Thoughts?

I don't know how long, but I'm sure it has been quite a while since I showed pictures of my yard.  But no worries.  The yard has not gone to wreck and ruin.  My method of gardening is mainly benign neglect.  I have some professional gardening done by some truly lovely people who hate power tools and plush lawns and square bushes as much as I do.  They may think I'm a little nuts about the bugs and birds, but at very least they act like they understand me.  I spend a little time myself puttering around the yard, trimming and pulling.  But mainly, I just water a little and neglect.  Since I love wilderness even more than gardens, it seems the best way to go.  Not to mention, it's kind of effortless.  Plants just show up in the yard, carried by birds or the breeze.  Sometimes they turn into wonderful things.  In this way, I've acquired a fig tree, two oaks, several sunflowers, tomatoes, night-blooming jasmine, and all manner of grasses.  And just recently, this.

A couple of  people and I made a bet on what we thought it was.  I said a melon.  They said, respectively, a sycamore tree and a passion vine.  I'm fairly certain they are wrong and  I'm right, but I'm interested in other ideas.  There may be a prize for the correct answer - possibly some of the bounty of the plant, whenever and whatever that may be.
Here's another nice thing that happens in my yard.

The Butterfly Ranch

In a few short years, my milkweed (which I bought in a three inch pot at a Huntington Library plant sale) has spread throughout my garden, as, being a weed, it is wont to do.  If you plant milkweed, monarch butterflies will come.  The population has increased each year, so the striped caterpillars covered the plants for weeks in the fall.  The plants are close to defoliated now, but where you can find leaves, buds and seedpods, there are still caterpillars.  I stopped counting the chrysalises when I got to 50.  And the monarchs aren't my only butterflies.  I have lots of passion vine, which is the host plant for the gulf fritillary.  The other butterflies I see include skippers, blues, giant swallowtails, tiger swallowtails, sulphers and painted ladies.  I've had rare sightings of mourning cloaks and red admirals and something kind of small that I can't identify.  I have plans to plants anise, coneflower, lantana, and cabbage.  I will be covered in butterflies.  Happy new year, blog readers.  May you too be covered in butterflies or whatever your heart desires.

After Rain

Nothing sparkles quite like a freshly washed garden.

Eye on the Sparrow

Sparrows have to be the riffraff of the bird word. They are pugnacious and prolific. They are alien and loud. They hop instead of walking.

Backyard birders with their bluebird nesting boxes? You couldn't find a nicer bunch of people. And yet when it comes to sparrows, they speak of pest control, of destroying broods, and of pellet guns. Thank God somebody's looking out for the sparrows.

My Pumpkin Patch

Ask me about my pumpkins. Here's a baby picture.


Where pumpkins come from. My favorite.

And these should give you a sense of the scale.


Me and my pumpkins.

Now and then

Found in my garden

A seven-legged male green lynx spider on the Tahitian Sunset rose

A pear blossom from several weeks ago. Poignant, because none of the pears set, and the whole tree is having a bit of a struggle now. It's tough out there, sometimes, for spiders, for trees, for all of us.

They're for Macro Monday, but I can't seem to add hyperlinks these days.

Macro Miscellany

A young conifer beetle on a passion fruit

A mushroom on the lawn of Eliot Middle School

Roses, Double Delight

Fly on rose. They pollinate flowers too and have some beautiful colors, yet they lack the cachet of butterflies.

Figeater Beetles

This summer, figeater beetles have descended on my yard. I don't even have a fig tree, but there's one next door. One morning I saw two of the beetles making sweet beetle love in my bougainvillea. Then a third beetle arrived.

The beetles are large, and they make a loud buzzing sound as they fly. They are a little alarming, but only harmful if you mind sharing your figs. The iridescence on their undersides is beautiful.

Two roses and a weed

More intimate peeks at my backyard. For Macro Monday.

Flora and fauna of home

It's still Monday here

I'm sharing my roses with many katydid nymphs. There are plenty to go around. These look very similar to the grown katydids. The smaller ones look very different and it took me literally years to figure out that they were the same insects.
These katydids haven't yet grown their wings, so they aren't making noise. I can't quite remember how they sound. I listened to sound clips, and they were a little different from the katydids around here. The call is supposed to sound like "katy did," which is where they got the name. I don't really hear that. It is a more complex song than the chirp of the crickets though. A three beat measure.

I've included this because the colors go so well with the picture above. I've also been pretty excited ever since I learned what a scarlet pimpernel is. This lovely little weed. What an odd name for a hero. Damned elusive pimpernel (I quote.) There are more wonderful macros here.

Bother

It's Monday again already.

This bug showed up on my spent sunflower. It looks like it's wearing pants. I like the leaf shapes and the shadows in the photograph. I submitted it for Macro Monday. I also submitted it to What's That Bug, because I'm not sure what it is.

Fragrance

There are a few things in my garden that I planted, but almost all the plants were here when I arrived. Yet I couldn't love it any better if it had sprouted from my dreams or by my hard work. As much as the sights, I cherish the scents of my garden. Honeysuckles, simple and sweet, that smell like my childhood just as the school year was ending. Night-blooming jasmine - secret, beautiful, intoxicating. Like falling in love.

New Born Limes

Fraught with possibility. A spritz on fish. A twist in seltzer. Guacamole, key lime pie. Margaritas. For Macro Monday.

Spring

Lessons from flowers: be open, be colorful, be fruitful, sow your seeds, follow the sun, seize the day.

Green

Are any of these shamrocks? If you know.





I'm part-Irish. I wouldn't mind if it were more. I mean, I wouldn't want to give up any of the ancestors I have, but I think I'd like it if the unknown ones turned out to be Irish.

Daily Bug

I'm not really sure it's a Carolina Mantis. Some kind of praying mantis, of course, but having seen honey bees snatched out of life by those jaw-like forelegs, I hesitate to call it praying. That's the yin and yang of the food chain; one creature's demise is another creature's sustenance.

I like the way the background turned out. I needed to make something that the green mantis would show up against, something amorphous but interesting enough to draw the mantis's attention in the direction away from the viewer.

I may take a break from bugs for a little while; there's some two- and four-legged creatures I'm wanting to paint.

Organization

Like many people of my age, I came to digital photography late. In the absence of clear plastic sleeves for negatives and yellow-orange envelopes containing Kodak prints that just fit shoe boxes, I'm at a loss to organize my photographic images. I know in theory it ought to be easier. In practice, I use a huge memory card and accumulate thousands of images in my camera. As the need or whim strikes me, I pick off a few at time and store them in uselessly named files on my computer. Names like Camera, Paint, and Today. I still maintain the majority of the images on the memory cards, and often repeatedly transfer the same image to the computer. Additional chaotically arranged images are on a separate hard-drive. I add to this problem daily, and worry about it only occasionally.

I usually know what I'm looking for, and so far have been able to find it. Always in the last place I look. Tonight I was looking through my images for pictures of sparrows. Since I see sparrows everyday, there are lots of sparrow pictures spread around in lots of picture files. You may notice these aren't sparrows at all. I just came across these forgotten images tonight, and they pleased me. The passion flowers are still buds now, but before long these crazy blooms will be back, enchanting the bees of a new season. Maybe I'll get a new memory card.

Gulf Fritillary

Here is a gulf fritillary in the pear tree. I took the reference photograph early in the morning and caught the butterfly sleeping. They don't stay still long when they're awake. It was a few a months ago as you can see because the tree had leaves. These gulf fritillaries are ubiquitous in my garden. In the afternoon in season, there is always a crowd of them. I take them a little for granted in fact, and have nearly forgotten that they are exotic and beautiful, as is the passion vine that lured them to my home. They are medium-sized butterflies with proportionately long wings with silvery spots on the underside.

I'm fairly happy with this painting, especially the shadows in the folds of the wings which were tricky, and the branches which effortlessly sprung from my paint brush like magic.

Thanks to George Liang, who painted me painting, I have a new profile picture.

Valentines

These pictures seemed to fit the day. That is, they are less inappropriate. Happy Valentine's Day. All kinds of love.