Friday Fabulous Flower - Phlox

This is not a wild phlox, but it is not a typical whimpy cultivar either; it resists powdery mildew and all the cultivars tried in this garden don't except for the spring native P. divaricata.  This plant survived a "weedy" attempt by the former owners to have a prairie and it is a big old thing reaching 5 feet tall with substantial stems and big showy panicles of pink flowers.  With the narrow tubes and small corolla opening this is without question a butterfly flower; phlox is a must for any butterfly gardens.  Bumblebees steal nectar from the bases of the corolla tubes. It makes itself at home and makes the late summer garden rather colorful.  If this strikes any of you as any thing in particular, let us know.  A few plants have pale pink flower, but most are this shocking pink.  

Wildlife friendly yard - how friendly is too friendly?

It was a very nice morning.  TPP walked out to take a glance at the kitchen garden. In that short distance, a rabbit, a chipmunk, a squirrel, and several birds crossed his path.  Moments earlier the view from the bathroom window (a most excellent view) featured a very large, well-fed ground hog (whistlepig, woodchuck, Marmota monax).  Unfortunately, a well-fed ground hog is not a good thing for gardens, so this latter wildlife denizen may get relocated to a friendlier location.  The kitty girls are in love with the idea of chipmunks as playthings, but this will not happen as one of the reasons our gardens are wildlife friendly is that the cats are house cats (one is occasionally walked about on a leash).  All three (four) of our local swallowtail butterflies (black, tiger, giant, and probably spicebush too)  were hovering around Mrs. Phactor's perennial bed.  However, members of the rue family (notably Citrus), are the host trees for the larvae of the giant swallowtail (bird-dropping camouflaged), and they are generally in short supply here in north central USA. This is our largest butterfly.  The spicebush swallowtail has become more common because it's food plant does grow in our gardens.  It looks a great deal like the black swallowtail, but with less yellow and more blue on its lower wings especially.  Also happy to see some monarchs flitting about, although milkweeds have not been particularly successful in our gardens for reasons unknown.  

Leafy passion for phony eggs

One of the best things about rain forest when you're teaching or studying rainforest is the myriad of interactions among organisms. You just see them everywhere. The leaf above is from a vine found growing on top of a clump of Heliconia near our cabina. It's a passion vine, Passiflora biflora. Notice the 8 conspicuous fake eggs on the leaf. Butterflies that specialize on Passiflora vines for their larvae to feed on see these fake eggs and decide not to add another egg to a leaf where other larvae will be feeding first.  But these fake eggs are also nectaries on the back side, glands that secrete nectar and attract ants that will defend their nectar source thus providing another protection from herbivory. Indeed the back side of this leaf had several ants on board.  Note that the top of the 2-lobed leaf is oriented upside down in this image with the apex, a tiny tip pointing down

Gardening by-products - butterflies

The Phactors did not set out to plant a butterfly garden, and yet we did as a consequence of trying to generate season long flower color and plant diversity. A number of butterflies have always been fairly common in particular painted ladies and red admirals, and the ubiquitous white cabbage butterflies. During the late afternoon, groups of red admirals dance in colorful tornadoes in sun spots that appear here and there in our gardens, undoubtably a behavior associated with reproduction. Monarchs have been fairly common this year, which is good because many biologists are concerned about their declining population levels. Milkweeds, their larval food plant, have never done well in our gardens although at least 3 species have been tried, but milkweeds are common enough in many places. The most common fairly spectacular butterfly is the tiger swallowtail, and tulip trees, their larval food plant, are quite common in our neighborhood. Black swallowtails are also fairly common and their very distinctive black-yellow-green larvae can be found eating your parsley and dill, another butterfly with a family level dietary restriction. This year a rare sighting of a giant swallowtail was a nice surprise, but TPP does not know their food plants. Now that several spice bushes, Lindera benzoin, have gotten to a decent size, as well as a largish Sassafras tree, spicebush swallowtails have become regular residents. Note the variable bluish-green coloring mostly on the lower wings, a marking that quickly distinguishes them from black swallowtails. Now all of the plants mentioned above are larval food plants, the adults are all nectar consumers patrolling the many different flowers, particularly mints, pinks, composites, and the like. Even from here in the kitchen the various butterflies can be seen flitting about the flower garden. This image of the spicebush swallowtail feeding on a blazing star is from the Ohio-nature website and you can find many more butterfly images there. 

Insectarium visit

On the way to the French Quarter for some oyster po-boys, there was a window full of tropical butterflies fluttering around.  This is not something you usually see in the windows of big federal looking buildings so it caught our attention.  A few yards beyond was the entrance to the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium located weirdly within the US Customs House.  OK, this made sense of the butterflies inside a federal looking building, except why that's where it was placed anyways?  Well, as the only adults unaccompanied by kids we sort of looked out of place, and a lot of the exhibits required you to bend down real low, but this was really a quite nice exhibit, so sayeth the biologists and aficionados of natural history.  Of course you saw the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Some exhibits did a great job of grabbing kids attention and directing their activity.  Some parents did a good job at helping their kids focus on things.  Some of the exhibits just didn't work.  It would take a while, watching them to figure out why, and then some ideas about how to fix them.  One thing is clear, kids don't read signs.  They don't notice them or if they do, they don't even try.  They simply ignore them and seek to investigate on their own.  This means that taxonomically organized displays just fall flat.  Even if the organism is a cool as all get out, the lesson is lost.  The Seattle Aquarium (not sure if the name is right) took a different and simpler approach.  How do fish hide?  How do fish swim?  and then each question was followed by a series of examples and a nice illustrative diagram.  To heck with the names although they were there.  The ugly was seeing adults giving eeky, icky, yucky, repulsive, physical displays of negativity, great role models for the kids. You know how hard this is for us teachers to knock this type of behavior out of students because they grew up with parents who provide poor role models?  One of the best exhibits was a butterfly room, and it was quite lovely, quite nicely done, which we'd seen from the outside.  Here's a bird wing on a feeding station.  TPP was familiar with many of the neotropical butterflies, or their close relatives.  Of course lots of kids were totally ignoring the "don't touch" rule, so not only don't they read, they don't listen.  People you got your work cut out for you to teach your kids how to be patient, curious observers and listeners.