Sassy wants her morning walk by 7 AM, and I finish a mug of pour-over coffee by that time. She interprets certain signals favorably, such as donning socks and speaking certain words, such as go, walk, and morning crunchies.
We inspect the rose garden at the same time, for different reasons. I look for the latest blooms. She noses about, looking for signs of wild life.
On Friday I wonder about what will be blooming Sunday morning. In hot weather the new rose blooms appear rapidly. If I want more roses,
- I prune mature rose flowers,
- look for death stars (blooms with no petals, ready to develop hips), and
- cut away dead wood.
All three suppress new blooms, so I follow John 15 and cleanse the fruitful to make them more fruitful. But Sassy is a busy executive, with people to meet and places to explore. She hurries me along with some happy barks. Pruning waits for her permission, later.
I am watching the plants I obtained for pollinators. At Almost Eden, that word came up often - pollinators. That includes bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. The gardening sites all work very hard at exploiting those categories, especially butterflies and hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds love three plants I am promoting in the rose garden:
- Hostas - for their trumpet flowers;
- Bee Balm - for their trumpet flowers;
- Trumpet Vine - for their trumpet flowers.
The common factor seems to be...Bueller, Bueller, anyone? anyone? Worth mentioning is the hummingbirds' need for tiny insects. Hummingbird feeders offer sugar water, but flowers offer nectar and tiny insects.
Hummingbird flowers will also be popular with bees, and I like having a constant cycle of blooming, which start with early spring weeds, mints, and dandelions.
Butterflies seem to need a specific plant for each kind:
- Milkweed for the Monarch eggs and caterpillers,
- Parsley for the Black Swallowtails.
I am working on Butterfly Weed (related to Milkweed) now and Milkweed for next year.
Teeny-Tiny Insects
Joe Pye and Mountain Mint draw groups of tiny insects and butterflies. I wondered why they sold a small version of Joe Pye called Little Joe. Now I know why. My mature Joe Pye is ready to bloom and almost 6 feet tall.
Likewise, Mountain Mint is so tall that people ask what it is. Do not laugh, but I have made three attempts to divide and replant some. I missed the one day of spring for that, and the roots are welded to the clay soil for now. Laugh all day - I have Mountain Mint and most people do not know how valuable it is.
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| Cletha - aka Summersweet aka Sweet Pepperbush, etc. Poke a bloom and see a tiny insect cloud. |
But I also like the tiny insects that do so much to attack insect pests. Their small size contributes to overlooking their value. If I wiggle the right plants, a tiny cloud of them will take flight and settle down again - quite a sight.
About Clethra - From Gardening in Tune with Nature
If I had space in a small garden for only one woody plant, I would grow summersweet. I’ve always grown it and frequently written about the heady perfume of its summer flowers and its unique brassy yellow autumn leaves, but its status as a “must have” plant for the garden insectary was secured last August as I stood among a colony of the cultivar ‘Hokie Pink’ flowering in Marjorie’s Garden. I recalled the summer day ten years earlier when we knocked each of the five small plants out of its one-gallon pot and planted them around the bole of the old white pine growing off the porch steps. A decade later, as I twisted my way into head-high branches crowded with racemes of soft pink flowers, it was impossible to say where one plant stopped and another took over. Even a chipmunk has a hard time weaving through the interlaced stems to reach the base of the pine.
Carefully moving branches aside, I positioned my legs and those of my tripod in the middle of the summersweet colony and waited for the wake of my disturbance to settle. Soon the spikes of flowers, only a few inches from my nose, were crawling with bees, wasps, hoverflies, beetles, and several insects whose images remain on my computer desktop, waiting to be identified. Bumblebees of all sizes and colored markings outnumbered all other insects. A lonely honeybee joined the symphony of buzzing, along with several small native bees, some metallic green, others gray or black. Two distinctly different hoverflies tormented me with their inability to settle down long enough for a photograph, but a tachinid fly obliged, stopping in its frenetic foraging for nectar long enough for me to get a decent shot. (Both hoverflies and tachinid flies are predators of herbivores such as aphids and various leaf-munching caterpillars. Hoverflies feed on nectar and pollen as adults, but their larvae feed on other insects. Tachinid fly females lay their eggs on other insect adults or larvae. When these eggs hatch, the tachinid larvae bore into the host’s body and slowly consume it.)
In terms of diversity of insects attracted to a single plant in bloom, nothing in my experience compares to what I witnessed on that August afternoon. Through the tangle of summersweet branches I could see the vegetable garden a hundred feet away, the bright orange squash flowers beckoning. When a bumblebee in my viewfinder took wing and disappeared, I knew where it was heading.
More about Clethra from another writer. I have two mature Clethras.
Where Yah Going on Vacation?
I am there.
