Spring, All at Once

 Desmia funeralis, Grape Leaffolder.

Mmm, what a natty jet airplane of a moth! Perched on Nancy Love's gravestone at my little Methodist cemetery. I could not have told you what it was without David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie's new moth guide, which makes me whoop with joy. What a book!! I'm getting it signed at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, where Seabrooke will be speaking and showing us all the fabulous moths. Giving them names, for once. O joy! I get to meet her and get my book signed! See, writers get just as geeked out as everybody else. (Postscript: She was Wonderful. Marvelous. Self-effacing but quietly confident, brave and magical, too).

Scattered, scattered, I am. On her way to the New River festival, Murr Brewster came over for a day and a half and a lovely night too and we emptied my greenhouse. Two women could not have had more fun, than messing about with pots and soil and deciding which geranium looked nice with which nemesia. I love that woman!! We decided she really just needs to live here. Think how much we'd get done. Or not. Yakkity yak yak yak.

 The second we put them out, the "Graffiti Red" stellar geraniums were visited by swallowtails and this lovely male hummingbird, who had been flying into the greenhouse every day to say hello to the flowers. It made me smile as wide as Montana to be in the Garden Pod when he flew in, because he sounded like a gargantuan wasp from a Japanese horror movie in there.

Birds are flooding in. Oh my gosh. How can I do everything I have to do to get ready for the festival?? To keep my precious plants and bulbs from dying while I'm away this spring? There's an indigo bunting in the orchard, and they're flying over in twos and threes, zapping...

And there are sweet kids to be fed and run to the waiting bus...not for much longer! They get out May 23!!

but there's a faded scarlet tanager rasping away in the orchard, too...

 and the woods is full of wood thrushes, and how can you do everything that needs to be done when you are melting away?

Twee-o. Tweedleay. bup bup bup twardle tee? Twowdly-oh Tee? Twee-o.

And the leaves drip and the song twines around my heart and squeezes it up into my throat.

Pitcher Plant Hell

I looked at my fine plant with new eyes. Not only was it beautiful, it was deadly!

As you might imagine, I had a problem leaving live moths in the pitchers, scrabbling helplessly against the leaf's slickly haired sides. 

Judging that the plants had more than enough to eat, I saved them.

oh thank you giant primate

One I freed was a lovely Virginia Ctenucha, one of the wasp-mimic moths.

Just couldn't let it sink down into the goo.

Also had two gorgeous Ailanthus Webworm moths, Atteva punctella, one of the larger microlepidopterans, with a beautiful veined orange-and-white rolled wing. They flew away the second they were out in the air. Couldn't get a photo.

Earwigs, wasps, bees, flies, honeybees, syrphid flies, hoverflies--anything that comes to flowers will come to a pitcher plant, apparently, only it's the Hotel California for pollinators.

Even paper wasps are not immune to its sweet, honey-scented charms. It has a competitive advantage in that it's quite hardy and in full, sweet-scented bloom when practically everything else has croaked from the first frosts.

 Stick to flowers, guys. These plants are bad news.

Pollinators swarm my Suffolk Pink chrysanthemum just a few feet away. It's the hardiest and latest-blooming of all. It doesn't even get going until Halloween in southern Ohio, and it's a blessing blooming that late. (It's done now; these photos have aged a bit since I took them.) 

"Suffolk," in a few different colors, was probably the first mum ever brought to the New World. The foundation stock for my plants (yes, it spreads modestly and delightfully) came from peerless pastel painter and partner in peripatetic hilarity Cindy House, from her Vermont/New Hampshire gardens. (You may remember her spotting the "body bags" outside a Massachusetts restaurant).

A nice, super hardy, willing plant. Not like those nasty carnivorous ones.

I have the pitcher plants in the greenhouse, on the cold floor next to an outside vent, for the winter. Hoping I'm doing right by them. They're just too precious to me now to let them freeze into the pond ice again. Thanks again, Cheryl! All it took was five years and some sphagnum...