, a weed, and several of the shoots have developed flower buds. I look forward to that splash of orange or yellow color. The dwarf aster bloomed as well, and I can’t remember whether it was supposed to bloom this time of year or whether it was just early because of the planting schedule. And, the small rudbeckia on the other side of the steps has bloomed, and looks quite cheery in that dark little patch. Besides those, everything else is still in the sprout stage; I’m not sure I’ll get any daisies at all this year at the rate they’re growing. I remind myself that it’s barely summer, and there’s plenty of time for them to shoot up and get established.


The volunteer aster.


Leaves on the clethra.

Elsewhere around the front yard everything’s loving all the rain and heat. The clethra now has a full set of leaves, and we’re hoping to see more shoots once it starts actually photosynthesizing. The aster that I left unmowed has bloomed all over with lovely yellow-centered white flowers. I kind of like it as an outpost at the property line, but I’m under some household pressure to relocate it into the flowerbed. The monarda has grown significantly, and now has a healthy colony of predator insects eating the healthy colony of aphids that discovered it within the first days of planting. It hasn’t bloomed yet, but I’m hopeful. The daylilies are bursting out all over, of course; they love this climate and have been reveling in the rain. I had been thinking of phasing them out in favor of more natives, as I wasn’t sure anything found sustenance in them; I’ve since seen some insects eating the pollen and at least one butterfly—possibly a Delaware skipper—drinking from a bloom.


The daylily bed, with the clethra in the lower left corner.

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

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White mystery flowers.

There are these little white flowers that spring up all over our neighborhood in late spring. For a long time I thought they were spring star flower; now that I’ve received some ipheion from a neighbor I can see they’re different. I now believe they are zephyr lilies, however the most commonly described variety appears to be only one flower per bulb without branching stems and are listed as blooming in autumn. They could be a native regional variety in the same family; I haven’t been able to tell from photos whether this variety has a branching stem, although the habitat description certainly fits with our town. At any rate, I moved several clumps of them out of the lawn last year and into the small bed with the daffodils, on the right side of the porch steps. Only two bulbs sent up flowers but the greenery did quite well; as with the crocuses, I’m hoping to get many more flowers next year.

In addition to puzzling over these little white flowers, I spent some time this weekend transplanting perennial lilies from my neighbor’s front foundation beds. The folks who owned the house before her planted hundreds of spring bulbs through their flower beds a couple of years ago, and the lilies in particular are now coming up everywhere. True lilies are not my favorite flower—I find the scent overpowering—however, in the spirit of providing a refuge for the neighbors’ flowers, I took some and planted them along the back fence behind the peonies. Of course, as soon as I had them in the ground I became paranoid that they would bring black mold with them that would destroy the carefully nurtured peonies just as they’re ready to flower for the first time. This is the life of a novice gardener; never being quite sure that what you’re doing is really the best thing for the plants, always fearing that you’ve missed some crucial piece of information in the one gardening book you chose not to consult. In this case, nurturing the peonies has meant weeding around them, clearing the mulch off the crowns in early spring, and otherwise leaving them completely to their own devices. I’m sure it will be fine, and I can always resort to spraying toxins if things get completely out of hand. Not that I’m likely to go that route, but it sometimes helps to remind myself that the nuclear option is there, anchoring the other end of the continuum.

While I was busy moving lilies, my partner was hard at work removing stumps. You may remember that we are still in pioneer mode when it comes to the beds in the backyard, dedicating enormous amounts of time, energy, and sweat to clearing the various sapling stumps, pricker bushes, grapevines, English ivy, liriope, violets, Virginia creeper, and last but certainly not least, poison ivy. The way that works is that we work together with the spade to clear several yards of ground of anything that can be easily dug out, and then my partner spends hours toiling alone with the landscape bar and the tree saw to uproot the pricker bushes and tree stumps. Sometimes we invite friends over for this process, have a beer afterwards, and call it a party. Last weekend it was just us, and it was only the two stumps; nothing like two years ago when we did battle with the pokeweeds for what seemed like months and was really just days. As it has been every year, my goal is to have the side beds cleared of weeds and under mulch by the first frost. Why give it up? It’s a good goal!

We all have to have something to strive for, and my something is a yard bordered by flat brown stretches of bark chips. When that day finally arrives, I’ll be glad to move on to a goal involving actual plants. For now, the front yard is where I am able to fulfill my desire to have living, growing, flowering plants, and I let the backyard be where the killing happens.

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won

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Our timing could not have been better in terms of maximizing the growth of the lawn during a one week vacation. The entire week prior to our vacation, it poured rain, ensuring that I could not top up the lawn mowing (so to speak) before leaving. The first weekend we were away, it was dry and there was a heat wave. Nothing grass loves more than nice hot sun after being soaked for days; I say ‘grass’ here when I really mean clover, violets, catmint, et cetera. When we returned not only was the crabgrass tall enough for Jack to scurry up it, all the regular grass had also gone to seed. Great for reseeding the lawn and attracting pollinators, not so great for mowing. And, of course, it was still raining.

Normally I’m not that fussy about the lawn and relatively impervious to the fear that the neighbors will judge us on the basis of the state of the grass. Still, this was a little much, and it drove me to use the hour by hour weather prediction feature on my preferred weather website to find the earliest time this week that would have the maximum drying time prior to mowing and enough time prior to more rain to get the whole lawn cut; that time was 12pm yesterday. Thankfully, it was still cool, as 12pm is not typically my first choice for lawn mowing. I hauled the electric mower out of the garage and went to it. The mower performed valiantly—I only had to stop twice to clear the blocked chute thingy through which the cut grass gets thrown out onto the lawn—but it really was no match for the situation, what with having to avoid running over the cord and the one wheel that likes to reset its height as you go and the screws on the handle that like to rattle themselves loose. The mower itself is a tank, a Black and Decker that was given to us by my friend’s mother when we moved in, so in terms of plowing through a meadow it’s a good choice. For regular everyday use, I’m looking forward to the time I can get a zippy new generation Neuton. I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms that time will be when the current mower is dead, a category for which one gimpy wheel, some loose screws, and a missing rubber flap does not yet qualify it.

The nature of the lawn, as I’m sure you know, is that it grows. The nature of my mowing of the lawn is that I invariably omit to mow one of the tucked away parts of the lawn. This time I remembered the bit up by the stairs to the basement around the side of the house—which was, as the kids say, out of control as I’d forgotten it the last two times—and forgot the section outside the back gate along the alley and the bit by the garage on the other side of the walk. I’ll get back to them when it stops raining.

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won