Archive for the 'Butterflies, Insects, and Spiders' Category

Lewisia tweedyi

Pleione formosana

Boechera (Arabis) koehleri (planted January 24)

When you are using your greenhouse to grow special plants like Lewisia tweedyi or Pleione formosana, or seedlings of an unusual western rock cress, you might be forgiven by reacting to the first sign of aphids with an immediate fog of insecticide.  However, I decided last winter that I would try to make the greenhouse as much of a natural environment as I could.  The windows open to the out of doors on warm days without screens so that insects are free to come and go.  The greenhouse manufacturer said that people liked this idea for pollination but I was thinking more about insect control.

In early December when I first began operations I saw a few ladybugs taking refuge from the cold.  I had hoped they might settle in, perhaps laying eggs.  And last week I saw my first ladybug larva busily patrolling the leaves for aphids.

Lady Bug larva

They are voracious eaters (think of teenagers eating between meals).

And yesterday I spied a praying mantis.

Small Preying Mantis

I had seen an egg case in the hillside garden and put it into the greenhouse in February.  Though I never saw the hatching take place, they are apparently growing fast.  Unfortunately a few minutes later I saw this one get trapped in a spider’s web.  While both seemed to be about the same size, the spider definitely won the battle.  But there should be many more praying mantis wandering around the greenhouse at this point.

While i was watching the praying mantis and spider struggle I looked up and saw the dominant actor in the food chain.

Large wooly spider on citrus leaf

This guy was alert and ready for action.  So while I do see aphids here and there, nature’s enforcer’s are busy keeping things within bounds.

Spider with turquoise bib

Bee on Dahlia

I spent last weekend at a garden photography workshop at Chanticleer Garden outside of Philadelphia.  The weather was intermittently mixed clouds and sunshine but we got enough good lighting for some interesting photo opportunities on Saturday.  The workshop was conducted by Alan Detrick and Roger Foley with a small group of enthusiast photographers who were really pleased to get early morning access to the gardens (with good lighting and before the public showed up).  Roger and Alan gave regular and helpful advice as we tried to isolate our own respective visions of what was worth photographing in these early fall scenes.  Both of them have extensive garden photography experience and have previously been judges for the Gardening Gone Wild photo contests.

Chanticleer is truly a pleasure garden in every sense for a gardener.  They have seven horticulturalists who specialize in different sections of the garden and the attention to detail really shows throughout the garden.  A weekend of photography might sound like a lot, but it barely scratches the surface of what is possible at Chanticleer.  By the time you set up your shots the light is already moving on, not to mention the bees and butterflies.

One of the benefits of a small workshop like this one is that you get to share and comment on the other visions that people bring to their photography.  I’ve seen time and again that different people will always bring different photos away from the same scene.  And it only takes a few times of people pointing out the annoying branch you left in the composition before you start to think about it before you click the shutter.

Anyway, despite the weather being less than ideal, I had a great time and I’d like to do it again.  If the thought appeals to you they are likely to run this workshop again next year.

Here are some selected photos from the weekend.

Bee on Dahlia - Version 2

Grasshopper on Celosia

One of the points that Alan emphasized was the way the early morning light can delicately light the edges of a subject like the grasshopper in this image.  And if it’s cold enough, they don’t run from the camera.

Celosia sans grasshopper

Backlit Celosia

Bee on Celosia

Toad Lilies ( Tricyrtis hirta 'Miyazaki')

The Toad lilies are almost shrub-like and completely line the path through the Minder Woods.  They are flagrantly in flower at this season, shaming all those spring blooming flowers that have long gone by now.

Colchicum

I’m generally not a big fan of the Cochicum which flop all over the hillsides at Chanticleer, but they do have their moments.  Mostly I prefer the less gaudy fall crocus which are just now showing up in our lawn.

Perennial Gotta Pea (Amicia zigomeris) detail

Sulpher Butterfly with Proboscis unfurled

Clitoria ternatea

This is tropical vine that was up on the terrace in the house garden.  I think it has to be started from seed each year.

Poppy Mallow (Callirhoe involucrata)

I really liked the detail on the Callirhoe — it would be well worth adding to our hillside garden.

It’s also time for another Gardening Gone Wild Photo contest.  Saxon Holt has selected a theme of filling the frame.  I’m going to take this opportunity to enter a photo that I think truly fills the frame, though perhaps not in the way that Saxon Holt originally conceived.

Aibika (Abelmoschus manihot) detail

This close-up image of the Aibika, a relative of okra, will be my entry for the October Picture This Contest.

Parched Earth

This summer has given a new appreciation of the Dog Days of August.  Historically this is a phrase connected with the significant observations of Sirius, the dog star.  But for me, and many others I think, it connotes a tiredness associated with day after day of overwhelming heat.  We have finally just had two days of long overdue rain.  It was the first since July 4th and we’ve been running a water deficit since May.  When you have to supplement the water drops the plants milk out of the atmosphere, it doesn’t leave time for many other projects.  I won’t even mention the blog postings that were completely written in my mind and never made it to the keyboard.  Let it suffice to say that I will be ready and willing to move toward fall.  In the unfailing optimism that must accompany gardening I planted fall peas and beans on Satuday morning, just before we got some rain.

In the meantime, it is GBBD after all and time to celebrate that which has survived to flower even in this heat.  I want to give a special commendation to the chocolate Joe Pye weed which has been sharing it’s remarkable foliage with us all year and has now decided to flower as well.

Eupatorium rugosum 'Chocolate'

The white flowers contrast nicely with the dark foliage.

Another winner is the Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ which is finally coming into its own.

Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight'

A nice little addition to the party is a seedling Rudbeckia that looks much nicer than the ones which stayed in the ground all winter.  Of course it’s been getting more hand watering than the others.

Rudbeckia hirta 'Prairie Sun'

In the camellia garden we also have the fall blooming cyclamen looking very charming at the moment with their fascinating leaves and flowers combined.

Cyclamen hederifolium

And it would not be fair if I didn’t mention the yellow corydalis which has been flowering continually since spring.  What a great shade garden flower.

Corydalis lutea

There are other flowers out there, such as the rudbeckias, the black-eyed susans, cosmos, geraniums, and the monarda.  But they are on the scraggly side of their blooming cycle right now.  We need to digest this rain for a bit.  Let me close out with one of the regular visitors to our gardens, the crab spider.  They are getting bigger at this time of year and this particular spider seems to be very well suited to the cosmos he/she settled in on.

Spider on Cosmos

Crab Spider Waiting

Please take the time to visit other gardens courtesy of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens

Rainbow at Busch stadium on July 4th

It rained yesterday.  It wasn’t as dramatic as the rainbow we saw on July 4th in St. Louis where we basking the afterglow of a wonderful marriage celebration for our ‘third’ son.  Nor did it have the news impact of the flash flood that hit Frederick with an inch and a half of rain in 30 minutes on July 8th.  Nope.  This was just a gentle rain that fell in the morning for long enough for us to notice that it was really raining and to actually penetrate the dry ground and begin to help the plants.  And it was particularly satisfying because I had only just finally gotten the peppers, eggplants, squash, cukes, and annual flowers planted.  Since this is about 2 months late for them and for the corn that finally got into the ground this morning we shall have to wait and see what the outcome is likely to be.

Once again we have been dealing with really dry weather where it seems like every summer thunderstorm drops its rain on somebody else.  However, the constant hand watering has finally caused me to reconsider our approach to watering.  For many years (let’s say nearly 40) I have acted under the mistaken impression that on the East Coast it was up to Nature to water my garden.  I gave the weather gods the chief responsibility for making certain that all the plants had enough water.  This was probably because, compared  to California where I was raised, the water seemed abundant here and it actually did fall from the skies a fair amount.  When the water didn’t come down however, I complained about dead plants and only reluctantly pulled out the hoses when plants were drooping.  We also have the problem that too much watering will dry up our well and that has implications for washing, showering, and drinking.

This year I came to the brilliant conclusion that if I water during the middle of the night in small amounts it should (a) help the plants, (b) not drain the well, and (c) reduce my daytime labor.  To this end I’ve rigged up 7 watering stations around the yard and garden with timers set to go off for 15 mins on the hour all night long.

Hose manifold leading to timers

Even though we’ve only been doing this for a short while I can already see that this is going to improve my time and attention to other parts of the gardening process if I don’t have to spend 2 hrs every other day dragging the hose around the yard.  Now your may well ask what took me so long to come to this solution and for the life of me I don’t really know.  But running a water pipe out to the garden certainly made this easier to do.

As far as brilliant insights go, I am batting two for two this week.  We normally keep our compost bucket underneath the kitchen sink.  For some reason we let it get pretty full and found that fruit flies were having a sexual orgy down there.  At least they produced a lot of babies that were rapidly spreading to the fruit bowl, the wine bottles, the glad and lily flower vases, and any place with sweet or fragrant substances.  In the past this kind of infestation has been really hard to eliminate.  Basically it involved getting rid of all the attractive things and spraying rooms on a regular basis.  However, when I found them on the beautiful gladiolus and lily displays I knew we needed another solution.  So here is what I did (and I want full patent rights on this solution).  I sprayed the inside of the vacuum cleaner and then vacuumed the little buggers off every surface where they had settled.  The vacuum wand can actually pick them right out the air.  It took about two days of going back over the same areas and sucking them out of the air until there were no more to be found.  I did put a plug on the end of the vacuum while it was not in use to make sure they didn’t appear again from inside the machine.  The process worked so well that I didn’t even have any left to take a picture of for this posting.

Speaking of bugs, has anyone noticed that the population of stinkbugs is dramatically decreased from last year.  I don’t know of any reason why that would happen but the reduction is most welcome.  Last year we would find multiple stinkbugs sitting on the door waiting for it to slide open and this year nary a one.  Let’s hope that a natural solution is evolving.

I suppose that one explanation for reduction of all bugs in the area is the little flock of guinea fowl that walked through our yard the other morning.

Guinea fowl

We had never seen them before but apparently Guinea fowl are widely raised because of their appetite for ticks and other insects.  They are welcome to come walking here anytime they like.

I had one major loss when we returned from St. Louis and two successes to report.  This year my kids had given me a rare Chinese tree, Emmenopterys henryi, as a gift.  I had potted it up and it seemed to be doing well.  When I returned it had just up and died.  I inspected the corpse and could see no reason – the soil was moist and everything around it was doing fine.  I’ll have to give it another try I guess.  On the positive side of the ledger, the Oconee Bells (Shortia galacifolia) planted this spring all have developed new leaves and seem to be growing just fine, something I did not see with last year’s attempt at the Shortias.

Oconee Bells (Shortia galacifolia)

In somewhat the same vein, I have planted Gloriosa Lilies many times and never managed to get a growing plant, let alone a flower.  This time, along with all the other much delayed plantings, I put the Gloriosa in the ground just before we went to St. Louis.  This time the effort was rewarded with a little plant that seems to be coming on nicely.

Gloriosa Lily (Gloriosa superba)

A Catmint/Baptesia/Coral Bells Rose Garden

There is a lot going on in the gardens right now.  Everyday a new flower emerges and Beth rearranges what is showing in the house as well.  Even as things change there is one constant theme for May and that is a struggle for our attention between the Iris and the Peonies.  This is the first year for the Itoh Peonies to bloom for us.  They are a wonderful combination of the best of the foliage and form of the Tree Peonies and the fullness of the normal herbaceous lactiflora varieties.  And, unlike the full-flowered lactifloras, they do not flop.  Not that I would complain about any of the Peonies — they are all wonderful — but we are really liking the Itohs, especially Julie Rose.

Itoh Peony 'Julie Rose'

Itoh Peony 'Singing in the Rain'

Last flower from the Yellow Tree Peony

Paonia lactiflora 'Honey Gold'

We often bring the Peonies inside for closer enjoyment.  They last fairly well and many have a nice fragrance (especially Festiva Maxima).  But it is hard to compete with the eye-stopping display that the Bearded Iris provide.

Bearded Iris

They need constant attention — the buds in flower change daily and the dead flowers have powerful dyes when they drop.  But the colors are superb and the fragrance grabs your attention when you walk by.  In the garden they pull you toward their sentinel flowers from a distance seem to be impervious (like the Peonies) to deer predation.  This purely cranberry colored Iris is one of my favorites.

Cranberry colored Bearded Iris

In addition to their fragrance and color the Iris are also so very distinctive in the architecture of the flowers.  They have exquisite detail that rewards close examination.

Iris 'Ginger Snap' profile

Iris Beard

Orange Iris Beard

Even with all the attention given to the Iris and Peonies, I would be not be serving by constituent flowers fairly if I didn’t mention a couple of other star performers right now.  The Baptisia are looking better than ever and the variety ‘Twilight’ makes a lovely photo subject.

Bapteisia 'Twilight'

And for an ex-California I was delighted to see that the California Poppies that I planted last spring have decided to come up this year.

Calif Poppy in bud

I should also mention the creatures that have been visiting.  The first hummingbird of the year has come zooming past with it’s motorboat-sounding wings.  There have also been a lot more clearwing moths than I remember previously.

Clearwing Moth

I enjoy their high tech sunglasses and long proboscis.

And then there was the Black Snake that we noticed while eating dinner on the deck last night.

Black Snake Planter

Think of this as a new design for planters…

This is also the time for the monthly photo contest at Gardening Gone Wild and the focus this month is on lighting with Macro Images.  I looked at using one of the images above but I’m going to return instead to a favorite closeup shot of a backlit Tulip where the light just seemed to emanate from the base of the flower.

Tulip 'Flaming Purissima'

Morning Mist

Not too long ago we had a morning mist that covered the hillsides.  It was the most rain we had from the twelfth of August until last night.  Another month without rain.  And only .4 inches from last night.  You might ask how the plants can survive such dismal conditions and the simple answer is they can’t.  I have had to water as much as possible and we just don’t have the capacity from our well to support all the plants on the property.  This is what the triangle field looks like after a summer of drought.

The dry triangular field

And, as if it weren’t enough that the dry conditions (combined with woodchucks) did in the corn, the squash, and the cucumbers completely (I mean nothing, not a single morsel), we now have an invasion of stinkbugs on everything that’s left.

Stink Bugs on the tomatoes

These aren’t your ordinary stink bugs.  These are the Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs that will want to come inside for the winter time.  They’ve taken to sitting on the door and window screens when they are not sucking the life out of the tomatoes, the peppers, the eggplant, and the apples.

Brown Marmorated Stink Bug

Nonetheless, we shall persevere.  We can always look forward to a tropical storm visiting the area… — I see that Igor is forming in the Caribbean…

Blue Water Lily with yellow cente

Yesterday I awoke at 6am with crashing thunder and multiple lightening strokes headlining the arrival of the first rainstorm in 29 days.  It was quite a storm with over 5000 people losing power in Frederick(not us) but most importantly for our yard was the total of more than an inch of rain.  It was followed by more rain in the afternoon and then again last night.  It is hard to believe how dry it has been here.  The ground has been cracking, trees losing their leaves,  and plants have been dying left and right.  Gardening has been discouraging on the whole when you see so many of the spring’s investments disappearing.  It’s not just that it’s been dry but the temperatures have been high enough to make it really unpleasant to go outside.

Two weeks ago a posting from Melissa at Garden Shoots reminded me that last year I had made a photography trip out to the sunflower fields that Maryland plants near the Potomac River.  I had heard that the fields were not up to last years display but I remembered that the Indigo Buntings were plentiful last year and I decided to journey out to the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area to see what I could find.

The field was full of dried out stunted sunflowers that were well past the peak of flowering.

Very tired collection of sunflowers

I spent a couple of hours there hoping to see the Indigo Buntings that were so plentiful last year.  I thought I imagined I might have maybe possibly seen one or two in the distance.  But the field was loaded with Goldfinches and House Finches.  There were hundreds.

Goldfinch on sunflower

A very red House Finch

I did see a Pileated Woodpecker in flight across the field.

Pileated Woodpecker in flight

After two hours of waiting and watching on a very hot day I packed it up and decided to go find my own water.  On the way back from the Potomac I stopped at Lilypons Water Gardens.  Their 250 acres of ponds are filled with flowering water lilies at this season.  It was refreshing to see so many flowers at once and what a contrast to the dry tired field of sunflowers.

Pond of Fuschia-colored Water Lilies

You can wander freely about the grounds and it’s a great spot for photography.  Wildlife abounds as you would expect with so much water and lush vegetation.

Dragonflies mating

Swallowtail at Lilypons

I have to confess that I don’t really know my Water Lilies at all.  I’m a water gardener wannabe.  I could guess at some of the varieties I was looking at but I’m probably on safer ground just to cite the colors.  Suffice it to say, Lilypons is worth a visit if you are in the area.  And if you aren’t, they have a mail order catalog.

Yellow-white Water Lily

Yellow Water Lily

Lilac Water Lily

Pink Water Lily with reflection

Red-Shouldered Hawk that greeted me yesterday morning

Though the mulberries are almost gone, I still try to start the days with a half-hour watching the birds in the mulberry and cherry trees.  Yesterday morning as I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes on the way out to the garden I heard the characteristic cry of the Red-Shouldered Hawk.  And there on the garden fence, not 25 feet away was this awesome hawk.  The cry is actually a mating call so that I was probably just a distraction.  Nonetheless the look I got was an irritated one.

Red-Shouldered Hawk getting ready to launch

Red-Shouldered Hawk takes off, note the talons

You would think that this would make the birds of the neighborhood lie low.  But moments later I witnessed this same hawk getting dive-bombed by this Eastern Kingbird (no bigger than a Robin).

Eastern Kingbird atop cherry

Just two days earlier I had seen a family of Great Crested Flycatchers amongst the Cherry trees.

Great Crested Flycatcher

Great Crested Flycatcher youngster

So despite the fact that I missed the last couple of weeks of the mulberry/cherry season there is still a lot of bird watching to do — and it remains rewarding to get up and out in the morning.

Yesterday also yielded a Swallowtail hanging out in the Agastache ‘Tutti-Fruiti’.

Swallowtail on Agastache

Swallowtail fully spread out on the Agastache 'Tutti-Fruiti'