The Ephemeral Meadow

 Arrgh. It's all going so fast, so fast...the greens are leaving, the browns are coming. We haven't really had a proper fall here in southern Ohio, just a whole bunch of rain and wind and trees dropping their still-green leaves, and other trees that should be riotously colorful just standing around buck naked.

So I'm looking through my photo archives for things to share and it all looks impossibly bright and colorful and fresh and late-summery.

 I could just smell my neighbor winding up to mow this incredible meadow of mistflower (Eupatorium coelestinum.) I like to call it "wild ageratum" because that's what it is. It's one of my favorite flowers for the way it can paint a meadow sky-lavender.

I'd drive by the meadow and think, "I have GOT to get in there with the camera before he mows it!" Because when things are at their most beautiful, that's when he gets the bug to mow. You may remember the monarch rescue two years ago, when we saved 67 caterpillars as the tractor was grinding through. To his credit, he helped us gather them--once we told him they were there!

Wonderful guy. Just a different ethos about beauty, that's all. Mowed close is his beautiful. 

Mistflower and butterflies is mine. Here's a pearl crescent.

a clouded sulfur

A leatherwing or soldier beetle, possibly Pennsylvania Leatherwing (Chauliognathus pennsylvanicus) . You usually see these all over goldenrod.

 I kept stepping back, marveling at the beauty of the biggest stand of mistflower I'd ever seen. Knowing its days were numbered. Thankful it had been left this long.

Common buckeyes, a fall migrant around here, and one of my favorite butterflies. Those white wingbars flash in flight, and I can almost always identify this one on the wing before it alights. That's saying something for a butterfly.

And of course there were monarchs, but they preferred the more vividly colored tall ironweed.

On the leeward side, where he'd already mowed, mistflower still grows in the  uncut shadow of the hayrolls. There's a painting in there somewhere.

You know how I feel about hayrolls...

Not a week later, it was all gone. I guess you have to mow if you're going to make hayrolls.

 But he didn't even take hay this time. Just cleaned it up, made for an early frost.

The Last Rocket Standing

Some of the wild mustards are known as rockets, for the speed with which they shoot up and bloom in the springtime. Some of them, particularly the yellow rocket, are horrid, invasive pests--this species is from Europe. You'll see it blanketing bottomland fields in a cloak of brilliant yellow. Blaaa. Pretty but bad, bad, bad. Bill and I have been pulling yellow rocket since it first showed up on our farm three years ago. It's an annual, and it has the grace, like the dreaded and horrific invasive garlic mustard, to pull up cleanly by the roots. That's about the only thing I like about either plant.So I'm walking along the driveway, coming back from taking the mail out, pulling mustards from the ditch, planning to take them to my fire circle to burn (the only safe disposal for those darned seed-bearing siliques). There's a new word for you, quite a pretty one--a silique is the slender seed capsule of the Cruciferae. And I come to the last rocket standing, and this pearl crescent butterfly flutters up and nectars on its uplifted, tubular yellow flowers, and I hesitate and watch. The butterfly flies off and finds a mate and they hook up right there in front of my eyes, fueled by rocket sauce, presumably.Rocket, rocket, all of my rocket sauce.

Voyeuristic butterfly photo captured, I turn back to the rocket. Now I'm gonna pull it. I really am. And from underneath a leaf, midsection, pops the cutest little jumping spider I have ever seen, even cuter than Boris, the black Phidippus who used to live on my studio windowsill and leap on mealworms that I'd toss to him. Jumping spiders are my favorite spiders, thanks to their fabulous faces and endearing ways. They watch you, just like mantids, and they're very curious and , being territorial, they can be revisited again and again. I'm always delighted to get to know an individual, be it bird or spider.
Oh, let me see you a little closer.
Cute doesn't do it. You are adorable, with your RocketMan hair and your bright black eyes.
Woodsman, spare that tree! It was a microcosm of the death of my beloved Privacy Tree, with me the jumping spider, looking at the logger as his chainsaw snarled into its yard-wide trunk. The spider kept ducking under a leaf, then popping back out to see if I was gone yet.

I left the mustard standing.

The next day, I went back and carefully checked for RocketMan. He had vacated. I pulled the plant and tossed it on the fire with the others. I'm a softie, but I still hate yellow rocket.

Just as much as I love Eastern Tailed Blues. This is the best blue butterfly picture I've captured. You can even see his tiny tails. The 70-300 mm. zoom telephoto makes a darn good butterfly lens.A little flake of sky, fallen to earth.