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.
Don’t let anyone tell you words don’t have power. When my husband and I shopped for toilets recently, I could not stop giggling at the language used for selling what we all want most from a toilet: to hide the evidence. More than that, our trip to Home Depot showed me that having a gift with words doesn’t always mean writing novels. You can name paint chips. You can classify laminate flooring.
You can market toilets.
VorMax for maximum vortex flushing
The Optum™ VorMax™ box needs to be read in a booming, between-plays hockey arena voice, with flashing disco lights.
VorMax™ flushing system delivers a POWERFUL stream of water that SCOURS the ENTIRE bowl.
That’s a potent sentence, even without the hockey voice. It conjures images of a high-velocity, unstoppablevortex of clean, clear water extracting everything in its path, like a movie whirlpool that’s so powerful it sucks ships to the bottom of the sea.
I puzzled a bit over the “dirt” word choice for the CleanCurve™ Rim, though. Do people usually have dirt in their toilet bowls? Perhaps that was just thrown in to draw attention away from the more graphic word in the sentence: “buildup.”
A whole bucket of golf balls? In a single flush?
The marketing on this one makes me want to buy the toilet just to try to flush golf balls. It also made me laugh at the cleverness of conveying “ewww” invormation in such a sterile way. Look how white! Look how clean! Look at the sparkle in the “Fight stains with Everclean®” image! Even though it’s not golf balls you’ll be flushing, your toilet can look like this, too.
The next one is my very favorite, though.
AquaPiston: it’s a locomotive in there
This toilet is going to work hard for you. You’re going to open up the tank and it’s going to be like a train locomotive, with pistons pumping, and water sucking, and the toilet bowl flushing with such force it might pull tissues out of the box and down into the vortex if you’re not careful.
I can’t remember which toilet we ultimately ended up buying, but I had a lot of fun shopping for it.
I sure would love to see all the jokes the marketing teams wrote when describing the glories of their toilets.
I started reading the US in three books per state in January of 2014, nearly three years ago. I just finished reading Kansas, the 17th of 51 states (and the District of Columbia).
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.
This summer has been brutally hot. The past few times we’ve gone to Claytor Lake to sail, there has been a burning sun and no wind.
This morning, though, it was different. At 7:00 AM, my husband and I swung out of the driveway, pulling our little wooden yawl behind the car. Our coffee swirled in ceramic mugs in the cup holders. We had the windows down and the air conditioning off.
We arrived at the lake so early, there was nobody at the ranger station to collect our launch fee. In the vast parking lot that usually swarms with jet-skis, motor boats, pick-up trucks, glittery trailers to match glittery speedboats, and boaters toting towels and coolers, there was grey mist and stillness. We had the boat ramp to ourselves. In the normally buzzing lot were two empty trailers, zero people, and acres of deserted asphalt.
When we stepped out of the car, we both shivered in the morning air, then grabbed our sweatshirts and pulled them over our heads.
Sweatshirt and bare feet
I’m a sucker for autumn. It might be my favorite season. To combine autumn (the best season) with morning (the best time of day) and water (the best place to be) is pretty much heaven to me. It’s cool, it’s quiet, the sounds are gentle, the scents are fresh.
Without boats zipping back and forth, without the buzz of engines and radios, without wakes to tumble our little boat, without the summer activity that usually accompanies a trip to the lake, we were able to glide silently through the water with a light wind in our sail. We made no wake.
Invisible path off the stern
We sailed towards a flock of small birds — maybe swallows? — that swooped and swirled within feet of the water’s surface, ignoring us in our quiet approach. We heard the sploosh of fish jumping. We skimmed along, listening to the splish of fresh water against our wooden hull.
I’m not sure I could have asked for a better beginning to autumn, kicking it off with an early morning sail, where not only did we have a gentle breeze and comfortable, overcast skies, but we wore swimsuits, flip flops, and sweatshirts.
Swimsuits. Flip flops. Sweatshirts.
This may be my new favorite combination of clothing.
On my recent trip to Whistler, British Columbia, I attempted to pack minimally. I reduced shoes to 4 pairs — boots, Vans, flip flops, and running shoes — and I left my camera at home.
That last was a big mistake. (As were the running shoes, but we don’t need to talk about that).
I ultimately ended up not going outside very much while in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. Instead of taking time off to go enjoy the gorgeous mountains and Pacific rain forest, I worked. I know, dumb, right? Now that I see everyone else’s photographs from their hikes, gondola rides, and ziplining, all I can think is, What was I thinking?!
I did go for a brief walk alone on a quest for some fresh air and quiet time, and I was awed by the lushness of the Pacific Northwest. It is beautiful there. I am promising myself now that when we go back next year, I will take my camera as incentive to get myself outside to enjoy it. For now, here are some shots from my phone.
Butterfly Mind 