Reason #1037

. . . why fall in southeast Ohio is one of life's great pleasures.

This is what I see when stepping out the front door.

And that's just one view. Turning slightly to the right, I get this.

Okay, the drop-dead red in the center is an invasive burning bush that will be replaced by a native in the near future, but the plant is going out in a blaze of glory.

While its replacement is growing, we'll just have to be satisfied with the trees in the arboretum.

I suspect we'll manage.

A not-so-blue blue

I'm not sure when or how mild depression got called "the blues." After all, blue skies are a good thing, right? And blue flowers are among the most prized, perhaps because of their rarity in nature, at least as far as true blues are concerned: spiderwort, delphinium, Himalayan poppies, maybe, but most other blues are more purple, at least around here.

But who cares? Agastache foeniculum, AKA anise hyssop or blue giant hyssop, has been one of the success stories of our new lawn strip garden. (Given my haphazard record-keeping, I cannot remember if our plant is the straight species or the short cultivar "Honey Bee Blue," but I suspect the latter.) In any sunny area that is not waterlogged, this plant is foolproof. I love the red western agastache species and hybrids, but our damp winters often do them in. Our eastern native is made of sterner stuff. 

This member of the mint family is not an immediate attention-grabber. It has nice serrated leaves, nice but not spectacular color, and a pleasant scent, but not one that wafts; the leaves need to be bruised to release the anise scent that gives the plant one of its common names. However, it starts blooming with the midsummer daisies and is still going now after most of the asters have finished. It grows in sand, clay, and actual soil, and asks for no water, though it has no problem with rain or snow. It plays well with others, forming steadily-growing clumps that, unlike those of its distant cousin wild ageratum, do not become invasive.

And it is a pollinator magnet. On an ordinary afternoon last week, our single plant was loaded with bumblebees (whom the unfortunate light conditions would not allow me to photograph), and a female monarch, who seemed determined to visit every blossom on the plant while tanking up for her long flight to Mexico.

Here's hoping that the goldfinches visit to get the seeds.  I'm not ready for the show to be over.

Asters Everywhere!

I have not done a lot of gardening since our March move, but the pollinator bed in the front lawn strip is getting off to a good start despite my neglect. Of course, asters are pretty much indestructible, which is why I love them so. Most of the year, they look pretty pathetic, scraggly foliage straggling along a stem that gets woody and frequently lists to one side or another, but then they start to bud,



and when they bloom--oh my. So much color, and so much life! For anyone not in the habit of observing such things, asters are major fall pollinator food, and the seeds eventually feed the small songbirds who hang around for our Mid-Ohio Valley winters.

I have a bad habit of forgetting which aster I have planted where, so I am never quite sure which plant will show up. When I moved plants this spring, I had hoped that I got a start of "Purple Dome," but no such luck. I did, however, manage to transplant not one but two specimens of "Wild Romance," enabling me to continue using the line, "Wild Romance is blooming." Even if one is not inclined to make silly statements, who could resist that color?

 

A joy of the lawn strip (which I have not been able to photograph due to inclement weather every time I think of going outside with a camera) is its plethora of asters, even though I deliberately did not plant aromatic aster due to its seriously thuggish propensities. In addition to my ridiculously-named "Wild Romance," the bed contains plain old New England aster, the misty purple so much a part of autumn and such a magnet for pollinators, 

 along with one of the excessively enthusiastic white asters that I can never identify (and surely did not bring along deliberately) and a surprise: a tall pale pink beauty never seen before in my yard. Even better, the boxwood hedge has yielded several specimens of a large-leaved aster in a lovely pale blue. That one does not yet have a definite ID, but a specimen has been rescued to the lawn strip bed, while the others will go to the college's pollinator habitat. Even I recognize that one cannot leave three-foot daisies poking up through what is supposed to be a well-behaved evergreen hedge. (However, the butterflies and bees would rather have the daisies. Just saying....)

Butterfly Sex

Yesterday I learned how to tell the boys from the girls, at least among monarch butterflies. (I did figure this out for humans a few decades ago, although I pay less and less attention to such things as the years go by.) At the end of a delightful one-day symposium on sustainable landscaping, the director of the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio, released several monarch butterflies bred on the site and tagged for research. These butterflies are part of the fall brood that, if all goes well, will find their way to Mexico to spend the winter.

The release took place in the arboretum's pollinator garden, a smorgasbord of nectar and host plants to leave any pollinating insect drooling (if insects could drool). None of the plants were new to me, but the garden was a delight, anyway.

My takeaway for the day was a lesson on how to sex monarchs. The males, like this handsome specimen resting on a swamp milkweed, have two black dots on the hindwings,

while the females lack such ornamentation. They're gorgeous, anyway.

 

Not long after these pictures were taken, despite its being a chilly day, these young adult butterflies began their spiraling flight into the first leg of their long journey south.

Mixed signals

Here it is, almost mid-September in the Mid-Ohio Valley, and the temperature the first part of the month hovered uncomfortably near 90. Tomorrow, on the other hand, is predicted to bring a high in the mid-sixties and quite a bit of rain, not perfect weather for the end-of-summer festival held in our town the second weekend of September. After a cool weekend, mid-eighties are predicted to return. The weather in our part of the world has trouble making up its mind.

Today brought mixed signals from our local flora and fauna as well. The tulip poplar across the street has already dropped at least a third of its leaves, most of them, it seems, on our sidewalk. Asters of various sorts are blooming in the front pollinator-garden-to-be (still too much in its infancy to be called a real garden).

One of our rudbeckias, however, has gifted us with thirty or so tiny seedlings, certain not to reach blooming size this late in the year. Sitting on the front patio grading papers (or trying to) this afternoon, I was distracted by adolescent cardinals sitting in the holly, demanding food. Such young birds (and such amusing bird behavior) have been more common in June than in September, but some of our local cardinals evidently managed to get in a late clutch of eggs, promising more color at the bird feeders next year.

But--squirrels have been sighted carrying fruits from the kousa dogwoods in the lawn strip and walnuts from the trees in the arboretum, evidently stuffing themselves with fat from the dogwood fruit and beginning their fall stashes of nuts. Hyperactive, foraging rodents are an almost-sure sign of fall. (So too, I fear, are the several hundred baby kousa dogwoods that need to be removed from the lawn strip before it becomes a kousa forest. Sigh.)

On beginning the last year of middle age

Yes, today is my fifty-ninth birthday--an odd age, not one recognized with special cards or generally celebrated with age-specific parties. The only time I remember the age ever being specifically mentioned is in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (which I read for the first time in my forties), when Anne examines herself in the mirror and concludes that she is "not bad for an old bat" but too old (and too married) to seduce a gorgeous young(ish) priest. It's an in-between age, kind of like seventeen (for those of us old enough to remember the song, in which Janis Ian described learning the truth), but at a very different place on the life spectrum.To stop any speculation right now, fifty-nine is a much easier age than seventeen. I like it better and thoroughly expect to enjoy it more. Adolescence was rough, and I have no desire to go back (except maybe to have joints that don't complain, such things being a nuisance).

Fifty-nine is not, however, young, and to be honest, not in the middle of any ordinary human life span. Until recently, sixty was considered at least early old age by nearly everyone. To my knowledge, none of my relatives has lived to be a hundred and eighteen, or even a hundred. Ninety is the outer limit for most of us (and those who made it further retained very few marbles during their last few years), placing me at the last year before the last third of earthly existence. Oh. my.

So--watch out, world! Retirement from full-time paid employment is only a very few semesters off (barring some economic disaster--not impossible, and I'll be in good company if that happens and likely to still be enjoying the tormenting of
students), and my hours and days will be mine to structure. Activities will be those that seem to me a worthwhile expenditure of limited time.

Hmm...I wonder what the next adventure will be.

Long time no blog

This summer has not been one with a lot of time for gardening, between finishing up our move, selling two houses, spending time with a family member receiving Hospice care, and schlepping around Bulgaria and Ireland for two weeks with friends. (At some point, there will be pictures of and meditations regarding the European experience.)

The good news is that our urban space is proving to be a wildlife mecca--well, maybe not a mecca, but we have wildlife, sometimes in the most unlikely places. The potted "tropical garden" on the back patio draws hordes of bumblebees and the occasional hummingbird

although the hummingbirds actually prefer the rose of sharon hedge separating our building from the yard next door. I would never have planted such a thing, given althea's desire to colonize the known universe, but the blossoms are evidently loaded with nectar.
A "pollinator pot" on the front wall is doing its job,

and we have more tufted titmice than anyplace else I have lived, sometimes half a dozen at a time going for the sunflower seed in the feeder. The mini-meadow in the lawn strip next to the street  has been attracting bees and butterflies, including the occasional monarch, for several months now despite its youth and pitiful raggedness.

The real excitement, though, was walking home from the library on a drizzly morning to find a pair of goldfinches busily scarfing down seeds from the lawn strip liatris. Looking forward to future develipments.