Perhaps the wrong name

A few days ago, walking the downtown river trail, I came across a Buddleia davidii, commonly called butterfly bush, in full bloom, even in mid-October. 

Who could not love that color? And while there were not many butterflies out on a chilly fall morning, the bush was hosting several fat bumblebees, of which, unfortunately, I did not get a decent photograph. And who doesn't love bumbles? Even this late in the season, the plant's leaves were in pristine condition, not a single spot or hole.

What's not to like?

Plenty. Butterfly bush is actually not a good butterfly plant. Yes, it provides a gorgous, sweet-smelling snack bar for adult butterflies over a long season, but those perfect leaves are a tip-off: this plant feeds not a single North American caterpillar, AKA baby butterfly. When we give this exotic plant a home in our yards, we are in fact reducing butterfly habitat, which must include space to reproduce if we want more generations of the fluttering creatures we purport to love. To make the case against buddleia even more strongly, more than 95% of North American songbirds feed their young almost exclusively on caterpillars: planting the misnamed "butterfly bush" also reduces the reproductive capacity of the birds whose nestlings will starve without the fat and protein provided by caterpillars. A single brood of chickadees, to give just one example, requires between 6000 and 9000 caterpillars before they can leave the nest. Earthworms are no good, being another non-native species providing little nutritional value.

This is what a leaf on a useful plant should look like in fall (unless of course it has been completely munched): spotted and full of holes.

If some of these leaves are turned over, they will reveal eggs or larvae hiding on the underside.

Something hiding on a riverside silver maple

I know that our gardening instinct calls for perfect, unblemished  plants, but nature requires imperfection and transience. Plants must be chewed for animals to live, and we bipedal primates require the interaction of plants, animals, and microbes for our own thriving.

Filling a yard with "butterfly bush" is the equivalent of feeding a child a diet of nothing but gummy bears. 

The plant needs a new name. The real "butterfly bush" is an oak, but that is a subject for another post.

The Village Grows

 The Fort Street Pollinator Habitat has become quite the happening place, with heliopsis and rudbeckia getting much taller than such plants have any right to be--and unfortunately, sometimes collapsing under their own weight--

Keeled-over heliopsis

but blooming anyway.

with their persistent blooms

Perhaps the most exciting growth, though, was the team of volunteers that came out earlier this month to create a mowing edge of bricks salvaged from a to-be-demolished building. When the bricks were offered by the building's owner a few weeks ago, some dedicated workers used crowbars and brute strength to remove them from the old floor, load them onto a truck, and unload them in a storage area made available by the church across the street from the habitat. On September 17, workers, tractors, and trailers materialized, and the bricks were moved to their new location.

At least twenty-one people showed up early on a misty Saturday morning to make this project happen. They included members of a church committee, the Rotary Club,

the leadership program of a local college,               

a teenager and his grandmother,

general community members, and a City Council representative. The team had an age range of more than seven decades. 

Our crew worked hard

but managed to have some fun along the way.

Photo courtesy of Marsha Ward

Some senior pictures were taken while the staircase was being weeded.

And in roughly four hours, the team dug out and installed edging along the habitat's 285-foot length.

A project that started with a discussion in a church basement and five geriatric committee members pinning solarization plastic to a slippery slope has become something else entirely. Volunteers from three community organizations, several faith communities, and the neighborhood have engaged in several work days on the site. Our small city has provided land and invaluable logistical support. Some local businesses have donated materials.

And nature is doing the rest. What had been a hillside of invasive Johnson grass and poison ivy is now home to bumblebees butterflies, and songbirds, and gives humans a reason to stop and take pictures.

Eutrochium Euphoria

     Joe Pye weed to me is the essence of an Ohio summer, its poofy, pale-pink blooms decorating every unmown roadside and field and probably too much of my small yard. But it is such a sociable plant, attracting more tiger swallowtails than any other bloom I know. Yesterday afternoon, a single plant was hosting six, though they would not agree to cluster in camera range.

                    Formerly part of the genus Eupatorium, Joe Pye has now been given its own genus, but whatever it is called, the plant is a pollinator magnet. Summer afternoon entertainment around here includes checking out the activity. A fifteen-minute period today found bumblebees, honeybees, hoverflies, both the yellow and dark morph forms of tiger swallowtail, a black swallowtail, a great spangled fritillary, several silver-spotted skippers, a hummingbird, and the year's second monarch. Wildlife-watching without leaving my favorite porch chair. 

     In addition to being a nectar host for any number of adult butterflies and moths, Joe is a larval host for swallowtails, skippers, painted ladies, blues, and assorted moths and provides fall seed for small birds. Left standing, it can provide cover, and its hollow stems host cavity-nesting insects.

     This is not, however, a plant for timid gardeners. Dwarf cultivars of Joe Pye can reach five feet in height, and some species are downright enormous. The photo below is a specimen that volunteered in my yard, taken early in its second season in 2019. The tree in the background is a mature "Bloodgood" Japanese maple, more than fifteen feet tall.

The photo below was taken this evening, after the plant had been beaten down by heavy rain. The tallest stem is somewhere around ten feet, or maybe twelve. 

     In more civilized parts of the yard, I prune Joe Pye, cutting it back by a third the first weeks of June and July to keep it between four and six feet tall. These plants start blooming a few weeks later than the one left to its own devices but do just fine, and extending the bloom season is never a bad thing.

     And for me, being surrounded by so much buzzing, fluttering life is the major joy of summer.

 

Silver-spotted skipper

Cup of gold

 Silphium perfoliatum, our native cup plant, is no shrinking violet. Native to fields, prairies, roadsides, and ditches, this enthusiastic yellow composite can reach heights of ten feet, making it one of Ohio's most striking wildflowers. As tough as it is beautiful, the specimen in my old yard survived at least two years heeled in in a pot much too small for its root system, the gnarled result having to be cut out of its broken container when I finally got around to planting it (hence my Wildlife Gardeners title of "Official Silphium Abuser"). The clump below survived by pushing its way through the solarization plastic on the slope intended to house Phase Two of the Fort Street Pollinator Habitat. (In our volunteers' defense, we got the site in November, when the silphium had already collapsed into a mass of dried stems, so we did not know what a treasure we had.)

While this particular yellow daisy can be a bit much for some tastes and is, admittedly, not well-suited to a small urban garden, it is a fabulous wildlife plant. The common name refers to the "cup" formed by the leaves growing from the stem, which is a drinking water source for small birds after a rain.

Goldfinches seem as fond of cup plant seeds as they are those of its cousin, the annual sunflower, and this beauty comes back on its own every year. It is a favorite pollen source for bees, 

and some species of leafcutter bees nest in the hollow stems that remain at the end of the growing season. It also serves as a larval host for some moth species.

Besides, cup plant is attractive in all stages of growth. The leaves are lush, the blossoms are undeniably impressive, and the buds and opening blooms are just plain fun.

Yes, we're going to have to keep an eye on our golden Silphiums to be sure they don't take up too much room, but we suspect the Joe-Pye weed going in this fall will be able to hold its own.