Using It Up - Common Buckeye Caterpillars

In early spring, lawns around here sprout a pretty little native wildflower known as old field toadflax (Nuttullanthus canadensis).  An annual, it is here and gone almost before you realize it, but it is considered a "lawn weed" and, as such, it is not considered desirable by most homeowners.

I find this dainty little flower enchanting.

Old field toadflax is related to snapdragons, which you can see in the shape of the bloom...if you take the time to look closely at it before you mow it down.  Perched on the ends of long, slender stems, the tiny blossoms would really have to occur in huge numbers to make a show of any sort, but my "selective wildflower vision" zeroes in on them and magnifies their attractiveness to enjoyable size.

Given my propensity to enjoy what shows up without any effort on my part, I've let the toadflax grow where they appeared in my front flowerbeds, rather than weeding them out with the oak seedlings and dewberry.

When I went out to do my occasional bed weedout on Saturday morning, I noted that the toadflax were done blooming and I thought that perhaps it was time to pull them out to "neaten up" the bed.  On the other hand, if I let them remain a bit longer, I could more reliably count on new plants next spring....

As I was weeding and debating this weighty question with myself, I noticed a black caterpillar on the ground near one of the plants.  Hmmmm.  Another, larger caterpillar was on a nearby plant.  Looking a bit further, I noticed a third caterpillar munching away....

By the time I looked at all the plants, I'd found 7 caterpillars! 

They were all the same species and they were all either on or right beside the old field toadflax.

Looking at the flower spikes, I noticed that the lower flowers had set seed, dried and were releasing seed.  The remains of the upper blooms were still green, but obviously seed was forming.  Since these are annual plants, as soon as all the seed is set, the plants will basically dry up and wither away.

When I went inside and looked up the caterpillars in my handy-dandy caterpillar guide, I decided that these were probably common buckeye cats (Junonia coenia), a highly variable species of (butterfly) caterpillar that is known to feed on plants in the snapdragon family, including toadflax.

This discovery lifted up my spirits all weekend long.  Isn't nature simply amazing?!  This relatively small annual plant blooms, sets seed, and then dies.  Rather than waste all that great plant material by simply having it dry up and blow away, Mother Nature arranges to have mama buckeye butterfly stop by and leave a couple eggs.  The eggs hatch into tiny caterpillars who, just as the plant is finishing with the foliage, eat up all the leaves and change the plant material into butterflies.

Beauty in flower form turns into beauty in butterfly form.  I call that pretty amazing.

Thoughts While Weeding

What do you think about while you weed?

As relaxing and enjoyable as I find it to weed, you'd think I'd be thinking elevated, beautiful thoughts that calmed my spirit and elevated my soul.

You would be grossly wrong.  A few days ago, I found myself "listening" to  my thoughts and here's what I heard:

1)  a series of theme songs running through my head from Winnie-the-Pooh, "I'm so rumbly, in my tumbly, time for something SWEET, to eat!"  and "Winnie-the-Pooh, Winnie-the-Pooh, scrubby little tubby all stuffed with fluff!  He's Winnie-the-Pooh, Winnie-the-Pooh, willy, little silly, old bear!" and "Up, do-own, up!  Up, do-own, up!  When I up, down, and touch the ground, it puts me in the mood.  Up, down, and touch the ground, in the mood for food!  I am short, round, and I have found, speaking poundage-wise, I improve my appetite, when I exercise!"

2) more somber thoughts about our family friend who, at 55, was diagnosed recently with a very malignant form of cancer,

3) and, of course, some political angst mixed in with the more pressing comical and tragic elements.

At other times as I weed, I find myself composing gardening blog posts.  Understand, please, that the vast majority of these garden-composed posts have long since escaped my mind by the time I actually sit down in front of the computer.  Nonetheless, I go on, mentally "writing."

As I weed, sometimes I dwell on transplanting that needs to be done or on other changes to my "landscape designs".  ("Landscape designs", in my garden, is a euphemism for the "plop 'em there" design pattern that I generally follow when I bring home a carload of fantastic plants that I've just discovered at my local nursery or plant sale.)

Most importantly, I think, I talk to the creatures that I see while I'm weeding, like this recently de-tailed ground skink,

this red-faced little southern toad I disturbed, buried in the soil,

or the red-shouldered hawk that haughtily surveyed the landscape while "hidden" right above me.

All of these guys joined me in the garden recently, even though it's still early February.  They are among the living creatures with whom Greg and I share our landscape, so it seems only polite (and politic) to discuss the changes I'm making with them when I see them.

What do you think about while you weed?

The "It's A Good Life" Jar

Today is December 27, 2014.  There are four days left until the new year is upon us...and I'm actually remembering to start a project that I saw months ago on Pinterest which really spoke to me:  setting up a jar to collect memories of good times in.

I have picked out a jar.  It's our old cookie jar from when the kids were little.  It's nothing particularly unique - just a pressed glass jar, probably a reproduction, that I picked up many years ago.  With no children in the house and therefore no need/excuse to make cookies and keep them around, the jar has just been stored in the basement for years, gathering dust.

Said cookie jar has now been washed and dried, and it is sitting in the place of honor on a beautiful, new-to-us, carved table that was a special Christmas gift from friends Flip & Shelley.  Our old cookie jar is becoming our new "It's a Good Life" Jar.  Into this jar, I plan to place slips of paper anytime something happens that makes me feel lucky or blessed or particularly happy or just glad to be alive.  Hopefully, Greg will join in too.  On December 31st next year, I (we) will take out all of the slips of paper and have a wonderful record of the good things that 2015 has brought into our lives.

Yes, this is a little touchy-feely, to use Greg's favorite dismissive desciptor for activities or comments that look beyond the reality of day-to-day living, but that's okay.  A little touchy-feely-ness is a good thing, in my book, because remembering to be grateful for the positives in my life has always made me feel better overall.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think it would be a good thing for all of us to make a special point of cultivating gratefulness.  In fact, sometimes I think that one of the reasons Americans are so stressed nowadays is that we, as a whole, aren't very good about realizing how much good is already in our lives.  Yesterday reminded me of this:  the emphasis in the U.S. on December 26th is "After Christmas Sales", and this morning our paper reported that many people were disappointed at those sales yesterday.  Compare that to "Boxing Day" on December 26th in Great Britain.  For years I had heard the term and thought it referred to the sport of boxing, which I was at a loss to connect to Christmas.  Just recently I learned that Boxing Day is actually a day put aside for boxing up your extra stuff - the stuff that you just don't need or use anymore - and giving it away to those who could use it.  Isn't that a wonderful holiday?! What a great way to be thankful for all the new we received the day before from friends and family!  What a great way to focus on the good in our lives and try to pass along some of our wealth to others!

So I'm cultivating a new tradition in my life to celebrate my gratefulness.  For starters, I must say that I'm grateful to Pinterest for the idea!

"Where is Your Wild?"

A meme on Facebook this morning showed a backpacker overlooking a beautiful vista of mountains while standing alone in an alpine meadow.  The caption read, "Where is your wild?"

Well, here is MY wild!

Our front tallgrass....

a patch of smooth milkweed in our yard....

one of the front gardens, needing some "manicuring," when we got back from vacation this summer...

and the draw, with the path into the back, last winter.



All of MY favorite "wild" is within the 10 acres that we live on.

All of us can nurture the wild locally in our cities and neighborhoods and yards.  We don't have to drive halfway across the country to some national park to experience "the wild";  we just have to cherish and value "the wild" that occurs right under our noses.


Where is YOUR wild?

Serendipity...Or Lives That Want To Be Shared?

Okay, this is a warning.  I am going to sound a little "Woo-woo" in this post.  I can't help that because sometimes that's just how I am.

So, with the appropriate warning out of the way, I have to confess that sometimes it seems as if certain animals consent to show themselves to me so that I can photograph them.  How else to explain the chance to photograph the fly attacking the hornworm last week? 

Or the funnel spider that sat at the entrance to its hole and just looked at me one morning last summer?   That's very unusual behavior for a funnel spider.

How about last week, when the scissor grinder cicada (Tibicen pruinosus) flew to the stem of a sunflower, about 5 feet from where I was weeding in the vegetable garden, and started to loudly sing away, making sure I had the chance to put his song and his appearance together. 

He even sat there singing while I stood up and photographed him!

Then there was the hanging thief robber fly (Diogmites sp.) that landed right in front of me to munch away on her wasp victim, while she dangled nonchalently from a single foot hanging onto the dry tip of an aster leaf.

Look how gently she seems to be cradling her prey.

I shouldn't forget the beautiful (and BIG) garter snake that posed prettily on the back path earlier this summer, obviously replete from a satisfying meal of (probably) cotton rat or baby rabbit. 

I walk the paths with 2 large German shepherds and I make little or no attempt to be quiet or to keep the dogs on heel.  That snake HAD to know we were coming!

Don't get me wrong - I am definitely not complaining.  I absolutely love getting glimpses into the lives of the animals that share our "little bit of Earth" with us.  It's a privilege and an honor to share their stories with a wider audience, too.

I'll leave you with one last animal story I was privileged to witness recently and with the related thought that it sparked in me.

I saw this David and Goliath story in my front garden just last week.  How in the world did that little crab spider manage to catch - and especially hold onto - that huge swallowtail butterfly?  The butterfly was obviously old - it's tattered wings hint of multiple adventures survived.  Was the butterfly just too old to have the energy to get away this time?  Or did it, somehow, know that its time was done and "consent" to become a meal for the little spider, passing along its energy to help the wheel of life spin just a little bit further around?

Do animals "consent" to be eaten and to become part of the food chain?  I've read that the Native Americans always used to say thanks to the animals they hunted for giving their lives to them for sustenance.  Was that a willing choice on the part of the animals?  Or was that simply an acknowledgement, on the part of the Native Americans, that they were taking the lives of other animals to support their own?

Of course I have no answers to my questions and I know that I'm being fanciful, especially in imagining the animals' desire to have their stories shared on the internet, but thanks for reading this and letting me indulge in whimsy from time to time.  I hope you'll always share the chance encounters you have with wildlife in your gardens - and the stories behind those encounters, too!

Last Hurrah in the Aromatic Aster

On the 15th of November, about 5 weeks ago, I took a series of photos of the insects nectaring at the last of the aromatic aster blooms.  We'd already had a frost or two and the tomato plants had become black mush weeks before, but the aromatic asters just kept valiently going on, day after day after day.  I'm sure that most of these insects have since descended into their final cold sleep, but it seemed like a good time to share one of the last warm days of 2013 on my blog....

What do the following insects have in common with each other, besides the plant they are nectaring on and the fact that they were still alive on November 15th?

Insect #1

Insect #2

Insect #3

Insect #4

Insect #5

Guesses, anyone?  That's right! The answer is that, despite the striped black and yellow camouflage that some of these guys are wearing, all five of these insects are flies and they are all native pollinators!  What's the tell?  The give-away to their true identity is their antennae and the single pair of wings.  Flies have short, stubby antennae, while bee antennae are longish and usually have a single bend near the forehead.  Flies have a single pair of wings, while bees have two pairs, often "stitched" together by tiny hooks to look like one pair, though.

Why do several of these flies look like bees or wasps?  The better to fool predators and stay uneaten, of course!  Humans aren't the only animals that are wary of getting stung.

Of course there were some true bees nectaring on the asters as well.

There was this classic honeybee...which is NOT native, by the way, although it does function as a pollinator.

And I saw this little beauty, a metallic green solitary bee, brightening up the day for me.  The tiny little shadows of these insects make me feel very tender towards them, for some reason - and you can see the long antennae that helps identify this animal as a bee particularly well in its shadow, too.

As I was snooping into the lives of these 6-legged creatures, I was privileged to see an interesting standoff occur:  this tachinid fly landed right in front of the wheel bug, who was obviously interested and had her beak out as if ready to pounce.

I watched for several minutes, though, and the wheelbug never did actually attack the fly. 

Eventually the fly seemed to get bored and flew away.  Perhaps the wheelbug had already laid her full quota of eggs, was tired, and was just too lazy to go to all the effort of catching and eating even one more insect....

Each year there is only one generation of wheelbugs, fierce predators from the moment they hatch, so perhaps this old lady was getting ready to peacefully let go, her role in the wheelbug lifecycle now complete.

One other insect caught my eye that day, although this one was no longer alive.  This little bee, still festooned with full pollen baskets, had the ill fortune to become a spider's meal.

I never did see the spider, but the little bee's gaudy corpse twisted sadly in the breeze.

The variety of insects I see in my yard and gardens never ceases to amaze me.  What's especially fascinating is how many of them are predators.  Or beneficials, for that matter.  I see major life dramas enacted daily, or come upon the remains of tragedies after they've occurred.  These days, I can't imagine gardening without paying attention to the insect life with which I share my garden.  It's opened up a whole new world to me.

The Glass Menagerie, Botanical Style

Note:  Somehow "Botanical Garden" doesn't have the same feel as "zoo" or "menagerie" to me so, in naming this blog post, I borrowed the title of a famous play and took some serious license with it....

These days we have digital cameras to record plant details.  With their immediate results and cheap cost per image, these wonderful cameras join a long history of technologies and methods with which we've tried to capture the beauty and uniqueness of the plant world to learn about the variety of species and to share our knowledge of plants with others.

Over a hundred years ago, the methods and technologies of recording plant information were much fewer.  The classic methods were written descriptions, botanical drawings, and pressed plants.  All of these methods, while still valuable, were limited.  True 3-D specimens were not possible.  Colors faded.  Visualization from written reports was limited.  Once upon a time, though, several men conspired to find another way, financed by a wealthy mother and daughter....

In the late 1800's, Harvard began to develop a Botanical Museum.  Prof. George Goodale, its first director, wanted to create lifelike models of plants for display, but the only methods for modeling that he knew about were relatively crude, either papier-mache or wax.  When Prof. Goodale heard of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son team of glass artisans who lived in Germany and created exquisite marine invertebrate models from glass, he traveled to their home to meet them and to see their work firsthand.

The Blaschkas' glass work was, indeed, amazing, so Prof. Goodale talked them into creating a few plant specimens for the newly developing Harvard Botanical Museum.  These specimens were so exquisite that a wealthy Bostonian woman and her daughter offered to finance an entire collection of glass botanical specimens as a memorial to Harvard alumnus, Dr. Charles Eliot Ware.  The results of this combination of generosity and artistry are available for all of us to see, if we have the opportunity and desire to visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When I heard about the Glass Flowers Collection recently, I decided this was definitely something I might enjoy glancing over.  We were heading to Boston to visit our son for Thanksgiving, so I had an opportunity to "Seize the Day!", so to speak.  Greg and Sean both indicated an interest as well, so last Thursday we headed over to Harvard Square on the T and wandered across the Harvard campus until we found the Museum of Natural History.

Although not botanical, the first thing that caught our attention as we entered the museum was a glass case with 3 bird skeletons in it:  a rhea, a great auk, and...a dodo.  This is our son, Sean, standing by the case to give you a sense of scale.  The dodo is the medium sized bird in the middle.

It was quite sobering to stand a few feet from the actual remains of an animal that lived fairly recently and whose entire species is now extinct, due totally to human greed and arrogance.

After pausing for a while to take in the enormity of meeting a dodo, even if it was just a skeleton, we opened the door and went into the Glass Flowers Collection.  Where do I begin to tell you about it?

The collection is exquisite.  Truly.  Even after 100+ years.  As difficult as it is to believe, the specimens don't look like glass.  They are all life sized and they range in type from trees (showing leaves, twigs, flowers, and fruits or nuts) to flowers to grasses to cacti.  There are a few aquatic plants.  There are orchids.  A few of the specimens even have pest species shown as part of the display.  Some of the colors are a bit faded and there is a tiny bit of breakage, but overall the condition of these delicate works of art seems pristine.

One of the first specimens to catch my eye was this pitcher plant.  Each of the "pitchers" is about 9" long.

Other southern species included sweet azalea, Rhododendron arborescens, ...

...and mountain laurel, Kahlmia latifolia.

There were several clematis species, including two of my favorites, Clematis texensis and Clematis crispa....

Note the fine petals on the blossoms of the fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus!

The beautiful arching of the Canada goldenrod, Solidago canadensis, panicle is perfect, ...

...as is the upright stiffness of the showy penstemon, Penstemon spectabilis, ...

...and the clusters of swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, blossoms at different stages of opening.

Even the spines of the candy barrelcactus, Ferocactus wizlizeni, seem perfect, in both their individuality and their totality....

The accompanying sections of the ovaries with their developing embryos (seeds) caught my eye in their fascinating symmetry.  I find my interest in the plant families and their identifying characteristics ignited after seeing this exhibit.

How did these 2 artisans capture the living details of these plants, especially when so many of the plants live and thrive half a world away from where they lived and worked?  This was well before color photography.

How did these specimens survive shipment from Germany to Boston?

Here is a photo of the type of equipment the Blaschkas used to create these glass marvels.  Such simple and relatively crude tools to create such fine details.

As the following label describes, this project even led to the development of new materials and methods by these talented glass artists....

Here is an overview of the specimens he eventually created to illustrate red maple, Acer rubrum, complete with the vibrantly colored fall foliage. 

There are many, many more examples that I could share with you, but I'll stop here and encourage you to see this collection for yourself, if you are ever in Boston.

I can only imagine what the family of Mrs. Ware and her daughter said upon being first told that they were underwriting the production of this superb collection of glass botanical specimens.  I am deeply thankful, however, that Mrs. Ware and her daughter decided to go ahead and provide the funding, because it has given the world exquisite works of scientifically important art that are still breathtaking and unique, a century after they were made.  There are certainly many, many, less lasting and less important ways to spend money.

A Bountiful Harvest of Strawberries

We've been away for about 10 days, visiting our daughter down in Florida.  I spent the week prior to our departure trying frantically to get all the plants in the ground (and I mostly succeeded at that!), then I just chilled out on the trip, enjoying the fruits of other people's labor as I noticed beautifully blooming plants or oohed and aahed over vegetable gardens that we passed.

When we got back home, our gardens had outdone themselves in growing while we were gone.  For better and for worse, the growth spurt included weeds - lots and lots of weeds - so I have a lot to do before I feel  like I have a handle on everything again.  Thankfully our weather is fairly cool, especially compared to the last several years, so I'm not fighting unbearable heat when I'm outside working.

I had assumed that I would be jumping into battle with the weeds as soon as I got home...but our garden had a different plan for me.  Thankfully, we thought to go out and check on the strawberry patch before starting any other projects - and, lo and behold, it was just jam-packed with ripe strawberries.  There were plenty of over-ripe berries, too, but even after throwing those away, we were left with just over 10 pounds of strawberries, seen here ready to go into the kitchen!  (Yes, a lot of the green you see outside of the strawberry bed is composed of weeds, but that's work for another day.)

Getting a closeup shot of the berries allowed me to crop out the weeds and just focus on the mouthwatering goodness of the berries and the plants themselves.

I spent the rest of yesterday figuring out what to do with all these berries (it's the best harvest we've ever had at one time)...and then doing it!

We ended up with a delicious mid-afternoon gorge on freshly made strawberry shortcake, plus 2 trays of individually frozen, sugar dipped whole strawberries and about 8 1/2 cups of strawberry puree.  Mmmm-Mmmm, good! 

NOW I'm ready to start on all that weeding!