A Tired Time of Year in the Garden: Time to "Tolerate the Uglies"

As I look around my garden these days, there are definitely places where it's starting to look worn out and ratty.

For example, what's the end result of this sight, on August 25th?

This sight on September 9th!  And LOTS of gulf fritillary butterflies gracing our yard, too.  Just recently a seemingly unpenetrable wall of green, the passion vine (Passiflora incarnata) is literally skeletal now.  All of its leaves - literally ALL of them - have been eaten by gulf fritillary caterpillars (Agraulis vanillae), leaving nothing but awkward stems with the remnants of a few fruits hanging on.  I'm not worried, though.  The passion vine will be back next spring, as full and pretty as ever.

Also, did you notice?  The leaves of the vines were beginning to turn yellow by the end of August anyway.  They weren't going to last much longer even if the caterpillars hadn't been eating them.

The victim of twin onslaughts - monarch caterpillars and advancing age, the swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) is looking rather pathetic too.  It's a battle to see whether the caterpillars will eat the leaves first or whether they'll turn yellow and fall off from the bottom up.  (The tall, leggy plants in the photo above are the swamp milkweed, planted just behind the birdbath basin on the ground.)  It's the legginess and ugliness of this stage of their life cycle that encourages me to generally plant swamp milkweed in the back of the border, hopefully behind some "fluffy" lower plants like red sage (Salvia coccinea) or short species of asters.  If you look closely at the left side of the photo, however, you can see that the monarchs aren't upset by the state of the milkweed at all. 

There are still many flying in the yard, with females frequently seen laying eggs here and there - even on "ugly" plants.  

Flyr's nemesis (Brickellia cordifolia) is just about done blooming, so its small, cotton candy pink pom-poms of flowers are fading into grayish lavender mush.  The leaves still look good, but the stalks have sprawled everywhere, thanks to the weight of all those beautiful blossoms over the last couple weeks.

I've got these few stalks held up with stakes because they were lying flat on the lawn.  Our 3 year old grandson gives a good sense of scale against these shortest of the Flyr's nemesis stalks.  Despite the waning number of blooms, the monarchs, gulf fritillaries, and little bees are all still enjoying the Flyr's nemesis immensely.

Declining in the same way they grew, from the bottom up, the Dr. Seuss flowers of spotted horsemint (Monarda punctata) are past their prime as well.  There are still individual flowers in the upper bloom clusters, but the bottom clusters are turning brown and drying out.  Like the Flyr's nemesis, the stems have sprawled from the weight of bountiful blossoms.

Looking up into the trees, numerous nests of fall webworms (Hyphantria cunea) pockmark the ends of the branches of the pignut hickories (Carya glabra).  I've noticed an increased number of birds like bluejays up in the canopy since the webworm nests appeared, so I'm guessing that the birds are having quite a nice, seasonal, tree top feast up there.

In the front gardens, even the tidy green mounds of the trailing pineland lantana (Lantana depressa) are showing signs of decline, although thankfully you have to look fairly closely to see them. 

Many leaves have been used as caterpillar food by some sort of leaf rollers this summer and they have become gray ghosts of themselves.  Empty flower stalks are numerous now, too, although the blossoms still attract most of the attention, especially from a distance.  Luckily, again, the butterflies, skippers, and other creatures don't seem to mind at all.

When I worked the phone line for the Master Gardener office, we'd always get concerned calls at this time of year, "My plant leaves are looking so sick.  What should I spray on them?"

My response then was the same as it is internally to myself now, "It's the end of summer.  The leaves have been working hard all summer and they are tired and worn out.  It's almost time for them to fall, where they will continue working to make the garden healthier as they decompose into rich topsoil.  Don't spray anything.  This is all just part of the natural cycle of life.  Nothing is wrong at all."

Or, in other words, it's the time of year to remind ourselves to "tolerate the uglies" as the seasons begin to change yet again, moving us into the release of fall and the quiet peace of winter.  This, too, shall pass.

Milkweed Signals?

Watching for caterpillars as closely as I've been doing this summer, I noticed an odd phenomenon on the milkweeds about a week ago.

As of August 5th, last Sunday, I had not seen a single milkweed bug, large or small, on any of my milkweed plants this summer.  At midday, I was out in the backyard, photographing insects and flowers like the swamp milkweed above, when I noticed something reddish flying in the middle of the backyard. 

Chasing it down, I saw that it was a large milkweed bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus) which had landed on a small yaupon bush (Ilex vomitoria).  Note:  I apologize for the quality of this photo, but it's the only one I took at the time.

The next morning, August 6th, when I got up, there were probably a dozen large milkweed bugs on my swamp milkweed plants, primarily on the blooms.  Many were in the process of creating the next generation of large milkweed bugs.

In the space of 24 hours, my yard went from absolutely no milkweed bugs to a single large milkweed bug to a dozen or more large milkweed bugs.  The numbers have continued to increase over the week.

Where did they all come from?  No one else I see around the neighborhood has milkweed plants and there is little "wild space" nearby.

What brought them all in at essentially the same time?  The swamp milkweed had been blooming for over a week at that point, the tropical milkweed for weeks, and the butterfly milkweed for months, so why August 5th-6th?  Why that day specifically?

I have no answers to these questions, but it's a fascinating little mystery to me.  Sometimes it seems like the more I learn, the less I know.

Tolerate the Uglies!!!

After carefully watching my larval plants for several months (which felt like years!), I'm finally seeing caterpillars on them. 

There are monarch caterpillars on the milkweed,

black swallowtail caterpillars on the parsley,

gulf fritillary caterpillars on the maypop vines,

and - based on the foliage - probably phaon crescent caterpillars on the fogfruit. 

YEAH!!! My plants are starting to get ugly!  They are making butterflies!!!

As much as I love seeing the caterpillars, though, I find that I do cringe at how ragged my plants start to look at this point of the summer.  Not only is the heat taking a toll, the plants are so large that any dry spells can cause wilting and brown edges, even partial leaf drop.  By the time the caterpillars show up and start eating the leaves, the plants can start looking like I should yank them out of the garden at the first possible moment.

Of course I don't pull them out.  I chose and planted these plants especially as butterfly food.  Why would I pull them out just as they are starting to actually produce butterflies?  Even if I do "mentally hear" my neighbors gossiping about how ragged my garden is looking these days.

Honestly, couldn't these plants be a little NEATER and PRETTIER while they go through this stage of their life cycle?!

My own phrase for this is "Tolerate the uglies!"  Benjamin Vogt of Monarch Gardens shares the same concept with his phrase of "Redefine pretty."  In a world saturated with television ads showing happy, beautiful people in manicured yards that don't have a single tattered leaf or brown spot in the lawn, it feels subversive to allow caterpillars to actually eat the leaves on your plants.  Seriously, shouldn't this be done behind closed doors, people?!

To be even more subversive, this summer I've noticed that my monarch caterpillars seemed to purposefully deflower the milkweed they are feeding upon. 

First, mama monarch laid quite a few eggs underneath flower bud clusters, so the caterpillars have been eating the flowers and buds from the moment they hatched.

Secondly, as the caterpillars reached one of their later, larger instars, I noticed that 3 of them had cut the stem of the entire flower cluster partway through, resulting in the entire bloom head hanging upside down and dying.  Seriously, what's up with that?!  The only thing I can figure out is that, evolutionarily, this decreases the chances of parasites being attracted to the plant for nectar and thereby finding the caterpillar(s) nearby to host their offspring on.  I've never heard of this as a "thing" before, though, so I don't know if my imagination is just running away with me - or if, maybe, I'm on to something.  Any monarch researchers out there that might want to look into this idea?

Along the same lines, is it coincidence that the eggs were laid shortly after the buds started opening and the plants started blooming?  Evolutionarily, could it be that so many eggs were laid on these newly opening flower buds to decrease the overall numbers of blooms, decreasing the seed production, and thus moving the plant energies into leaf production, thereby providing more food for more baby monarchs?

Or is this egg placement just a way to hide the caterpillars until they get a little bigger and less attractive to wasps and other caterpillar parasites who might not care that they don't taste good?  See how well that monarch caterpillar is hidden?

Can you see it now???

How about now?  Pretty safe hiding place, isn't it?

WHY the timing and placement for egg laying?  Coincidence or evolutionary plan?  Inquiring minds want to know.

While I contemplate these possibilities, I meander my garden enjoying the new life chomping hungrily on my plants and try not to cringe at the blooms being cut short and the leaves disappearing in the process.  Life is a balance - and never more so than in a garden.

Native Container Plants

Last spring, for the first time ever, I intentionally tried to find native plants that would work well in containers to sit on our back patio.  While I found a few, I would love to have a wider variety in my "stable".  I thought I'd share what worked and what didn't work for me - and I hope you'll share your favorites in the comment section to guide me this spring.

First of all, a disclaimer:  All of the photos in this post were taken on October 3rd, when I actually decided to post about this topic.  Most of the plants were well past their prime at that point, for which I apologize.  I find that I didn't take pictures of the full plants earlier in the summer;  I just took photos of the bees and butterflies and assorted other insects that were using them, especially their blossoms, for food and shelter!

Since we have no plant nurseries closer than about 45 minutes away, in trying to develop a native plant container garden, I started out at our local Home Depot.  There, I looked for plants that weren't labeled with the "sweet" little tags that essentially say, "I've been treated with death-causing chemicals so that you can have pretty flowers."  As I looked, I found that I had to be very careful:  some plants that were obviously from the same grower and batch weren't labeled, while others were.  Most disturbing were the numerous "butterfly" plants that I saw touted...while they bore that telltale, nasty little tag.

At Home Depot, then, I bought 3 "butterfly milkweeds" and a Coreopsis?/Rudbeckia?  As they grew, the butterfly milkweeds turned out to be Tropical Milkweeds (Asclepias curassavica) rather than Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), but at least they weren't treated with neonic pesticides. 

Know how I knew for sure the milkweeds hadn't been treated with neonics?  They had aphids on them, including one individual with a pretty bad case of them.   Yes, I intentionally bought a plant that was seriously infested with aphids - and I was glad to get it.  Once I got them home, I didn't do anything but pot the milkweeds up.  As I've discussed before, the aphid populations cycle up and down, based on natural predators, so I wasn't too worried about them.  The 3 milkweeds are doing fine, even if they aren't actually native here.  In fact, these three tropical milkweeds from Home Depot are the plants on which I've observed (and photographed) most of the aphid/predator cycles that I've shared with you on this blog.

Note:  The tropical milkweeds are the leggy background plants in the photo above.

The Coreopsis/Rudbeckia (I can't remember which it was) was the only other "near native" I could find at our local Home Depot that hadn't been treated with neonics, so I bought it to show that some of us would rather have butterflies than poison-filled plants.  Sadly, the plant hasn't done well for me and essentially never bloomed again.  Half of it died;  the other half looks healthy, but remains bloom-less - and insect-less.

I've got a couple pots with Violets (Viola sp.) and Scarlet Sage (Salvia coccinea) that have seeded in naturally, taking over other plants like lettuce that had finished their life cycle.  Both of these naturally occurring container plants are doing well and seem worth keeping as containers, due to their attractive foliage and/or attractiveness to pollinators.

Here is the scarlet sage, which seeded itself into a container where Greg had been growing kale.  It's not gorgeous, but the butterflies visit frequently.  Next summer I'll fertilize it a bit and give it some attention;  hopefully it will be fuller and fluffier.

I've also got some natives that I picked up from native plant nurseries especially to put into containers this summer:  Blue Curls (Trichostema dichotomum), Indian Blanket (Gaillardia pulchella), Blue Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum sp.) and Gaura (Gaura lindheimeri 'Siskiyou Pink').

While the Gaillardia hasn't been the "neatest" looking container, it has bloomed prolifically all summer long and has attracted many pollinators; I will continue to include it in future native plant container gardens.  By October 3rd, most of it had started to die back, so I didn't photograph it individually.  It's the pot at the far right of the photo at the beginning of this post.

The Blue Hyssop, above, which is not actually native to the southeast, was overgrown and floppy when I got it.  I did repot it, but I didn't cut it back like I should have.  It has done well, although it has looked a bit ragged because of my hesitancy with the pruning clippers.  I will continue to include it in future native container gardens, as it has been a reliable bee attractant.  I do not know if it will overwinter, or if I will have to treat it like an annual.

I bought and planted 2 different species of Mountain Mint this spring, but I don't remember which ones they are, let alone which is in the pot and which is in the ground.  I have the plant tags buried some where in the garage, but I am too lazy to look for them right now.  Anyway, both mountain mints are doing very well - and I love the fluffy white fullness of both of them.  Both have been good pollinator attractants;  I'll use Mountain Mint in containers again.  Hopefully the one in the pot behind my little girl, above, will be back next summer.

So far I've talked about the "good guys";  now let's discuss the more problematic patio occupants.

I'm iffy about using Blue Curls as container plants.  They bloomed well but, in the pots, the plants look quite leggy and scraggly while the flowers aren't large enough to overcome that deficit.  I think that part of this has been my fault:  I am not the most consistent waterer, and these were in smaller pots that tended to dry out fairly quickly.  In fact, I used the Blue Curls as my "indicator plants" to tell me when my containers needed watering.

This is, in fact, the first year I've grown Blue Curls at all.  Besides the 2 in containers on the patio, I also had 2 plants in the ground, and they looked much healthier and happier than the potted ones.  I may try Blue Curls in larger containers next year, but probably only if I can't find enough other natives to experiment with.  So far, none of the Blue Curls really seem all that attractive to pollinators, despite their reputation.

Frankly, the Gaura has been disappointing.  I think I either need to find a different variety - or just not try it again.  I don't know if it's a watering issue or if it was in too much shade, but it just wimped out.

Although I didn't think to buy any to put in containers, looking at all the wonderful photos of asters, covered in pollinators, this spring I'm wondering about trying pots with a couple different species of those in them.  I'm not sure which species would be best, though, both for good bloom and for nice looking foliage earlier in the summer.

So that's my "Native or Near Native Container Plant" roundup.  Are there any species that you would recommend?

One Thing Leads to Another.....

(This post is an expansion on a Facebook post I made yesterday morning.  I wanted to share the photos I took - and add a few more comments.)

I love how one thing leads to another.....

I saw an Eastern Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes) out back nectaring on the Scarlet Sage (Salvia coccinea), so I got my camera and ran outside.

It flew over to a camellia where it sat for a while to bask, allowing me to get fairly close and to take multiple photos.

Then it flew back to the sage and continued nectaring, allowing me to take more photos.

After the swallowtail flew off, I noticed a battered Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) basking, so I took photos of it, following as it, ...er, 

SHE lifted off and laid an egg or two on the Corky-Stemmed Passionvine (Passiflora suberosa) nearby.  It amazes me that this ragged female could still fly - and that she still had the energy to locate passionvine and lay eggs!  It makes me think that, perhaps, occasionally handling butterflies won't overly handicap their success after all.

Movement by the milkweed caught my eye and I was able to get a few shots (although I don't know if they turned out) of a syrphid fly laying eggs near aphids on the milkweed.  Note:  This was the best of the shots I took. It isn't great, but I thought you might enjoy it anyway, and it does serve to keep the narrative going!

More movement made me notice a little tufted titmouse hunting about 20 feet away, so I snagged a couple photos, one of which wasn't too bad....

Still more movement, this time nearby, helped me notice some sort of odd little wasp hunting on the swamp milkweed...  When I downloaded the photos, I realized that this isn't a wasp at all, but rather some sort of fly.  BugGuide has helped me determine that this is a female syrphid fly in the genus Xylota.  These syrphid flies eat pollen from the surface of leaves as adults, which I think you can actually see her doing in the above photo!  The larvae feed on sap runs.  So, my bare eyes said a small wasp, hunting, but increased magnification and more research revealed a fly, eating pollen!

Close to this unusual little syrphid fly was a Milkweed Assassin Bug nymph (Zelus longipes) that may have actually been hunting - attempting to catch the little syrphid fly unawares.

As an added pleasure, I found all of this activity while I was enjoying the sweet fragrance of the blue curls (Trichostema dichotomum) that are scraggly but blooming, in pots on the back patio!

A fun few minutes. Fifteen minutes, to be exact.  And all from the relative privacy of my back patio, while in bare feet and still in pajamas!

As I wrote the original post when I got back inside, I  looked out back onto the patio again and saw a male towhee perched proudly on the top of the statue there! Sadly, I  wasn't able to get a picture of him, but I did get to enjoy watching him from my spot in the recliner!

Gardening for wildlife is like having a nature preserve right outside my back door!

Secrets of An Assassin Bug's Diet, or Beware of First Impressions!

When I went out with the dog, first thing this morning, I noticed a ladybug on one of my milkweeds, so I went inside and grabbed my camera to photograph it.  I just don't see ladybugs very often any more.  The ladybug turned out to be a Multi-Colored Asian Lady Beetle (Harmonia axyridis), which is very disappointing but not too surprising.  This is the species that is displacing so many of our native ladybugs.

As usually happens when I get my camera out, however, I found a couple other things to photograph while I was outside, and I'd like to share one of them with you tonight.

As I was photographing the ladybug, I noticed another orangish red and black insect nearby, a nymph of a Milkweed Assassin Bug (Zelus longipes).  I'm fairly used to seeing these in my garden nowadays, so I didn't pay too much attention to it at first....

Then I noticed the long, small, white insect it was eating.  "Damn!" I thought to myself, "It's a tiny monarch caterpillar!  No wonder I haven't been seeing any larger monarch caterpillars around."

Since I'm a pretty firm believer in "the circle of life", especially when the life forms involved are native, I did nothing but take a couple pictures.  The assassin bug nymph soon finished its meal and started hunting again, but I didn't notice it capture anything else.

Tonight I went through this morning's photos on the computer - and, lo and behold, that wasn't a tiny monarch caterpillar!  The Milkweed Assassin Bug nymph was actually eating a newly molted (still white) leafhopper!  The leafhopper was just so small that my eyes couldn't make out what it actually was until the magic of photography enlarged it for me.

I have no idea which species of leafhopper this was, but all leafhoppers drink plant sap, so this is a perfect example of a predator keeping a plant-eating insect population under control.  (To be brutally honest, of course, the same could be said if the assassin bug HAD actually been eating a monarch caterpillar.)

Once again I had a dope slap moment and had to remind myself not to jump to conclusions when I'm out in the garden, observing.  I am continually amazed at the intricate functioning of the web of life...when we humans can avoid mucking around with it.

Syrphid Fly Scouting Place to Lay Eggs

In my recent post on aphids and their predators, I shared photos of two types of syrphid fly larvae that I am seeing.  A few days later I was lucky enough to get this photograph of an adult syrphid fly, looking for a place to lay eggs on my milkweed.

If you click on the photo, you can see the details that are not apparent in the smaller image imbedded in the text here.  Note the aphids at the base of the flower cluster?  There aren't a lot and I didn't see the female syrphid fly lay any eggs, so she may have decided that she needed to look for more populous aphid clusters.

Going by the Latin name of Ocyptamus fuscipennis, there is no common name for this syrphid fly.  I am pretty sure that this is the adult form of the "gray slug" syrphid fly larva that I see munching on oleander aphids. 

Here is a closeup of this individual....

(Note:  I have not raised an individual from larva to adult to know for sure, but this is both the most common syrphid fly that I see laying eggs on the milkweed and the most common adult syrphid fly larvae that I see.  Others have raised this species from larva to adult, and the larva does look very similar to this.)

What predators are you seeing munching on YOUR aphids?!

Predators and Parasites on Oleander (Milkweed) Aphids

My milkweeds are hopping these days.  Sadly, I've only seen one monarch caterpillar, but I am still fascinated by all the insect life that I am seeing.  Most of my observations have been on tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) simply because I have several big, healthy plants in pots on my back patio and they are easy to check on and photograph, but I'm fairly certain that what I'm seeing isn't unusual for other milkweed species.

The orange-yellow oleander aphids (Aphis nerii) are common on these plants.  A week ago, when many of these photos were taken, the aphids covered about 2-3" of the top of every shoot.  This week their numbers are much reduced, with just a few hardy individuals remaining where hundreds dined last week.  This is at least the second rise and fall of aphid numbers on my plants this summer.  I'm sure they will go through at least one more population cycle up and down before frost comes this autumn.

So what's keeping the aphid populations from exploding out of control?  If you look closely at the photo above, you can begin to see the answer.  Specifically, here are some of the candidates I've been seeing....

Each milkweed shoot with its covering of yellow aphids near the tip seems to also have at least one or more of these blobs of gray and white protoplasm which, I am pretty sure, are actually syrphid fly larvae.  Although the blobs are stationary when I usually see them, I have occasionally seen one "hightailing" it from one area to another.  Looking on BugGuide.net, this looks like the larva of the syrphid fly, Ocyptamus fuscipennis.  I have certainly noticed syrphid flies that look like these adults hovering around the aphid clusters.  There is no common name for this little fly that I know of, but the BugGuide link will allow you to see what the adult looks like, so that you can notice if your milkweed aphids are attracting attention from this species, too.

Less common, but still easy to find, are these little bumpy caterpillar-like animals that are also, I believe, syrphid fly larvae.  I've not been able to figure out which species or even genus these guys belong to, but I do find it fascinating that two different species of syrphid flies are munching on my oleander aphids!  The only way to really tell for certain would be to raise up some of these larvae to adulthood, which sounds like a fun project when the boys get a little older.

If you ever see a piece of trash seeming to move on your plant, look a little more closely....

You may be seeing a green lacewing larva, which hides under a pile of debris that includes its castoff skins from earlier molts. 

If you look closely in the photo above, you can easily see the yellow oleander aphid being eaten...by the actual lacewing larva at the bottom of the pile of debris.  Lacewings are fierce aphid predators as both larvae and adults.

Not uncommonly among my aphid populations, I will see a dark brown aphid that doesn't move.  This is an aphid mummy.  Tiny parasitic wasps lay an egg in an individual aphid and the developing wasp larva eats out the insides of the aphid, leaving the aphid a literal shell of itself.  Only one baby wasp per aphid, but each female wasp can then go on to lay eggs in many aphids, so aphid mummies are welcome sights on my milkweed plants.

There are other more generalist predators that I'm seeing around my milkweeds, too, which may or may not be preying on the aphids.

I often see tiny, longlegged flies, for example, flying around and landing on milkweed leaves for short periods of time.  Longlegged flies (Family Dolichopodidae) are iridescent green or brown and are known to be predators in both the larval and adult forms.  Although I have never seen one pay attention to, let alone eat, an aphid, I can still hope.  They've got to be eating something!

Clad in the red-orange and black colors of the classic milkweed insect, milkweed assassin bugs (Zelus longipes) are another generalist predator that I see these days, both on milkweeds and on other plants around the yard.  I see the milkweed assassin bugs hunting up and down the plants, sometimes hanging out in the flowers, but just as commonly walking up and down the stems or inspecting both sides of each leaf.  Their eyesight is superb and it can be hard to sneak up on one to take its picture.  At first it will simply duck to the other side of a stem or leaf or flower cluster, but if you persist, it will readily fly away.

The final predator I've been consistently seeing around my milkweeds in recent weeks is a damselfly.  Again, I don't know if this dainty creature is eating winged aphids or not, but I doubt it would turn one down.

So, as you look at the aphids on your milkweeds in horror and dismay, look a little closer - there's a good chance you'll see some other, interesting insects drawn in to the feast that they represent in the animal world!