Small things

     This is hardly optimal wildlife habitat,

being a roughly 15x20-foot patch bordered by two sidewalks, a driveway, and a fairly busy street. Of course, being a plant nerd, I pack a lot into the space,

including things that probably shouldn't grow there, like Joe-Pye weed, which I do at least whack it to keep it short(ish). But how can any garden not welcome any plant that does this?

Joe is such a sociable plant.

    My little space attracts all the usuals--skippers, swallowtails, fritillaries, crescents, bees, predatory wasps, the occasional monarch--but things new-to-me have also been known to visit. These swamp milkweed beetles were getting a bit frisky on the whorled milkweed.

And this spotted thyris moth was like nothing I had ever seen before.

All this adult insect activity indicates that larval hosts must be somewhere nearby, and they are. My little patch sits across the street from the city arboretum, home to oaks, maples, and tulip poplars more than fifty feet tall, along with younger specimens of a good many species. All those native trees, coupled with the "enthusiastic" planting on my corner, provide homes for a lot of "the little things that run the world," as Half-Earth Project founder E. O. Wilson describes insects.

    And all those insects provide a lot of bird food. The species nesting in the trees on our perhaps-tenth-acre lot include robins, chickadees, titmice, wrens, cardinals, and at least two kinds of sparrows. The dozens of trees in our block of the arboretum provide homes for others, not to mention a sizable population of squirrels. The red-shouldered hawks that make their home less than a block away seem to be finding plenty of food, as do the bats, swallows, and nighthawks that come out at dusk. The number of adult fireflies lighting up the neighborhood are an indication that their carnivorous larvae are eating something. 

    This area is not pristine wilderness, but it is definitely habitat. Small spaces can provide food and shelter for a myriad of small creatures, and those small creatures make up a big part of our shared world.