2021 Garden Highlights
It’s become a bit of a tradition on Instagram to post a 9x9 grid of your top photos from the year, and this year brought me just an all-around, Paul Rudd-nice collection of garden memories.
The top left photo is my biggest and grandest zinnia bouquet of the year (actually taken October 21, 2020). Affectionately and somewhat bittersweetly named the “Goodbye Zinnia” bouquet, it was the result of one last huge rush of zinnia picking as frost neared that October.
Though not native, zinnias are non-invasive and bring tons of nectar for pollinators, habitat/hunting grounds for predatory insects (praying mantids, assassin bugs), and seeds for birds. Once I planted a 4’x25’ patch of zinnias along the east wall of my house, I also stopped feeding nectar to my hummingbirds from a feeder- they buzzed happily and frequently among the zinnias instead.
The top center photo is my favorite garden memory of the year. For the first time I was able to see a bumblebee’s tongue in action! It was remarkably huge on this golden northern bumblebee, and this particular bee was very calm and slow moving as I moved around it gaping and taking videos. The scientific name for this bumblebee is Bombus fervidus and the workers are known to work extremely hard and long, often so much that the older ones can work themselves to over-exhaustion and death while foraging (their scientific name makes sense now!). I suspect my bee was on the tail end of a very long day of foraging, and really hope she got to kick back with a bead of honey once she got home. On a lighter note, their unique method for defending their nests is to cover intruders with honey and sometimes even defecate on them. If that big ol’ mess doesn’t deter the intruder enough, the bees will lie on their backs with stingers in the air and mandibles wiggling - basically, all their hurt-y points aimed with extreme prejudice! These golden northerns do NOT mess around.
The top right is a monarch butterfly, of course, set against a backdrop of the only butterflies that can live year-round in Indiana (steel ones, of course). Similar styles can be found at the Rusty Birds Shop on Etsy.
The photo at center left if the eagerly anticipated first shoots of milkweed for the season. So many native plant gardeners are on the lookout in May for these, and it never fails to get hoots of celebration from everyone when you finally see them. This photo was taken April 30, 2021. I always pair my milkweed watching with tracking the monarch sightings on https://journeynorth.org/ If you haven’t already done this, I highly recommend you watch and add your sightings for spring and fall. They track many kinds of migratory creatures, so there’s a bit of something for everyone, even if they are not a bug person. This sort of citizen science gives me a huge boost of camaraderie with my fellow humans, and lets me believe there’s hope yet for us to start doing more good for the planet than all the bad that humans currently inflict on it.
The center photo is the flower that really won me over to using huge swaths of yellow in my previously all pink/purple/white scheme. Sweet black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia subtomentosa is also the flower that absolutely COATS my local bumblebees in pollen. Thanks to the internet, we now affectionately call them Cheeto bees. For 2022 I plan to experiment with cutting them back a bit in early summer, which will keep them a bit shorter and bushier. They topped 5 feet this year and some got a little lean-y over my paths.
The center-right photo is my favorite spring flower, wild geranium. If you haven’t already, plant some in a shade-part shade spot in your garden. I also really like to plant it around the bases of shrubs.
The spring photo at the bottom left shows some of the few tulip bulbs that I keep around. Spring Laura always grumbles a bit at Fall Laura for not planting more bulbs in November, but honestly, November Laura is ready for a break and revels in all that time NOT spent digging in cold ground. Tulips, we salute you, but don’t expect additional friends any time soon. What’s really cool are the pink native rose verbena just visible behind the back white tulip. Now THOSE are a flower worth multiplying and bragging about. They are a perfect ground cover, spread nicely but not aggressively, bloom from May to fall frost, and look beautiful regardless of whether it’s rainy or a drought. They are harder to find, but well worth buying a start of and expanding their patch over the years.
At the bottom center is a handy comparison of the markings of female and male monarch butterflies. I meant to do a whole post about this, but you know, life. The TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read as young people say) version: female is on the left with bolder/blacker wing veins and the male is on the right with fainter wing veins and two spots on the lower wings near his abdomen. The bold vs faint wing veins are a little harder to tell when you don’t have another butterfly there to compare it to, so I always just look for the two black spots.
The bottom right is another still of a video, this one of a bumblebee very precisely retrieving nectar from some prairie blazing star. The time that I spend staring at insects in my garden, I’m convinced, adds back a few minutes onto my life that stress and caffeine have taken off it. I hope more gardens can begin to serve others in this way and maybe save us while we save the world.
