A possible cure for the insect apocalypse?

The last few months have brought alarming reports on declining insect populations, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the "insect apocalypse."  Given that insects are an essential part of all terrestrial food webs (and that a lot of human food depends on insect pollination), this news is beyond alarming. Out for a walk through Toledo's Wildwood Metropark yesterday, I was deeply troubled to find almost no insects in Susan's Meadow, an area generally buzzing with life. (Sorry--I couldn't resist.)

There were a few butterflies flitting here and there, some tiny flies, and an interesting creature I could not identify on a monarda,

but none of the clouds of bees usually found there. Nor were there any goldfinches, whereas last year they were swooping around in what looked like aerial dances. An Ohio summer without insects is Not Normal.

Leaving the meadow and heading toward the manor house (Wildwood having been part of a wealthy family's estate at one time), I decided to check out the rain garden and found where at least some of the bees and other buzzing insects had gone; they were all over a blooming buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis).

This cousin of coffee, gardenia, and sweet woodruff(!), it turns out, was once a major nectar source for a beekeeping industry in the southern US, and is an important larval host for several showy moth species. The Xerces Society (and if you aren't familiar with this organization, you need to remedy that situation immediately) regularly includes buttonbush on its lists of plants for bees and butterflies. In addition to being useful to insects, buttonbush produces fruits eaten by more than fifty species of birds.

These need to ripen for a few months.

This common native plant takes a fair amount of space and water, occurring as it does in wetlands and damp woods, but in the right setting, it seems to garner more insect attention than anything else in the vicinity. Something else to add to your "if you plant it, they will come" list.

"Admire me I am a violet!"

Something no self-respecting violet would ever say, according to poet John Keats in a letter to a friend; in his view, "retired" flowers like violets and primroses would lose their beauty if they called attention to themselves. With all due respect to Keats, when the common blue violet is in bloom in its thousands in an Ohio April, the spectacle is pretty attention-getting. I have never taken a photo that does justice to the show, but the swaths of deep purple resting just above the deepest spring green in every Marietta park are not exactly shy about making their presence known.

And why should they be? Violets are not only an indestructible ground cover, they are the sole larval host for the great spangled fritillary, one of our most beautiful butterflies, and a major early pollen source. They deserve to strut their stuff.

But the flowers we think of when we hear the word "violet" are not the only types. Besides numerous species of purple violets that I am not in good enough shape to identify (since me crawling around on  the ground with a magnifying glass would be a whole other kind of spectacle), Ohio also boasts violets of other colors. For several decades now I have looked forward to the shy blooming of the white violets descended from the patch in a deceased friend's yard. Unlike their common cousins, white violets do not spread aggressively but keep within bounds and play well with others.

And yesterday I saw my first specimens of a violet I had not known existed, the (supposedly) common yellow violet (Viola pubescens), growing in several areas of Wildwood Metropark. This little beauty is pickier about siting than Viola sororia, preferring to grow in relatively undisturbed soil in forested areas.

As far as I know, this particular violet does not grow in England, but it behaves much more like those Keats described. Those of us who want to appreciate it will need to seek it out; it won't shove itself in our faces.

Following my nose to a new discovery

The Toledo Botanical Gardens are not as colorful this spring as they have sometimes been. Yet another Winter That Would Not End has delayed quite a few of the spring bloomers, though the daffodils are being their usual cheerful selves and looking quite lovely amidst the birches.

Walking along the path next to the walled garden, though, I was hit by a sweet scent too powerful to be coming from a few ground-level narcissi, so of course, I had to follow my nose. The scent was coming from a shrub I had never seen before.

This not-particularly-impressive-looking thing was the source of a spicy sweetness noticeable several yards away. My first thought (after "what is that thing?") was that it looked like a white forsythia, and a little snooping revealed that this is more or less what it is. White forsythia is one of the common names of Abeliophyllum distichum, a Korean endemic now listed as "endangered" in the wild, with fewer than 4000 specimens remaining. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists habitat loss from deforestation and "ruthless collection" as contributors to the species' precipitous decline in its natural habitat.

Given that Abeliophyllum is as easily propagated as its yellow cousin, there is no excuse for wild collection of this plant. Any branch that touches dirt can be rooted by simply pegging it to the soil or even placing a brick to keep it in contact, so if you feel the need to acquire white forsythia, please make sure that it was nursery-propagated and not wild-collected.

The scent is wonderful, but allowing this plant to become extinct in the wild would not be sweet.

A fine day

Yesterday was a good day to wander a couple of favorite parks. Not much is blooming yet in northwest Ohio, but the trilliums are beginning to show themselves,

and the chionodoxa at the botanical gardens are at their peak.

Not quite an English bluebell wood, but not bad for a public park in an ordinary neighborhood.

And when the warblers are warbling, the peepers are peeping, and the spring colors are this fresh, we can wait a while for the flowers to take over the show.

Back to the real world

or at least, to the world where I have spent most of the last four decades. On a short walk last Friday, the sun that inspired me to do my errands was followed by ice pellets bouncing off the sidewalk with a little of what looked like snow amid raindrops, a definite contrast to the 90 degrees and sunshine that were the typical weather of the place where I spent most of the winter.

Of course, the tropics are very real. Beautiful, yes, but with their own sets of problems. Beach erosion, for one. The beach below the sea wall of our too-close-to-the-water rental house was lovely and walkable in January

but during my 2018 visit had lost several inches of sand before I headed home.

This sand cliff grew taller as the weeks passed.

Snowbird mode is a different life as well. Not having projects in Yucatan (though that situation is likely to change next year) leaves lots of time (perhaps too much) for doing basically nothing, not that people- or pelican-watching is a bad thing. In the Valley, fitting everything into the available days (not to mention the available energy) is a major challenge. Busy is better than bored (not that I get bored very often), but there are limits.

And there are definite good things about the eastern US: April is daffodil season.

And six months later, we get fall.

For the birds

The first robins showed up a few days ago, and judging by all the singing, twittering, and general avian sounds emanating from every tree, shrub, fence, wire, and gutter in the neighborhood, we should start seeing baby birds in the not-too-distant future. But before that can happen, the parents-to-be of most species need to build some nests, a process that requires building materials.

Most of our common songbirds (and quite a few others) use small twigs and dried grass as the basis for their nests, but such things are in short supply in overly-manicured neighborhoods. Some humans try to compensate by leaving materials such as pet hair, dryer lint, and short pieces of yarn or twine where birds can find them, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology advises against these items. What our birds need is more of this.

If you have managed to avoid completing your fall (ha!) yard cleanup, now is a good time to cut those clumps of dead grass and leftover plant stems and use them to create an avian Home Depot.  These in-demand items can be placed in suet cages and hung in likely spots, or just left in piles on the ground if no neighbors object. They will be put to good use.

Once the babies arrive, they will need food, which generally means caterpillars or small insects, with baby hummingbirds being particularly fond of nearly-microscopic flies and gnats. The average brood of baby chickadees will need anywhere from 6000-9000 caterpillars or other insect larvae before they can leave the nest, with other species being similarly voracious. Multiply that number by the number of bird pairs in your area, and the need for insect-friendly habitat becomes obvious.

This planting is only one example of an insect- (and therefore bird-) friendly flowerbed: native plants with landing pads, nectar, pollen, and eventually lots of seeds.

Put something like this near trees and shrubs, and your yard is going to make the birds and the bees very happy.

A new favorite place

A tropical garden in an urban setting is a jewel not to be missed, and last week I and the fellow inhabitants of our guesthouse got to tour the Roger Orellana Botanical Garden. This tucked-away treasure, part of a research institute known as CICY, is an oasis for birds and other wildlife in the middle of a very busy city. Alas, a technical problem (a dropped external hard drive that will no longer open on my computer) has trapped most of that day's photos within a currently-useless piece of technology, so this single image of the entry to the gardens will have to do to provide a sense of the place.

Founded in 1983 on the grounds of an old hennequin hacienda, the garden's 2.5 hectares (roughly six acres) include a medicinal plant garden, a native plant nursery, a bird garden, a pollinator habitat, a showcase for Yucatan's twenty species of native palms, and glass houses for desert plants and tropicals from several continents. We were the only human visitors on the day we were there, but the garden was a very busy place.

Besides all the plants busily doing their plant things, the space was full of birds, several dozen species inhabiting this small site. Dragonflies were everywhere in the damp areas and water gardens, and the place was buzzing with bees. The adjoining medicinal and pollinator gardens include a bee house constructed partly of tree trunks, as many of the native bees are cavity nesters. Unlike their cousins to the north, the melipona of Yucatan produce quantities of honey and have been cultivated by the Maya for several thousand years. The bee house contained such incongruous objects as a cigarette and a shot glass, but our guide explained that a local shaman comes each year to bless the bees and make an offering.

CICY's research into the region's medicinal plants is in fact carried out in cooperation with a number of the traditional healers known as shamanes, or shamans. The village healers come to CICY with questions and plants, and the academic researchers use the information provided by local people to attempt to isolate the disease-fighting compounds in the plants used traditionally in the villages. The medicinal garden's plants were labeled with signs indicating the conditions they have been used to treat. Fascinating stuff.

As seems to be typical of worthwhile projects everywhere, the garden is understaffed and not particularly well-funded, so it is looking for volunteers for a variety of projects. My little ears perked up to learn that English-speaking tour guides are a need. Free training on the plants of the Yucatan coupled with a chance to tell stories and educate people on the biological wealth of this region sounds like a deal too good to pass up, so I think I know what I will be doing next winter.