One more day until the mulch arrives and my vacation begins. I am as jittery with excitement as a child before Christmas. My to do list for the garden is growing: mow, cut back forsythia, read about when to plant the seeeds I want to plant, check on the last frost date, sow seeds, mulch, weed, transplant bee balm.
I don’t know how I’m going to make it through six days of vacation time, at home, in warm spring weather, without buying plants. We saved the rest of the garden budget for May, when it’s truly time to plant, but sowing seeds is going to make me crazy with impatience to see green stuff in our garden.
I need to take a step back and be grateful for the green that’s already emerging. The lilac is leafing out, and I see flower buds like tiny grape clusters on it. The indigo salvia is leafing as well, with flower spikes forming. The cat mint is already a fluffy knee-high mound; the lemon balm is returning. The yarrow, the bee balm, the rue: these all have new growth. And the first tulip finally opened down by the mailbox! They survived my amateur attempt at transplanting last year!
So there is some leafy life. But there’s way more bare brown earth than growing green flora. I’ll have to wait weeks for seeds to sprout, and more weeks for them to grow, and more weeks for them to flower. When it’s warm and sunny, and birds are chirping, and tulips are blooming, and I’ve got dirt under my fingernails, I’m going to want flowers. I will want to fill our flower boxes. I will want to plant roses. I will want to put annuals in the empty spaces in our flower beds. I want something alive and new, and I’ll have six days of freedom in which I’ll have to restrain myself.
I am counting down the days until the mulch truck arrives. Three days, and then I can scatter wildflower seeds on the slope out back: a moment I’ve waited for for weeks.
I can’t stop thinking about the garden. Our back yard is a steep hill that makes me pant when I mow it. When we moved in, the top corner was overgrown with forsythia, brambles, poison ivy, and I don’t know what all else. Whatever was back there, it wasn’t pretty. It was a tangled, impenetrable mess I thought we’d never be able to clean up.
Slowly, over the past two years, we dug out stumps, pulled out vines, and eventually got the patch down to bare dirt. My husband and son got it to that point a few weeks ago, on a warm day in winter.
When confronted with a bare expanse of earth on our property, I want to fill it with flowers.
Since that day several weeks ago, I have consulted garden books, garden magazines, butterfly books, seed catalogs. I’ve been to our local nursery, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Pike nursery in Charlotte, NC, while we were there for our son’s soccer tournament. I’ve started a gardening notebook, an online gardening log, and added a Garden category to my blog menu so I can easily access posts that tell me when I did what in the garden in years past (we were killing lawn this time last year).
I’m ready. And now the time is almost here. Three days until the mulch arrives. Three days until I can sow seeds.
We have a back deck I never sit on because there’s nothing to look at but grass. Instead, when I want to sit outside, I take a folding camp chair to the front garden and pop it open under the dogwood tree so I can be among hummingbirds and butterflies. Now, we have a bird feeder out back. It has lured goldfinches and woodpeckers to our back yard, so sitting out back is more appealing now. But there are still no flowers. Soon, though. Soon we will have a wildflower patch for butterflies and hummingbirds.
Starting Thursday, our kids’ spring break begins and so does mine. I’m taking several days off from work to play in the dirt. In my research I’ve found several species I must have out back for the butterflies — parsley, dill, cleome, zinnia, globe amaranth. I bought seed packets for those. I also have seeds gifted from my friend Dorothy‘s garden — milkweed, blazing star (Liatris), and blanket flower (Gaillardia). And to fill in the rest of the area, I bought a 1.5 pound bag of Pennington wildflower seeds to attract hummingbirds and butterflies. Surely from all of those sources, something will come up.
I’ve already got my first day off planned out. The day is forecast to be sunny, with a low of 41° F the night before, and a high of 71 during the day. I’ll have a lie-in, as my British friend calls it, to let the temperature come up a bit before heading outside. After my smoothie breakfast, I’ll pull a bowl from the cupboard and stir seeds from my store-bought packets and seeds from my friend into the wildflower mix from Pennington. I’ll huff up the hill with a hoe and a heavy rake to break up and smooth the soil, then I’ll sprinkle seeds over the entire area. I’ll rake again to cover them.
And when I hear the rumble of the mulch truck coming down the street, and the screech and clang of the metal dumper spilling 6 cubic yards of shredded hardwood bark onto our driveway, I’ll wheel my barrow down the hill and start shoveling.
The only thing I’m still trying to figure out is whether to distribute the seeds randomly, or to create a few patches within the plot — a milkweed clump, for example, or a dill clump. I still can’t decide.
I’ve got time. Three more days until the fun begins.
I am at Barnes & Noble on a sodden Friday — my flex day. On the round Formica café table are my coffee, two gardening magazines, and a warm peanut butter cup cookie on a white ceramic plate (“For here, please”). The café hums behind me — I spent far too much time selecting my seat (in the corner? by the window? with a wall behind me? facing the tables or the bookstore?) — and in front of me a man in a cobalt blue sweater and well-worn sneakers browses the technology aisle. Rain drops run in rivulets down the store windows, and I am cozy with my coffee, cookie, and composition book.
I left my laptop at home. In this murmuring book store, on my day off, I am surrounded by physical media. Journals, books, magazines. Vinyl, compact disks. My pen tip scratching across the blue-lined paper of a wide-ruled Mead composition book (they didn’t have college-ruled, which is probably for the best now that I have old-lady eyes).
Before I left home, I opened my computer to pay a bill and look up some phone numbers (eye doctor, nail salon) and hours (library, book store). As soon as I opened it, Slack boinged at me, Telegram dinged at me, red notification bubbles glared at me, and browser and calendar banner notifications slid open in the upper right of my screen. I quit every application quickly so I wouldn’t see anything that might suck me in.
I managed to not work — a narrow escape! — but did not manage to avoid falling into the digital chasm. After I finished my online errands, I somehow spent 15 minutes searching for desktop wallpaper to satiate my craving for turquoise water, warmth, and a feeling of tranquility. I have no idea how I ended up there. I did not find satisfactory wallpaper before realizing the trap I was falling into. I shut the laptop and left it behind so I could spend my rainy day flex day at the book store.
Cherry blossoms are popping pink against the brown landscape, and I saw my first tulip of the year today, a spring yellow.
Today’s drenching should green the landscape quickly. I wanted to spend some time today weeding, but I’m not sad the rain is keeping me in instead. I haven’t started thinking about the garden yet this year, and with how warm it’s been, I’m finally ready. On the table in front of me are a glossy, staple-bound Virginia Gardener and a matte, glue-bound Gardening for Birds & Butterflies.
The green of their covers is fresh and alive compared to the dreary March grey outside. I fear I will leave here with a mind full of wishes, and a dangerous desire to spend a lot of money on flowers.
The garden is transitioning from summer to fall. The milkweed is mottled and scraggly, the sweet basil is yellowed and setting seeds. The parsley bolted, the Thai basil fell over under its own weight.
It’s time to do some cleanup.
Yesterday it rained all day. It was one of my favorite types of autumn Saturdays: chilly, grey, raw. We spent most of the day running errands. We bought new alarm clocks for the kids, harvest candles for the mantle, pumpkin-pie-scented wax melts to make the house smell autumny, and at the last-minute, mums for the garden.
Our daughter and I spent a good half hour inspecting the different colors of mums, gravitating repeatedly to particular ones (white for our daughter, burgundy for me), thinking about the colors in our garden, looking at pictures of the flower bed on my phone, and brainstorming what we needed to clear out and where we could put our favorite-colored specimens.
Today, the drizzle and pregnant grey are gone. The sun shines bright in a clear blue sky, and raindrops glisten on the green grass. The mums are out there waiting for me. I see our daughter’s white ones in a happy clump where the parsley once was. The wind is chilly right now, though, despite the brilliant sun. I’ll need a jacket and gloves while I work.
For now, I’ve got my slippers on and am sipping coffee from the chair by the window. Leaves shiver on the pear trees across the street, maple branches swing, and coneflowers and salvia nod in the wind. I’ll plant the mums when my cup is empty.
When I returned home after a weeklong trip to Whistler, I was giddy to walk around the garden and find not one monarch butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but two.
Newly emerged monarch on rueAfter finding those, I of course crawled around in the mulch and dirt to inspect the undersides of leaves. I found three more monarch chrysalises plus a bunch of fat swallowtail caterpillars who will soon be crawling off to metamorphasize as well.
This is SO EXCITING Y’ALL. Here’s a full caterpillar catalog of what I’ve found so far:
Some friends at work are also interested in butterfly gardening, and are looking for host plant ideas. Since we work for a company that makes, ahem, blogging software, my friend naturally asked “Did you do a blog post on what all you planted?” Nudge nudge.
Shockingly, I have not. So here it is! Kris and Liz, this is for you.
The plants
For Mother’s Day, our son gave me Christopher Kline’s book, Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies. Combined with a bunch of online research, experimentation with a butterfly garden in Florida, and talking to bunches of people who garden for butterflies and caterpillars, this book helped me plan a garden that includes both host plants (that caterpillars eat) and nectar plants (that adult butterflies drink from). The most successful plants in our garden are the following:
Host plants
Milkweed (Asclepias): We planted both common milkweed and swamp milkweed. These are by far the most insect-loved plants in the garden. They are constantly covered in various species, including aphids, beetles, and, late in the summer, monarch caterpillars. Milkweed is both a nectar plant and a host plant. We’ve seen adult giant swallowtails and monarchs drinking from its flowers, and have found at least a dozen monarch caterpillars on it. Word of warning: milkweed will get covered in aphids. The caterpillars will still come even when every surface is crawling with aphids, so we kept our milkweed intact even though it’s not very attractive once it has stopped flowering and it’s coated in tiny orange insects.
Rue (Ruta graveolens): This is possibly my favorite addition to the garden. The leaves are a silvery blue-green, the plant stays neat and tidy (it doesn’t get leggy or messy), it can take the heat (and drought) and still look healthy, and the swallowtail caterpillars adore it. As an unexpected bonus, the monarch caterpillars love it for building chrysalises. We’ve found at least 3 chrysalises in the small, shin-high plants.
Butterfly host and nectar plants
Nectar plants
Milkweed: all the butterflies big and small love milkweed.
Indigo salvia: Aside from the milkweed, these purple flower spikes are the most popular in the garden for butterflies to drink from. Bees also love these flowers.
Pink salvia: Okay, maybe these are tied with the indigo salvia for nectar popularity, at least for hummingbirds. I see hummingbirds drinking from these almost every time I sit in the garden.
Bee balm (Monarda): Butterflies and hummingbirds love this as well. Hummingbirds dart between the pink salvia and the bee balm.
Thai basil: I’ve seen some small butterflies and moths (and caterpillars) on these flowers.
Butterfly host and nectar plantsCone flowers: Butterflies always visit these.
Joe Pye weed: Butterflies love to drink from Joe Pye flowers. Joe Pye weed gets really tall and floppy unless you get the dwarf varieties.
Monarch on Joe Pye weedWe planted some other things that weren’t as awesome as we expected:
Parsley: parsley is a host plant for swallowtails, but the swallowtail caterpillars definitely opted for the rue over the parsley, at least this year. I didn’t find any caterpillars on the parsley, and found at least a dozen on the rue.
I guess the parsley is the only one :-). We have lots of other nectar flowers — brown-eyed Susans, Mexican blanket flowers, some other stuff I can’t remember the names of — but the ones I listed above were definitely the most successful.
If you can identify any of the caterpillars in the catalog, please let me know! I think most of them are probably moths, but I don’t have a good ID book.
Earlier in the year, I wrote multiple times about our different strategies for killing grass to build a flower bed. Since then I’ve blogged pictures from the garden, from reading,writing, butterfly-watching, and blogging under our dogwood tree, and photographs of the butterflies and caterpillars who live in the small ecosystem we helped create.
I realized though, that since my April post about building a flower bed, when we were still in the process of killing grass, laying out cardboard, and shoveling mulch, I never brought it back around to show the garden in its full summer glory, with before and after pictures. So here goes (I don’t have before and afters from the same angle, but hopefully you’ll be able to see the difference):
Before:
Building the bed
Now:
Morning flower bed
Monarch on Joe Pye Weed
Basil forest
Flowers in the morning
Monarch caterpillar
Garden in fog
Monarch chrysalis
Caterpillar feet
Monarch on Joe Pye weed
Parsley flowers
Reading under the dogwood
I wanted an herb garden and a butterfly garden, now we have both butterflies and herbs. We’ve made endless batches of pesto and basil gin smashes.
The kids and I check for caterpillars and chrysalises every day. At last count we have about 8 monarch caterpillars and 10 swallowtail caterpillars, and we think we found a monarch chrysalis in progress yesterday in the rue bush. All the work has paid off :-).
Butterfly Mind 