Gifts from the Meadow

And overhead the great clouds sail...

 

as I struggle to make images showing them and the landscape, too (a tall order and a terrible thing to ask of a camera)

 but I got my best-yet photo of a dogbane beetle in the meadow this summer. All with the trusty Canon G-11.

 

 I love this photo of a fritillary and the whole meadow stretching out behind it.

 The meadow, full of unconscious bouquets of rudbeckia and butterfly weed.

 and the best summer gift of all, a yellow butterfly weed, quite rare, coming up along the driveway!

 It was the most bewitching shade of rich golden yellow.

 and in a spot where Bill won't accidentally mow it. Hurray! It bloomed twice this summer, delighting me for weeks.

I smile down at it every morning when I go running.

 One day I happened on a Peck's skipper deeply engrossed in a Laurentia blossom. I thought perhaps a crab spider had hold of it, and went to help it. No. The butterfly was just trying to reach that delicious nectar at the very bottom of the corolla tube.

 

It hurriedly backed out and looked at me as if to ask me what I thought I was doing.

 It was quite an elderly, worn skipper and apparently set in its ways. It had its proboscis extended all the way, and was partway down the throat of the flower. Very sweet. I left it alone to probe other flowers.

 I set up a fun little shade garden under some birches, up out of reach of the durn rabbits. Rabbits love begonias and impatiens as well as gerania. It would take a rabbit about two minutes to reduce this glorious Rex begonia to sticks.

Hope you've enjoyed this little walk around my summer garden. Too soon it will be gone, and we'll have to content ourselves with flaming fall foliage!

Milkweed Madness

I've shown you a little of what goes on in the cultivated flower beds. Well, out in the meadow, which is just impossibly rich and diverse, it's a party all the time. If I had nothing else to do I'd be out there with my camera most mornings.

 The butterfly weed Asclepias tuberosa  was fabulous this year. It loved the extra rain, and it loves the way Bill mows around the thickest patches with the old tractor.

 Great spangled fritillaries think it's keen. It was overall a very light butterfly year here...many fewer individuals and low diversity in comparison to most years. I've heard as much from many friends.  Lots of rain early on may have suppressed hatching. I don't know. I just know there aren't as many butterflies around as there ought to be. It usually looks like a scene from Snow White around here.

It helps having butterflies' favorite flowers. Common milkweed A. syriaca is just irresistible. It, along with its more glamorous butterfly weed cousin, is one of my most valued garden plants. And out-of-garden plants.

 

Above: a beautiful female great spangled fritillary. She's more chocolatey than the male.

 

A Hoary Edge partakes (below). This is a less common relative of silver-spotted skipper. As you can see the white is more diffuse on the Hoary Edge--not a well-defined spot as on the SSSK. I would imagine lots of hoary edges get overlooked.

 

 I like this crazy shot of a fritillary feeding and a bumblebee departing. Sort of surreal.

 I like to remind people who wonder at my fondness for common milkweed that it's a treasured exotic in the best English gardens. And for good reason! Find me a plant, any plant, that offers so much to butterflies and bees, and in such a spectacular way. And that's without even mentioning the monarch brood plant factor.

                                                               All hail Milkweeds!