Tiny, But Mighty, Pollinators

It's Pollinator Week, so it seems like a perfect time to write about pollinators.  Little pollinators, to be more specific.

The first spring after we moved into The Land of the Giant Trees, small white flowers with yellow centers appeared in relative abundance around the yard.  Although I was pretty sure these were some sort of fleabane (Erigeron sp.), I wasn't sure which one.

"Are they useful for pollinators?" Prairie Boy kept asking, "Because they look rather weedy."  The question amused and irritated me.  We have all been brainwashed to think that almost any plant that grows without being purchased from somewhere is a "weed".  I'm trying hard to uproot this attitude from my own psyche, but it's well established and deeply rooted, even for me.  

Despite my amusement about Prairie Boy's question, I had trouble answering it.  My instinct was to say yes, the fleabane was useful for pollinators since these plants were native, but I honestly wasn't seeing much action on the flowers.  No honey bees.  No bumble bees.  No butterflies.  (Although that last observation wasn't really fair, since we weren't seeing any butterflies anywhere.)

Surely SOMETHING was using the fleabane!

It seemed like a good idea to identify which fleabane we had.  It turned out to be Philadelphia Fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus), a biennual. Now I could learn more about the plant and know what to expect from it in future years.

I started watching the blooms more closely...and I started noticing quite a bit of activity on the them.  However, almost all the visitors were tiny little insects that I literally couldn't see from very far away.  No wonder it didn't look like there was much activity on the fleabane until I started looking closely!  

The aster-like flowers of Philadelphia Fleabane are relatively small, about 3/4-1" in diameter, and most of the insects were MUCH smaller than the flowers.  In fact, many were so small that I had trouble identifying them much beyond "flying insect" with just my eyes.  As the days and weeks went by, though, it was obvious these tiny animals were, in fact, pollinators - and they were excellent pollinators at that.  The flowers developed into healthy seed heads in short order.

Eventually I started using my camera to focus on the tiny pollinators of Philadelphia Fleabane and other small flowers, trying to learn the identify of these minuscule creatures.  It's an amazing world that exists literally right alongside us - and yet most of us are completely unaware of these important little creatures who live inches from us.

As I explored this minute world further, I found a varied cast of characters.  Not only were there pollinators, but there were predators and parasitoids and even passers-by, who just seemed to be stopping in the neighborhood for a rest and a quiet "think".

For example, in the photo above, there is a Georgia Mason Bee (Osmia georgica) in the middle of the photo.  There is also a Club-horned Wasp (Sapyga centrata) in the upper left, a Harvestman (a.k.a. Daddy Longlegs) below that, a Crab Spider on the bloom just below and to the right of the mason bee, a tiny wasp about to land on that same bloom, and some other insect hiding on the other side of that blossom that I can't quite make out.  Any of these insects can be acting as pollinators as they move across the flowers, although the mason bee and the wasp are the ones we would traditionally categorize that way.  

Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) is another native plant that I didn't see pollinators using until I started looking more closely - and with a camera.  This member of the iris family has beautiful blue, but tiny, flowers.  They average about 1/2" in diameter.

In the photo above, a small Blue-eyed Grass flower is being pollinated by a tiny sweat bee (Lasioglossum sp.).....

and, in this second photo, another small Blue-eyed Grass flower is being pollinated by a tiny Thin-lined Calligrapher (Toxomerus boscii), a syrphid fly which is not only a pollinator as an adult, but a fierce aphid predator in its larval stage.

One of our native spireas, Meadowsweet (Spiraea alba), is another plant whose small flowers often attract small pollinators to them.  Each individual Meadowsweet flower is less than 1/4" across, although these small flowers are clustered in much larger, showy panicles.

It's easy for us to see the Emerald Flower Scarab (Trichiotinus lunulatus) pollinating the Meadowsweet flowers above, but the tiny, black Tumbling Flower Beetle (Mordella sp.) just beside it is also a potent pollinator, despite the fact that this little creature measures only about 1/4", just like each individual Meadowsweet flower it visits.

Goldenrods are yet another example of plants with showy, gorgeous blooms...that actually consist of tiny individual flowers.  They often attract tiny pollinators, too.

Here is a cloud of tiny sweat bees (Lasioglossum sp.) pollinating the flowers on Wreath Goldenrod (Solidago caesia) last October. Lasioglossum bees are fairly common tiny, but mighty, pollinators.

I was taught about the role of insects in pollination by learning about the Western Honey Bee, (Apis mellifera) which is actually a fairly large bee.  I'm not a gambler, but I'd be willing to place a good-sized bet that you learned about pollination as a function of the European honey bee, too.  Did you realize that honey bees are not native in North America, and that many folks consider them an invasive species?!  

So how did the plants on this continent get pollinated before Europeans brought honey bees over with them?  Our native pollinators, that's how, and many of these native pollinators are TINY.  Our native pollinators evolved with our native plants to do the job that needed to be done, and they are exceptionally good at doing their job. 

Check your flowers this summer.  Look past the "giant" bumble bees and the "large" honey bees for the smaller pollinators.   Then take a moment to let yourself get lost in wonder at the Lilliputian worlds all around us. It's pretty close to magic for me. 

  

 

 

Then and Now: A Living Explosion

"The yard is alive, with the sound of music!  With songs that've been sung for a million years...."  (My deepest apologies to Rodgers & Hammerstein for that abysmal rewording of their song.)

The yard IS alive, now, but when we moved in, it was quiet and boring.  Here's a summary of our journey so far....

THEN:    

    When we moved to southeast Virginia in fall 2019, our "new" yard challenged us. 

    The Prairie Boy was overwhelmed by the trees, 100+' giants that dwarfed the prairie trees he grew up with.  He likes to see the horizon, and you basically can't do that when you are surrounded by giant trees.  The yard was an enigma to him.

    The Druid was excited about having real, live, BIG trees in her everyday life again, having a true forest garden.  Her elementary school days had been spent in the eastern deciduous woodlands and she missed the ambiance and the ecosystem.

    However, the yard has ended up stymying both the Druid and the Prairie Boy.  These weren't just tall trees, these were TALL trees.  The neighbors told many tales of trees falling unexpectedly and hitting houses, so every time the wind blew, a sense of uncertainty swept in as well.

    There were remnants of prior landscaping in the yard, but they were truly remnants:  solo large shrubs, deer pruned and lonely, unsupported by companions and some seemingly placed almost at random.  In the spring, daffodils emerged and bloomed beautifully, but there were no flower beds, there was no lawn, and there was little discernible landscape design of any sort.

    Making matters even less promising, the vast majority of the huge shrubs were non-natives:  Chindo Viburnum, Camellias, Burford Hollies, Little Leaf Hollies, evergreen Azaleas, (small) Boxwoods, and a huge Rhododendron.  For native shrubs, there were a couple large Yaupon Hollies, planted way too close to the old greenhouse wall, and 3 Yellow Anise Shrubs.  Neither of these species are technically native to southeast Virginia, but at least they were "near natives".  There were no true native shrubs.

    As far as the "forest floor" was concerned, the yard had a lot of Japanese Stiltgrass and other non-native weeds, a few huge clumps of old fescue, a bit of Poison Ivy, and not much else besides the springtime daffodils and summer snowflakes.

    How in the world could we bring this space to life?  How could we create cohesion, and even beauty, in this struggling and rather awkward space?  In the spring of 2020, shown in the photo above, our newly acquired yard felt barren, despite the towering 100' tall trees that graced it.  We'd been feeding birds all winter, but there was precious little other wildlife to be found:  a skink or two, squirrels (of course), and honeybees from neighbors' hives, but almost no native insects.  That summer we had an Eastern Ratsnake show up one day, only to be found dead in the neighbor's driveway not long after.  A Leopard Frog made a brief appearance, as did a toad or two.  That was about it.

   I started pulling out the Japanese Stiltgrass the first summer, sitting directly on the ground, clearing out that invasive annual a few square feet at a time.  I'd researched stiltgrass and I'd learned that it didn't bloom and set seed until late summer or fall, but at that point it seeded prolifically;  I was determined to avoid new seed falling in as large an area as possible.  As I sat on the ground working, I got to know our yard "up close and personal".  

For example, in the photo above, you can see the bloom of a Naked-Flowered Tick-trefoil and a sedge, both of which are native, interspersed with the invasive non-native Japanese Stiltgrass, which has the broader leaves.  These particular native plants aren't showy, but the native insects need and use them. 

    I found a few really nice surprises:  several Striped Wintergreen plants (two are shown above), Southern Adder's Tongue, a few native tree and shrub seedlings, 2 stunted Mayapple leaves,  2 or 3 single Bloodroot leaves, and some nice Partridgeberry vines.   Mostly, though, I found a lot of non-natives, some of which were problematic and a few of which were outright invasive.

    Most disturbingly, I found almost no life in the leaf litter.  We'd left the leaves on the ground in the fall, so we did have leaf litter itself, but despite hours of sitting on the ground, all I saw that summer were a few little black crickets.

NOW: 

    It's been 4 years since that first daunting summer.  The Japanese stiltgrass still shows up a little, but it's easily pulled as I meander in the yard.  I've moved on to actively extracting Asiatic Hawkweed, fescue clumps, and Ground Ivy.  Ajuga is on my radar screen.  We've left the leaves every year and a healthy leaf litter has started to develop, feeding and protecting the soil, as well as providing habitat for a myriad of little animals.

 We've established a series of paths in the front yard, outlining them with branches from the tree trimming that has occurred.  We've left a large log and several small sections of logs,  forming an impromptu "jungle gym" for our grandsons in the front yard.  These have become favorite seats for me, as well.  In the back yard, we have a brush pile that the birds and the skinks find irresistible.

    For the most part over these intervening growing seasons, I've welcomed whatever native plants wanted to show up in the yard, relocating a few of them, but generally just observing and enjoying.  Because we have many seedlings sprouting, I can tell which plants are the birds' favorites, species like Spicebush, Wax Myrtle, and Black Cherry.  We've also planted a lot of native plants:  ferns, Columbine, Beautyberry, Viburnums, Goldenrod, Mayapples, and Bloodroot, just to name a few.

    We fight the deer...and the voles...and even, for a brief time last spring, a groundhog.  The deer have kept our newly planted plants undersized, but with judicious and regular use of deer repellants, we're finally seeing some growth.  Last spring the voles set us back on our heels for a while, but they haven't been as bad this year.

    Most excitingly, our yard has come alive with animal life.  These days I hear bird song all day long from a variety of species, including Brown Thrashers like the one shown above.   Fireflies twinkle at night.  

Butterflies flit through the air.  During the summer, I see Zebra Swallowtails and Eastern Tiger Swallowtails almost every day, but to get both in the same photo last summer felt like a real coup!  

In the leaf litter, there are now millipedes (like the one in the photo above), as well as snails and centipedes and roly-polies and firefly larvae and a gazillion ants and ...and ....and crickets, too, of course.  Moths have FINALLY appeared, especially the drab little leaf litter moths that are so incredibly important as food for many other animals.  

Solitary native bees, like this Georgia Mason Bee (Osmia georgica), visit our flowers and nest in the yard, as do a variety of solitary wasps who feed their young with paralyzed spiders or crickets or caterpillars or beetle larvae, depending on the species, helping to keep those populations in balance.

    So far this spring, we've had the parent birds of 10 different species bring their young to our feeders, including Carolina Wrens, Hairy Woodpeckers, and Brown Thrashers.  The photo above is of a father Downy Woodpecker feeding his daughter last spring.

    Pileated woodpeckers forage regularly on the stumps and the decomposing wood logs lining our paths.  

, 

    We have an untold number of Broad-headed Skinks in the yard, including this pair who had set themselves up in a prime location at the base of a dead tree.  Last summer, I also saw a Little Brown Skink, a species that lives entirely in the leaf litter.

    Butterfly numbers and species have increased, including this Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) from last August, but greedily I would love to see even more.  I'm hoping that my increasing numbers of native flowers and host plants will bring them in - and help raise up new generations of lepidopterans.

    Most excitingly, this spring we've now seen TWO Eastern Ratsnakes, a big one and a little one.  Presumably they are why the voles are less of a problem this year!

    I still feel like the yard's design is far from optimal, but I'm continuing to work on it, aiming for beauty and cohesion as well as for increasingly healthy native plant and animal populations.

    

Ours may not be the most classically beautiful yard in the neighborhood, but it's rapidly becoming a most vibrant one, our own fascinating wildlife preserve.    

    

Kids in Nature

Richard Louv's important book, Last Child in the Woods, was written in 2008 and brought attention to the reality that few children actually get to spend much time playing freely outdoors.   It sparked a subset of parents and other adults who have been trying to encourage families to get their kids outdoors in nature.  Unfortunately, it's seemed (from the outside, at least) like a bit of a slog, fighting through the mud that is the way our society is currently set up - barren yards full of chemicalized lawn and non-native plants, schedules jammed with activities that require all of our highly scheduled time and attention, parks given over to sports' fields rather than natural areas, and a general distrust of free time as "unproductive", the ultimate sin in the U.S.

When I was in elementary school, I spent days...weeks... months exploring the woods and creek near our home in College Park, Maryland.  There were tadpoles and crayfish to try to catch, minnows and frogs to watch, and many, many special places where my imagination could run wild.  The holly glade magically hid me, the tiny islands became my kingdoms, the paths (deer?) became trails leading me to new lands.....  When we moved to Massachusetts, I continued playing in the woods but I was getting a bit older.  Now I had a favorite log on a hillside overlooking a pond where my best friend and I would go after school to talk and just generally try to figure out life.  I led a band of neighborhood kids in catching toads and keeping them, naming them and "training" them to race in sandbox toad races such as high jump, long jump, and speed or distance trials.  (What can I say?  I knew I'd never have a horse;  maybe this was scratching that itch!)

In junior high, in the Panama Canal Zone, I tried my hand at gardening (I was awful at it) and explored the sea shore as much as I could, bringing home hermit crabs and other sea creatures to form my own attempt at a personal zoo.  Sadly, coming home with me was generally a death sentence for the poor animals, but I tried my best to provide good habitat and food for them.  Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, which my maternal uncle had introduced to me, was one of my favorite books - and a real inspiration.  More mundanely, I collected shells, too.  A lot of shells, which I carefully worked to identify and which I housed in cigar boxes, grouped by "type": moon shells, pen shells, scallops, whelks, cowries, etc.  I wanted so badly to be a marine biologist...but our next move was to Kansas and I didn't know any marine biologists.  How did you actually make a living as a marine biologist?  My courage and my imagination failed me in figuring out how to step in that direction, and life soon led me in other directions.

All of this is to say that playing outside, freely and with little oversight, was incredibly important to me and was influential in forming the person I became.  Greg and I were able to give our kids a taste of that freedom in the natural world, too, when they were in late elementary and middle school.

And now we're trying to give the gift of free play in nature to our grandsons as well.

It's a goal that seems to get harder with each generation.  If my parents worried about where I was while I was gone for most of each day, playing in the woods, I was unaware of it, and the wild area was right down the street from where we lived.  I walked there.  When our kids were playing outdoors, we lived in farm country and they were able to ramble through a wooded draw behind our house and through a neighbor's cow pasture.

Where do kids play now?  There are few natural areas left where they can roam and wander at will.  There's so much fear about "danger" that parents actually get prosecuted for letting their children roam freely.  (Or, at least, that's the story we're told.)

So I'm working to make our personal landscape an interesting natural area for our grandsons to explore and play in.  I've come across a wonderful book by Nancy Striniste, Nature Play at Home, which has a plethora of great ideas for changing your yard from bland to fascinating.   I highly recommend it if the topic interests you at all.

When dead wood was trimmed out of our trees last month, I had the tree service leave the major branches and trunks.  One of the things I've done with that dead wood is create play areas for the boys in our yard.

Good habitat for people AND animals.

Even their dad has gotten in on the action!

Bare feet are the norm for the boys, not the exception.  In fact, it's hard now to get them to wear shoes, even in cold weather.  Talk about "grounding"!

And imaginations run wild.

My heart truly swelled with happiness and pride the day that the boys came outside, on their own, with notebooks, guidebooks, binoculars, and pencils to "study nature".

They are not always successful in their endeavors - patience was not their strong suit as Connor tried to entice birds to eat out of his hand.  But that's part of the learning.

Even meal times have an element of outside nature for all of us, as we watch our bird feeders from the table on the back porch.  The boys have become excellent birders.  For example, it was our older grandson who first noticed the immature male Baltimore oriole feeding on the bark butter feeder a few weeks ago.  I'm not sure I wouldn't have quickly glanced at the bird and dismissed it as the pine warbler that had been frequently visiting.  I never expected a Baltimore oriole in January!

In other interactions with animals, we and the boys watch fireflies at night in the summer - last summer we noticed 3 different waves of them: one in April, one in mid summer, and one in early fall.  The April fireflies seem to stay 30' or more above the ground.  I've even found the firefly larvae occasionally as I weed.  

We planted around 30 swamp milkweed last spring and we watched for monarch caterpillars all summer long;  we did find a few and we're hoping for more next summer.  Our plants are still young.  We've found large numbers of black swallowtail caterpillars on parsley, enough that we've had to hit the grocery store for organic parsley when the hungry hordes decimated the plants they were on.

Late this summer, a box turtle wandered through the front yard - the first one I've seen in our yard in 2 years.  We see skinks and a few baby toads.  The boys haven't shown any interest in toad races yet, though! 

I hope we're building happy memories for them, strongly grounded in the natural world, that will last the boys for a lifetime.  Most importantly, I hope we're helping to create a new generation that cares enough about the Earth to help care for it in the future.

A New Home, A New Yard, A New Challenge.....

 It's been almost 3 years since I last posted to this blog, for which I apologize.  Life has presented challenges for me, personally, during that time, as it has for all of us around the world.

We moved from Florida to southeast Virginia in August 2019, so I had to leave my Gulf Coast garden behind for others to tend and begin a new garden here in the Williamsburg area.  This is proving to be a real challenge.

For the first time in many years of gardening, I find myself floundering, even with the basic thoughts of what I want to do in this yard.  While I love trees and woodlands, I'm unsure how to proceed in our secondary growth, eastern deciduous forested yard.  My goals seem strong, yet confusingly nebulous:  use native plants and improve the habitat, while designing a yard that encourages others to WANT a native landscape and that fits in with the somewhat traditional neighborhood we live in.

This photo was taken today from the front of our house, looking towards the street.  I've started incorporating fallen wood and wood from having our trees trimmed, but that's a post for another time.  As always, during the winter, you can see the "bones" (which are rather bare), but there are perennials and ferns moving in...

...as you can see from this photo, taken from the front porch taken in mid October.  So far, however, it's all very haphazard.

So, to give you an outline:  our yard is 2/3 acre, with 100' tall deciduous trees and understory trees.  The only shrubs present were planted by prior owners and are almost exclusively non-native ornamentals, while the ground layer was dominated by Japanese stilt grass and assorted other non-native weedy plants when we moved in.

I have spent the last 2 summers learning about and observing our yard.  Weeding has been my primary activity, pulling out stilt grass and other weeds like false strawberry, oriental hawksbeard, and ground ivy. While I've weeded, I've watched to see what plants I find buried within the weeds and seeding in.  There have been some fun finds along the way:

striped wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata),

cranefly orchid (Tipularia discolor),

cutleaf grape fern (Sceptridium dissectum), 

and southern adder's tongue (Ophioglossum pycnostichum).  None of these plants are large or showy, but all 4 of these species are dependent on mycorrhizae in the soil, which tickles me because it means that our soil still has some serious life in it and is, presumably, fairly healthy.

Moss covers many areas of the soil - and I have quickly learned that it is a wonderful seedbed for other plants, desirable and otherwise.

Serendipitously, I am finding seedlings of wax myrtle (Morella cerifera), spicebush (Lindera benzoin), and a few perennials like old field aster (Symphotrichum pilosum), mist flower (Conoclinium coelestinum) and golden ragwort (Packera aurea), a healthy clump of which showed up on its own.

Above is a clump of aster that self seeded into the front bed by our walkway.  I think it's an old field aster, but I'm not completely sure, since this one is taller and airier than the others.  That could, of course, simply be due to higher levels of shade.  If you look closely, you can see some mist flower in front of it - they make a nice combination, I think, blooming at essentially the same time.  The aster is much too large for this spot, though, and will be moved this spring.  I'm not sure if I'll be moving the mist flower along with it.

Several different kinds of ferns have shown up in the yard as well, including the Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) you see to the left here, sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), and others that I'm still leery of naming with any certainty.

Now that I'm ready to change from focusing on weeding and discovery to planning and planting, I'm stuck on dead center.  The best I've come up with so far is to create a path through a "woodland garden", then plant the garden alongside it that will make the path enjoyable.  I also dearly want some sort of screen between the front of the house and the road. 

Meanwhile, I'm "leaving the leaves" and hoping to encourage a healthier soil microbiome and more invertebrate life.  So far I've seen few invertebrates at ground level, which worries me.

So wish me luck, please.  On this project, I can use all the luck and good wishes that I can get!

And help me, please, to keep perspective about my fellow "gardeners" here: the deer, the voles, and the Asiatic garden beetles.  They, too, are an integral part of the challenge of gardening in this beautiful area.

At least they don't seem to like ferns.

  

Insects Using Gaillardia in My Gardens

Another staple of my (native) pollinator plants is Indian blanket or Gaillardia, Gaillardia pulchella to be precise.   This widespread, short-lived perennial blooms for months and months;  the colorful blossoms almost always seem to have some sort of insect on them. 

Interestingly, though, as I went through my photos, the variety of insects utilizing Gaillardia was not as great as it was for fogfruit.  For 2018, I have photos of only 6 different species using Gaillardia in my gardens. 

By far the most frequent visitor to my Indian blanket flowers was Poey's Furrow Bee (Halictus poeyi), one of the small, somewhat nondescript, native bees. 

I saw this little bee a lot, from early June through the end of October, and it could well have been present before or after I have it documented photographically.  As I understand it, the hook on the back, lower corner of the head, which you can see in this photo, is "diagnostic" of this species.  Even in photographs, though, it can be hard to see this feature due to the diminutive size of this bee and the fact that it tends to round its back and tuck its head a bit as it feeds.

This is typical of what I usually see, even through the camera lens, when looking at Poey's Furrow Bee.

Throughout the summer months, the Brown-winged Striped Sweat Bees (Agapostemon splendens) visited regularly.  I love these vivid little green jewels.  The females are solid green, while the males have black and yellow striped abdomens and a green "jacket" on the thorax. 

In the photo above, the male is probably more interested in the female than in the flower.

Here is a closer view of a different female, giving you a bit more of a feel for the vivid coloration of these little sweethearts.  What a disappointment the common name of this bee is - "Brown-Winged Striped Sweat Bee".  The "A. splendens" of the Latin name much more closely describes how I feel about them!

An insect that I've seen on several different plants around the yard, this Camouflaged Looper, a.k.a. the caterpillar of the Wavy Emerald Moth (Synchlora aerata), looks a bit different depending on which bloom it's raiding for its wardrobe.

What looks like a large, brightly colored piece of debris hanging from the underside of the flower is, in fact, the caterpillar with bits of petal attached.   

Yes, the bloom this little guy raided looks rather tattered, but I personally think it's well worth the less than perfect blossom to see how the flower finery has been used!  In 2018, I photographed camouflaged loopers on Gaillardia blooms on June 23 and again on August 5.

Getting back to native bees, one of my favorite groups is the leafcutter bees.   Females in this group are easy to recognize because they carry pollen in hairs on the underside of their abdomen, giving them a potbellied appearance.

This cute little female (Megachile sp.) demonstrates that trait perfectly.

The only insect I photographed utilizing something besides the bloom of Gaillardia was this paper wasp, which I saw on July 18th.

Truthfully, I don't know if I just didn't notice other insects on the stems and leaves, or if few insects actually utilize the foliage of this plant.

The final insect in my Gaillardia roundup is this flower beetle, the Pygmy Chafer (Strigoderma pygmaea).

In conclusion, I enjoy having Gaillardia in my gardens a lot, finding that it brings in a reasonable number of insects and provides a nice pop of color throughout most of the growing season.  Loving full sun and tolerating pretty dry conditions, it's usually very easy to grow.  The only downside I've found to Gaillardia pulchella is that each individual plant lasts for 2-3 years at most.  It will reseed a bit and, if I watch for seedlings, I can usually keep it as a garden presence without having to buy it again each year.  If you live within its (wide) native range, I'd definitely recommend it for your pollinator garden.

Turkey Tangle Fogfruit Community

Certain plants seem to create large communities of insects and other wildlife within my garden.  I thought I'd do a series on a couple of these species, starting with Turkey Tangle Fogfruit (Phyla nodiflora).  As I've gone through my photos from last year, I realized I've got pictures from at least 23 different species of animals using this species in 2018 alone - and that's just the number I captured with my camera.  I know there were animals using it that I wasn't able to capture on film (like swallowtail butterflies).  I'm equally certain there were animals using it that I simply didn't see.

Fogfruit is not a showy species to my eye.  Although some people really like its dainty flowers, to be honest, I find this plant rather blah visually.  It is, however, a powerhouse for supporting pollinators and other insects and, as such, has earned a place in my yard whenever possible.

Essentially a groundcover, fogfruit grows around 8" tall.  About 3 years ago, I started out with 2 plants in gallon containers, planted 2' apart.  The fogfruit now covers an area that is about 6' X 8' - and it would be happy to be out in the driveway and into the street, too, if we didn't keep it trimmed back.  On the plus side, fogfruit manages to hold its space fairly well, once established, and doesn't need much of any care.

The first photos I have of the animals it harbored last year are from mid-May.

Here is a small spider that I saw on May 15th, then didn't see again all year.  It's a pretty little thing which the great folks at Antman's Hill on Facebook helped me to identify as an orbweaver, Gea heptagon.

On the same day, I captured a photo of this little syrphid fly (Toxomerus sp.) nectaring at one of the fogfruit blossoms.

Like others in this genus, the larvae of this fly feed on aphids, thrips, and small caterpillars throughout the garden, so it's nice to see the adult visiting.

By June 10th, the action was heating up.  There was this cute little orange "teddy bear" nectaring, a bee fly (Chrysanthrax cypris).

Cute as this guy is, its life cycle is less cuddly.  Flies in the Chrysanthrax genus are external parasitoids on the cocoons of some solitary bees and on the cocoons of tiphiid wasps, which are themselves predators of beetle larvae.  The "balance of nature" is sometimes hard for me to feel comfortable with and gracefully accept, but I do my best.

Throughout June and again in August, I have photos of another bee fly (Exoprosopa fascipennis) nectaring at the fogfruit.

Again, I find this an attractive little creature, but again its life cycle is rather fearsome.  The bee flies in Exoprosopa feed on the cocoons of many different kinds of wasps, including the tiphiid wasps mentioned above, spider wasps, and a group of solitary wasps known as sphecid wasps.

Speaking of wasps, in mid June, this scoliid wasp (Scolia nobilitata) was enjoying the fogfruit nectar, too.

Scoliid wasps are parasitoids of beetle grubs, especially the grubs of May beetles.  The females dig down to the grub, sting it to paralyze it, and deposit on egg. When the egg hatches, the wasp larva eats the perfectly preserved beetle grub.  I like my grub control to be natural (even if it is rather gruesome that way)!

Since both the bee flies and the scoliid wasp were nectaring at the same time on the same plant, it is possible that one or the other of the bee fly species parasitizes this scoliid wasp species, following females as they leave their feeding ground and search for beetle grubs to parasitize.  There is so much about these little guys that we simply don't know, even things as basic as which bee fly species parasitizes which wasp species.  Often these predator/prey relationships with parasitoids are very specific, confined to just one or two species, or perhaps between two particular genuses.

Moving back to less gory lifecycles, a couple days after photographing the pretty wasp above, I started capturing images of butterflies and skippers.  First was this Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus) on June 16th.

 Since the larvae of fiery skippers dine on grasses such as St. Augustine, this species is relatively common.

On June 22nd, I photographed the first Phaon Crescent (Phyciodes phaon) of the year, although these photos are from later in the summer.

These cute little orange butterflies utilize fogfruit as their larval plant, as well as obviously nectaring on it.  Since I see quite a few of them, I'm pretty sure that my little patch of fogfruit is producing phaon crescents, but I've never actutally found one of the caterpillars.

Something sure likes to eat the fogfruit leaves, though!

I spotted this dainty damselfly hanging out around the fogfruit several times last summer. It's the only damselfly or dragonfly species that I photographed on the fogfruit last year, and the folks at Antman's Hill identified it for me as a male Rambur's Forktail (Ischnura ramburii).  That makes sense, as I've seen the (orange) female Rambur's Forktail in the yard multiple times, although I've never photographed one on the fogfruit.

There were several more wasps and bees over the course of the summer, including this potter or mason wasp on July 20th, .....

...and this paper wasp (Polistes metricus) on August 10th.

I actually don't see many paper wasps in the yard - which is fine with me.  Instead, I see lots of solitary wasps, who are generally much easier to share space with. 

One of my favorite finds was this cute little black leafcutter bee, the Carpenter Mimic Leafcutter Bee (Megachile xylocopoides).  As the name suggests, this stunning black bee with the fluorescent blue shimmer is considered a mimic of larger carpenter bees, specifically the Southern Carpenter Bee, which I also saw in my yard last summer.

Note the long hairs on the underside of the abdomen?  That's how you can tell it's a leafcutter bee - at least if it's a female.  Female leafcutter bees carry pollen in those hairs, often giving them a potbellied appearance.  This gal was apparently feeding herself, not gathering pollen for future offspring.

On August 8th, I was able to capture photos of a Barred Sulfur (Eurema daira) visiting...

...and if you look closely at the stem a few inches below the blossom, you'll see the wad of spittle that signifies a spittlebug nymph feeding - yet another insect species utilizing the fogfruit.

A few days later, I photographed this crisp Checkered Skipper (Pyrgus sp.).

Apparently, most skipper larvae fold and sew leaves together to make tent shelters for themselves, so don't be too quick to destroy any such structures you might come across in your garden.

Of the 23 species I photographed on my Turkey Tangle Fogfruit in 2018, the above photos were the most interesting and/or the insects were the most photogenic.  Rounding out my 23 species were 4 more species of flies, 2-3 species of small beetles, a honeybee, and two other bees I haven't been able to identify yet.

Like the plant they were visiting, most of these animals aren't large or particularly beautiful.  They are the everyday denizens of our gardens, busily living their lives and often feeding other animals in the process.  To me, each of these species has the right to exist, the right to its place on this Earth, just as much as any other species has that same right.  I hope that, someday soon, we humans can learn to coexist with the other plants and animals on this planet, instead of needlessly and carelessly destroying them.