Flowers For Me?

Sometimes I forget what a lucky woman I am.  This very week I am celebrating my 73rd birthday.   There is no need for Ed to send me flowers.  The garden is filled with blooms and that is not all. The butterfly bush right in front of the house has beautiful plumes of flowers and attracts butterflies like this tiger swallowtail.

Liatris has taken  over now that the pinxter has finished blooming.  I could never have too many of these plush purple plumes.

Ed's magnificent Spiritual Corridor is so lovely you hardly notice the catnip and milkweed.  Looking out the window from the house even the spent blossoms look colorful.  It all depends on your point of view!

Lemon basil, red basil and nasturtium leaves and flowers all make their way into my salads.  The fragrance makes plant identification a snap.  Yes, there is more milkweed here.

Sea holly is a fascinating plant that draws all kinds of pollinators.  It's purple too!  It makes a great cut flower, but I like to frustrate myself trying to get good pictures of any new visitors that might show up.

I love Alliums! This one, purple again, reminds me of fireworks.  Except for the Clara Curtis mums  the lush green background consists of weeds.  I prefer to see the flowers.  The butterflies, birds, bees ... and weeds are extra.  Oh, I forgot!  I love to pull weeds too!

The Monarch And The Giant

The Monarch caterpillar is growing fast.  The red milkweed bug is gone.  Here he is cutting the vein of the leaf to reduce the amount of white poisonous sap in the leaf that is next on the menu.  A little milkweed sap makes it so he doesn't get eaten.  Too much is deadly.  Fortunately his instincts tell him what to do.

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It takes a sharp eye to notice a monarch caterpillar.  They often eat from under the leaves.  Check out the shaded leaf that is nearly gone and you might see him munching away.  At the left edge just below the center line of the photo, a small bit of the eating end of the caterpillar can be seen.

Ed and I had another fun morning in the garden.  Before we went inside for lunch we sat on the bench with a cold drink. We watched the hummingbird feeding on the cardinal flower flowers, perch on the moonflower wire support and eventually zoom up and away at breakneck speed.  A monarch butterfly fluttered across the stone wall and landed on the white phlox.  These days it is a joy to see a monarch, but a huge black and yellow butterfly chased him away.  It was moving fast but was so big and brightly marked, I wondered what it might be.  I knew I had never seen a butterfly like that here before.  I wished out loud that we could have gotten a closer look and then the butterfly landed on this Liatris plant just to the left of where we were sitting.  He spread his wings and ate for a considerable time.  I did not have the camera, but we both had time to memorize the markings of this stranger. After he flew away, we described aloud to each other exactly what we thought we had seen.   With our mental images clearly fixed, a check of our books revealed the name of this never before seen here butterfly.  The position of the wings has a dramatic impact on the placement of the bands of  bright yellow, but we are certain that we were looking at a Giant Swallowtail.  They do venture into southern Canada but are more commonly seen where citrus trees grow.  Citrus growers consider their caterpillars a pest and call them Orange Dogs.  Here the large bright yellow and black butterfly was a once in a lifetime event.    As we age it is natural to think that we have seen it all.  We have spent more than two decades here in close contact with what is going on around us.  Then along comes a stranger who gives us an extremely good look at him and we experience the wonder of seeing something for the very first time.

A Garden Visit; Photos By Amy Plus One

"No time to say hello goodbye I'm late..." An update will follow!
                                                       Moon flowers and Liatris

 Bee balm and hummingbird moth with clear wings

Bee balm with clear wing hummingbird moth

                                                      Snapdragons and seaholly

                                                             Egyptian walking onions

                                             Water on daylily leaves taken by accident

A Monarch Indeed!!

 We have always had a thing for butterflies.  From the very beginning when we moved here we began to encourage the milkweed growing here.  The fragrant blossoms attract many kinds of butterflies, but of course the Monarch is king. Click Here to go back to 2008! 
 

This far North however it is not the fragrant blossoms that really attract the Monarchs.  What they are eagerly  looking for is some nice green milkweed leaves on which to lay their eggs. Ed carefully mows the plants in stages so that we have new milkweed plants when the butterflies need them.

We have been waiting and watching for the Monarch's return. Whenever an orange and black  blur goes by we wonder if it is a Monarch.  Sometimes we see what we want to see!  Yesterday a Monarch stopped to feed on this freshly opened Liatris plant.  There was no doubt this time and it was a girl.  No, there is no picture of the butterfly, but as of July 19, 2016 we can indeed say a Monarch has been seen here at the Stone Wall  Garden and inside the square at that!

 Every  Monarch we see is a joy and the same will be true of the caterpillars.