Eleven days ago, I shared a photograph of a chrysalis I found dangling in the compost. I’ve been checking it every day. Yesterday, the green sheath turned clear, and I could see the butterfly’s black and orange wings inside.
Today, I ate lunch perched on top of our deck table like I usually do when the weather is nice. The crickets were back at it with the chirping after their silence this morning in the fog. The oak has a few fully red leaves now. I only remember it going straight to brown in the past; I don’t remember it stopping through red on the way. Either the summer rains made a big difference this year, or it goes quick and I miss the red every year, or I’ve just not paid close enough attention. But this year there are glossy ruby-red leaves, and they’re beautiful.
The sun was hot on my shoulder; it was too warm for the jeans and tee-shirt I wore. The more I sat while I ate, the more things I saw that I wanted to do on my lunch break: fill the bird feeders, water the salvias and blanketflowers I transplanted, check on the chrysalis. When I’d set my plate down after eating, the wind lifted. It added a beautiful shushing to the air as it rippled through the oak leaves on the tree. I decided grab my camera and check on the chrysalis.
When I hiked up to the top of the hill, I saw the freshly emerged butterfly drying its wings a few inches from its empty chrysalis. An hour in either direction, and I might have missed it.
Empty monarch chrysalis on compost heapNew monarch butterfly
The sky is overcast and all I want to do is sleep. Yesterday, I was in the garden from 7:30 to noon, breaking only for a peanut butter and banana smoothie, then again in the afternoon, after running to the hardware store to buy dirt to fill in all the holes I’d made.
Unlike other gardening days, when I’ll listen to podcasts I’ve saved up for the occasion, I didn’t plug in while I worked yesterday. I listened to wind in the leaves and birdsong, the scrape of the shovel in gritty and rocky soil, the metallic schwiff of shears as I cut back yarrow and salvia. I felt the breeze on my ears and relaxed into the quiet of the gray Sunday morning. I watched a worm wriggle on top of the mulch when I unearthed it to make a hole for a transplanted yarrow.
I arranged and rearranged the still-potted purple asters and deep red chrysanthemums I’d bought in the rain on Saturday. I couldn’t figure out where I wanted them. I placed the potted mounds in the flower bed, then walked out to the street to see how they looked, moved them, walked out to the street again, and decided I needed to cut back and tear out a bunch of other stuff to make it work. I moved yarrows from front to back, salvias from left to right, agastaches and lantanas, verbenas and veronicas from right to left, then watered them all in under low, looks-like-rain clouds. I moved yard waste and an old rotting chair to the curb.
At the end, when I finally stopped because I just couldn’t do any more, I took a pumpkin muffin out on the porch and sat on the table so I could look out over the garden and observe the fruits of my labor. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked down to see a shimmering, emerald hummingbird in the scarlet salvia. It zipped from flower to flower, abuzz with energy. I watched it until it drank its fill and flew away, a glittering green gem with wings.
Today, my body is worn out. I went for a swim that didn’t even register on my Fitbit because I moved so slowly. I am surprised I managed to get out of bed and over to the pool, but my body was sore and the water sounded nice to stretch out in, and it was.
Now I have to figure out how to turn my brain on for work. Coffee is helping. The cat that just laid down on my arms and the gloomy sky are not.
The messier the garden gets with dried out perennials long past the point of being attractive, the more likely I am to find monarch chrysalises in the debris. I mowed earlier this week in the shadows of the late day, and when I pushed the mower past the compost pile, I saw a chrysalis hanging off a desiccated, composting stem. I saw one hanging from the underside of the birdbath bowl. There’s one hanging off an upright post on the stair railing. There were three hanging from tomato cages stored on their sides under the porch stairs.
This time of year, I become desperate to tidy the garden. The beds that were so lush and green in the spring and summer now look ramshackle and abandoned. The once vibrant rudbeckia, with its emerald foliage and sunshine yellow flowers, looks like someone took a blowtorch to its blossoms; black stems stand in a sea of brown-spotted, crispy leaves. The goldenrod is no longer grassy-green and gold, tall, and swaying in the breeze, and the shasta daisies no longer bursts of dazzling white on proud stems. Instead, the two have fallen over, exhausted from reaching for the sun, and are now tangled up together in a thicket of brown brush. The underleaves of the yarrow and lavender are musty silver-black instead of the fresh silver-green of spring, and the Joe Pye weed, which now reaches my shoulders, looks like the remanants of flower stems that have been left in a vase too long: the bottom leaves are rotting, and the stalks a dusty brown.
Once the flowers are done, and their petals curl to crispies, the plants transition to making seeds. It’s not a pretty process. I know this, and yet I struggle every year. I want to cut things back because I can’t stand the mess, but I also want to leave it because the joy of my garden is not just the greenery and pretty flowers, it’s that it surrounds our house with a little wildlife preserve. I garden because I like the birds and the insects, the chipmunks and bunnies and squirrels. I love watching them all, and I am delighted that they come hang out in our yard. The garden is intentionally full of botanicals for butterflies and birds because they’re what’s interesting about plants to me: I don’t want a sterile garden that just has pretty flowers, I want a garden that invites all the creatures.
This time of year, when the garden is its messiest, and every instinct in me screams to clean it up, is harvest time for the birds, and shelter time for the work caterpillars need to do. As soon as I think I can’t take it anymore, and I’m ready to cut it all down, a goldfinch will land on a crunchy echinacea cone and start eating the seeds. It’ll bob there, a burst of happy yellow brightness atop the black stem, and I decide, okay, I can leave the echinacea a little longer. But just the echinacea. Everything else must go.
Then I mow the lawn and see a chrysalis on the compost pile. I remember the chrysalises under the stairs, under the birdbath, in the nepeta and pineapple sage, the rue and the Russian sage last year. I look across the swaths of spent stems and brown withered leaves in the garden, and I know there are likely a dozen chrysalises tucked away in that mess. And I know I won’t cut it back. I can’t bear to. What if I kill a poor caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly?
I set today aside to garden and to tidy at least some stuff so I don’t have as much work to do in spring. I can cut some stuff back and still leave plenty for the animals. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s raining. Maybe it’ll ease up and I can take advantage of the hydration to put some stuff in the ground instead of cutting stuff back. I’ve been wanting mums and a couple of shrubs…
My garden has exploded in flowers. I sowed sunflower seeds for the first time in several years, and I feel joy every time I look out the window to see their lemony yellow petals and their happy faces turning toward the sun. As the sunflowers bloom, so do all of the coneflowers — black eyed Susans, echinacea, white coneflowers, and all the other colors we have in the garden.
I’ve been trying all week to get photos, but every time I’ve gone out, the sun was too harsh and all my photographs were too contrasty and glarey. I got one photo of the sunflowers and a blue sky, but most of the other photos weren’t great. Yesterday I took advantage of overcast skies to try to get some shots that show off the colors and profusion of blooms. July is hot, but the flowers are pretty.
Lemon queen sunflowersRudbeckia with calamint, white coneflowers, allium, and Russian sageMagenta coneflowersBack gardenFirst orange cosmo from seeds I sowed a while back. I’ve been waiting ages for them to finally bloom.White coneflowersGoldenrod beginning to bloomLemon petalsRudbeckiaCommon milkweedSunflowers and prairie flowersHydrangea and prairie flowersFrom the prairie gardenEchinaceaLemon queens and blue sky
Last week was rain, rain, every day. On Friday, the skies didn’t clear, but the rain did stop, and I was able to sneak in a mow before the rain began again. Saturday, it finally cleared. I spent the morning pulling weeds and clearing the jungle of rhubarb that grew between our wild, gangly forsythia and our neighbor’s fence. Then I got out my camera and snapped some shots. My new passionflower is blooming, and coneflowers are beginning to open up. The milkweed I planted from seed two years ago is brilliant orange and thriving. We’ve got bees galore right now. No caterpillars yet.
Passionflower.Lavender.Agastache.Milkweed and bee.Bee carrying pollen.Alium bud.Alium about to bloom.Bee on lavender.Hydrangea leaf.Blanketflower.Moonbeam coreopsisBirdbath with cosmos, coreopsis, and salvia; waiting for the liatris to bloom.Milkweed ready for caterpillars.
Sadly, my gardening vacation is at its end. It’s Sunday morning. My body is wrenched to the side to type this, my lap board and laptop tilted at 45 degrees due to one side being propped on the chair’s arm, all because a cat is sleeping in my lap and I don’t want to disturb her. I listen to birds chirp, and I watch the feeder swing in the wind. I’m soaking it all in before I head back to work tomorrow.
I planted bulbs in October: tulips and daffodils. I’ve never planted bulbs before. I usually don’t have any gardening energy left in the fall, but for years I’ve been saying I wanted to plant bulbs, and last year I finally followed through. And the flowers are emerging! I’m so excited to see that they actually worked. Plants are amazing. It was totally worth what probably amounted to ten minutes of planting time once I bought the bulbs. I can’t believe it took me so long.
Everything is cut back and pruned. The flower beds are all mulched. I’ve set a daily reminder to water the flower baskets. It looks like we’ve got some warm days coming up this week. I can’t wait to sit on the back porch on my lunch break and watch the garden grow.
Back hill, mulchedBundled brush to dispose ofEnd of the mulch pile and cut back grass patchMy front reading bedNew tulips under the dogwoodRose bed and new daffodilsFront beds, mulchedMy front reading bed
Butterfly Mind 