I’m holding on to a comment Doug Tallamy on a recent Backyard Ecology podcast. In these troubling times, he urged us to take care of our land. If we all did that, we’d provide an enormous amount of habitat for wildlife and help heal the planet. I’m seeing fewer insects this year. Many flowers and some insects are also appearing earlier than usual. On the bright side, most of the native plants that went into the ground last spring or fall have come up. The ones that have been here for two or more years are now leaping, as the rhyme says.
Front Garden
The front garden has fewer blooms right now, but some surprises.
- Bread wheat (a volunteer!), cross vine, blackberry
- Pussytoes
Back Garden
Flower highlights this week include:
- moss phlox, Jerusalem cherry, cinnamon fern (OK, those are fiddle heads, not flowers. Still adorable!)
- pink and yellow wood sorrels, white violets
- high-bush blueberries, iris, Eastern blue star
- lyre-leaf sage, Carolina allspice, blue-eyed grass
- pitcher plants
Visitors and Residents
- Five-line skink, female bullfrog, and male bullfrog, all with mating coloring
- Celery Leaftier Moth, maybe a carpenter bee, mining bee
- Forktail damselfly, Eastern calligrapher hover fly and varied carpet beetle, silver spotted skipper
- Small carpenter bee, narcissus bulb fly (who looks and sounds like a bee!), two kinds of ants on a peony bud
- Bumblebee
The image of the male bullfrog was my 1500th observation for iNaturalist!
