Midwest Native Plant Conference

Science Chimp, ready for anything. Photo by William Ringer, a nature-loving Hoosier who gets around, from the Potholes of North Dakota to the Fens of Ohio.

On the first weekend in August, I traveled to Dayton to speak at the second annual Midwest Native Plant Conference. I couldn't know what a blast it would be. I was so freaked out at the thought that native plant purists would turn up their nose at my habitat gardening talk, rife as it is with Chinese buddleia and Mexican salvias

Autumn sage, Salvia greggii

and Chilean fuchsias, that I refused an invitation to speak at the first annual conference.

But my friend Kathy MacDonald persisted and assured me they really did want me to come, so I spent a couple of days tearing up my talk to emphasize native plants like these in my garden.

My cardinalflower Lobelia cardinalis bed, with some Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" and Salvia greggii "Cherry Chief" and Fuchsia "Gartenmeister Bonstedt" and Crocosmia "Lucifer" thrown in for fun and hummingbird appeal.

The naturalized purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea along our driveway. I find it grows best along woodland edges.

So I wrote a special piece for the occasion about native plant snobbery, useful exotics, why I love lilacs and tuberoses and crape myrtle and how I don't care what anyone says about them. I love them not because I am too dumb to know the difference between a good (native) plant and a bad (exotic) plant but because I love them. For my own reasons, for the memories and the beloved people I associate with them; just because they are beautiful and good.

Being non-native doesn't automatically make a plant (or any organism) bad, despite the awful, awful preponderance of invasive exotics from grass carp to bamboo. I was still nervous about how it might go over, scarred as I am from a few run-ins with people who consider anything non-native a noxious pest. I needn't have worried. The Native Plant conferees were the finest kind, friendly and warm and full of good humor. Front-loaded with Master Gardeners, in fact, who are used to working with plant material from all over the planet. The talk went well, I had a load of fun, and best of all there was a field trip to Cedar Bog just west of Springfield, Ohio. You must, must attend the next one if you love native plants and would like to learn more about using them in your landscaping.

The gorgeous conference room at the Bergamo Center in Dayton, where I was privileged to speak.

Cedar Bog, outside Springfield, is the only open fen where white cedar grows in Ohio. A fen is an open wet meadow through which little streams course. Heavily underlain by marl (limestone) and somehow having escaped the cement mining that ruined most of our other marl bogs, it's got a terrific floral and insect community, and it's full of things you can't see anywhere else.

Here's part of the open fen/wet meadow which was full of white boneset, tall ironweed (purple) and obedient plant ( Physostegia, pink, in background) as well as black-eyed Susans, hops, dodder, sandvine, nettles...on and on. It was full of butterflies!

Tiger swallowtails on pasture thistle.

A Monarch on tall ironweed.

And a black swallowtail, also enjoying pasture thistle.

A pugnacious hackberry emperor kept hitting me in the chest and sometimes below the belt as I trod upon his boardwalk. He looks mean, doesn't he? I was intimidated.

A gray hairstreak rubbed his hindwings together as he sipped from a yellow flower only Jim knows. Bog loosestrife? No. Some sorta St. Johnswort? I dunno. Hm. Sumpin'. This is the problem with being a generalist, and on the downside of 50. I should write this stuff down. I should know by now I won't remember it for ten minutes.


At Cedar Bog there are orchids in spring, like showy lady's slipper and dragonmouth. There are elfin skimmer dragonflies (exceedingly rare) and the also rare and charming seepage dancer, which were abundant when we visited.

Seepage dancer, Argia bipunctulata. Nice name! It has much shorter wings than the common bluet, but otherwise, it'd be hard to know you've got an endangered damselfly.

A far more common but unnamed damselfly. My field guide only does dragonflies. Rats! Arrgh! Jim told me what it was...I found a beautiful pdf, Dragonflies and Damselflies of Ohio, by my friend Dave McShaffrey online! Maybe maybe a female blue-ringed dancer?

Anyone?

There is spiked gayfeather Liatris spicata
and cowbane Oxypolis rigidior

which is host to black swallowtail larvae, which eat things in the parsley and carrot family.

There will be more natural wonders from Cedar Bog in the next post. If you're passing through Springfield, Ohio, on I-70 (and judging from the traffic, who isn't?) you must take a detour and walk this amazing boardwalk. I had time for less than half of it and came out wanting to return soon! What a glorious place, with a wonderfully appointed and staffed "green" visitor's center. Check out their website, and visit Weds-Sun 10-4.

Yes, I'm posting one more day a week, to make three: Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. There's just too much good stuff to share and the backlog is tremendous now.

And today, August 17, is Charlie the chestnut-fronted macaw's 21st birthday. I found my check register from 1989 with the record of his purchase. That was before kids, house, dog, Ohio; even before Bill. We're in it for the long haul. He'll be trundling around the studio floor, playing Stab the Doll with Liam, stealing toys from Chet, hanging out on my shoulder as I paint, cackling maniacally under his favorite blue cabinet, and sharing stirfry and a beer with Bill at sundown--just another day for a kooky and well-loved little macaw.

Ooh, that's GOOD!

More Adventures In Trophy Hunting

You can only paddle for so long before your butt starts to rebel, so Phoebe and I beached our little craft and climbed a steep slope up onto, of all things, a plateau where perches the humble Noble County Airport. It's apparently unmanned on Sundays. There was a beautiful airstrip just full of dogbane and bursting with butterflies that love its nectar.

Here's a gray hairstreak, Strymon melinus, one of my favorite little delicacies of summer. Vladimir Nabokov loved hairstreaks best of all. Maybe it goes with writing loopy descriptive prose, to love those little trembling tails and sly hindwing-rubbing antics.
It never ceases to amaze me that an ordinary person with a halfway decent lens can get pictures like this. The 300 mm. telephoto allows me to photograph butterflies without creeping close enough to disturb them, and I like that. Here's a common buckeye, which is only common toward fall, when it makes a northward migration that brings it to Ohio, the Buckeye State. I think they named our fair state for the tree, but I'll pretend it was named for a butterfly.
I kept seeing a skipper on the rocks at lakeshore that bedeviled me. I worked and worked to get a decent shot of it as it whirled and settled, puddled and flew.
Wait. Is that a flare of orange on the leading edge of the forewing underside? Or just a trick of light?I think this is a tawny-edged skipper. I saw the same critter in the dogbane, and took this strange shot--just to show you how different skippers can look when they open their wings and show you the markings on their dorsal surfaces.
Finally, I captured an image that I felt confident depicted a tawny-edged skipper. It's the same butterfly as in the shot above, odd as it seems. People talk about the thrill of the chase. Well, you can shoot a trophy buck and cut his head off and hang it on your wall, or you can annoy a skipper for twenty minutes. I pick Option B.
A dun skipper, Euphyes vestris, perched quietly. It's notable precisely for its lack of notability. Which, in the odd world of butterflying, makes it instantly identifiable. Got that?
Actually, when you've been skippering for a couple of decades, the dun's elongated forewing sticks out like a happy thumb and tells you you've got something Other.For an Other, he's sure cute.

Our butterfly excursion over, we repaired to the lake. On our way back down, we found a little Fowler's toad, identifiable by the single wart in each black spot (American toads have 3-5 warts there). It's a toad of sandy soils, and those were in evidence in this dry forest. Everywhere, great blues perched on bowers of grapevine.
I amused myself by trying to get good flight shots. I much prefer shooting birds in flight to resting.  (That's an interesting sentence. It can be interpreted a couple of different ways, but both are true). It's harder to get a decent flight shot, and more fun to look at the results. Sometimes you get photos that make you crow like a rooster. That trophy hunting gene being expressed again, harmlessly...
And sometimes you look up, and there's a sylph fluttering through the forest ahead of you.
Never to be here, in this precise pose and lighting, again.