Gone Garden.

This morning, I sat down to work on my work-related on-line course, and.... pfffffttt. My filing drawer overtook my attention, and my fav office creed kicked in: File, don't pile. In my pile, I found my old butterfly gardening journal. It's a good journal. Well filled-in, photographs and negatives from pre-digital days, references to my blog, news articles, e-mails, penned notes. Very thorough. And very, well, cut short. The last entry was Summer 2011. 

Seven years... 

I thought: I'll check my blog, where's it at? Last entry was Friday, January 1, 2016. Two years ago. Two... Broken picture links, and some weird notices about updates to the Blogger community.

Closure time. 

Except, yeah, hardly anyone knows I got rid of the garden. So, here's some closure. The space is bare of bfly plants, just the statuary, brick and trellises remain. The greenery you see here is grass. The decision to raze the garden wasn't that hard, actually. The pipevine had overtaken EVERYTHING, and I had a growing fear that furry and scaly animals would or already had nested in the mess. Nothing else was growing properly - no blooms, just ragged, leafless stems suffocating for the most part, bits of branch poking their sadness through the vine. And, yeah, butterflies weren't much around anymore.It took me the better part of two days to pull, cut and chop everything out. It was a few months ago, maybe summer last year. It's been awhile. The resurrection of the journal is what got me here again, to write, to close. I actually do have thoughts on next steps. In the years I've had the garden, I grew to love some plants more than others, and if I do ever plant anything bfly-related again, it will be a cassia. The candlebush variety. The one I had got a ton of action, beautiful yellow sulphur bflies. But, even it succumbed to The Vine. In the meantime, the cat house is a pleasant part of my back porch yoga space, and the key lime tree is green from all this rain of late. It's small and bushy but lush, and has sweet little buds at the moment. The giant swallowtails like it. I like it.

You?
    

Happy New Year from BCA

My favorite nature writer, Sharman Apt Russell, posted a New Year's photograph of a butterfly on her Facebook page - a quaint snout-nosed butterfly. It was a very pretty photo, too, so here I am, inspired to wish you all a Happy 2016 with a butterfly photograph of my own.

It's not my best photograph. Actually, it's my first of a butterfly from my garden. It's from late November 2003, right around Thanksgiving (another beautiful holiday for reflection, perhaps about blessings rather than the New Year tradition of goals for the year to come). It's also a picture snapped around the time of the fall monarch migration, and the garden's milkweed was LOADED with monarch cats.

This first photograph is film, not digital, of a monarch, emerged in a pre-cat house tank, pasted into a pre-Confessions-blog-and Facebook-page journal. It's a beautiful journal, purple cloth cover, ribbon bookmark with a bead, decorated with poetry I found and stickers given to me. It's a journal about my garden, its beginnings, the people who were around it or knew of it, and the loads of e-mail correspondence with a dearest friend and fellow bfly gardener (hullo, Amanda). The journal is heavy, too, the heft from all the film photographs pasted inside.

So, Happy New Year from "Male Monarch #1" (pre-name-game), and a BCA wish for you to have a year full of awesome confessions.

Take A Good Look.

'Cause it's the last time I'm photographing & filming swallowtail butterflies in the cat house.

Look what happens when you wait too long to release a flitty giant swallowtail:

Yep, a tail fell off her wing while I kept her captive for video & pix. Didn't notice 'til after her release.

Still, upon release, she flew fast, high and free. I've seen many a swallowtail bfly in nature with missing 'tails', which led me to research the tails' purpose.

After poking through a surfboard site (surfer lingo is fun to read. Check this out -

"The swallow tail allows the tail to be wide but still hold well in the face of the wave. Swallowtails basically handle the same as a squaretail, but they look 'way' more ominous, the first one i saw was on Jeff Crawfords singlefin board in the mid seventies(as he was dropping in on me, the punk!), and I've liked them ever since!

Nothing more serious looking than a double wing swallow with 4 channels, but really they don't do anything a squaretail can't do on a 3-fin with the normal modern tail width(13.5"-14.") Now everybody wants a 'wider thruster' called a Fish, and they just kind of go hand in hand with a swallow/dove tail for appearance sake, anyways!")

Then I made my way to an actual bfly site. Seems the 'tails' are designed to disengage in case birds or lizards grab at them. Much like a lizard tail when your house cat grabs at 'em. Eh, felt a little better about her broken tail. Not much though.

And I really must explain how exciting this emergence was.

She had pupated for WEEKS, thought she'd never come out. Then Mother's Day rolled around, we happened to have mom to our place for the day, and YES, the butterfly emerged!

So, enjoy the following photos, check out the Mom's Day video Butterfly Confessions Also Facebook Page, and know all turned out well. Mom's Day good karma made sure she flew beautifully, even without her little tail.

Click Link to BCA Facebook - Mom's Day Video:

http://www.facebook.com/mobileprotection#!/photo.php?v=4094528245916

Surfer lingo credit:

http://www2.swaylocks.com/node/1003424

Names Galore.

Butterfly names may come easily; a thought while tending cats or pupae (such a good model for the camera... 'Calvin' it is), or gleaned from an on-looker's comment ("Looks like bugs." Bugs, cute, hm, Bugs and Bunny... and  "Honey! There's a chrysalis out here that looks like green glass!" Then Honey she shall be.)

Then there are times when names have escaped me, and Confessions Readers have stepped in.  There was Absalom ("if he were blue..."), an orange-barred sulphur; and Lucretia, a monarch that pupated on a garden gargoyle.

Then there's name overload. Nothing sticks, nothing goes away, and I end up with a list that speaks to me on all fronts.

That's who went nameless the past couple of weeks - two bfly pupae-cup purchases from Butterfly World - swallowtails - a tiger and a spicebush.

Spicebush

Tiger

Names... names... names...

Doodle and Bug? (my mother's gift to her dear high-school friend, a spirit-lifting Build-a-Bear named Doodlebug.)

Jonathon and Jennifer? (remember the Harts? Season One and Season Two have been on permanent 'play' at my house lately.)

Flo and Machine? (from Florence + The Machine. Can't get their latest album Ceremonials out of my head.)

The obvious Tiger and Spice, or perhaps Sugar and Spice?

Meanwhile, the tiger has emerged - full, healthy,  and prettily posing for pictures.

Ever seen Dances With Wolves? Remember when the visiting Sioux eyeball Kevin Costner's romp in the field with his pet wolf? That's when Dances With Wolves was born; it's a name bestowed upon you when a spiritual someone, like a noble Sioux, observes your spiritual self.

So, summon your spiritual self, and name this tiger beauty whatever comes to mind, for you, to keep secret or to share.

(Volume up.)

Note: The spicebush emerged as of this writing. See his flittery self on Facebook - Butterfly Confessions Also.

Garden Flame.

Of today's purchases, I know not which brought more joy.

The pupae tucked in cups?

The puff of cassia bush?

The pentas times-two with buds like a spring promise?

Or was it the Mexican flame vine? A first-timer in the garden, this vine is a sturdy climber with intense, orange flowers, like daisies on fire. Butterflies love it, too, like moths to a bright-orange flame.

 

 

For years, I've eyeballed this vine, passing it over for  bushier bloomers, or other  climbers that caterpillars like to eat, like maypop and pipevine. So, this year, it has a home and an invitation to climb the lighthouse weathervane. With its addition, three varieties of vine will play backdrop to the garden.

And its bright orange hue complements the yellow flowers of the cassia and groundcover, and the red of the pentas. It'll be like a desert sunset in a scape of greens and browns.

All the day's planting made me hungry. How 'bout some guacamole with cilantro, diced onion and a squeeze of key lime... and a pork tenderloin with black beans and mango salsa... and sangria with apples, oranges, and lemons soaked in brandy... served on the back porch while the sun sets over the garden.

Like us on Facebook - Butterfly Confessions Also.

Gloom.

I suspect the threat of a South Florida freeze has passed. But this weather, this weather. It's gloomy and putting me in no mood to buy plants for the garden just yet.

And I like gloom.

I embrace gloom.

I have gargoyles in my butterfly garden. I buy red roses for my house on Poe's birthday. I read his poetry every October to honor his death day.

I make road trips to old houses, I visit cemeteries on vacation, and this weekend, I'm driving three hours to see The Woman in Black in the perfect company of a woman once described as "more goth than most goths."

So why is it I need sun to put me in the mood to garden? It's actually better to garden on a gloomy day. It's cooler and there's a chance for rain to water the newly planted.  It's just that...on gloomy days...there aren't any buuutttttterfliiiiiies (read that as whiny as you possibly can.) When I finally bring home some fresh old-fashioned pentas and milkweed, a cassia, a maypop, and a flame-vine, I want bflies to descend immediately like they did on sunny days past that I brought home new plants. That's enough to brighten even the gloomiest day.

                        

Swingin' Swingles.

Meet Citrus aurantifolia Swingle, a.k.a. the  key lime tree. I googled 'swingle.'  Before I go on, why include this tree in my BCA blog, purchased and planted  sometime between last July and the present-day? I'd narrow down the time-frame, but I've forgotten when we bought this fragrant fellow. Key lime trees attract giant swallowtail butterflies. Not GIANT swallowtail bflies (though they are large on the bfly scale), but giant swallowtails, as in, that's their name, like gulf fritillary or zebra longwing or spicebush swallowtail. So, our key lime tree is as much a part of the garden as the pentas and pipevine.

So. A latin name that includes 'Swingle.' So far in my search, swingle is a Colorado landscaping company, a Colorado woman duped out of a monetary donation by a co-worker's false cancer claim, a New Jersey councilman, a 1920's jazz musician from Alabama, a key-lime-pie-on-a stick dipped in chocolate, and a wooden tool for scraping and beating flax and/or hemp.

I added 'botanist' to 'swingle' and found William Tennyson Swingle. And, yes, the man, an American,  had done extensive world-wide citrus research since the early 1900s. He was possessed to collect botanical literature, including 100,000 volumes from China, which you may view in our country's Library of Congress. I'd rather see Eleanor Glanville's collection of dead bflies in England's Museum of Natural History, but that's just me.

So. Though I've not found explicit explanation, the 'swingle' in Citrus aurantifolia Swingle is most likely Mr. William Tennyson Swingle.

Wonder if he's any relation to Lord Alfred...

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Those choco-dipped swingles really looked good. Check 'em out here: http://stevesauthentic.com/wpnew/?page_id=23

Fascinated by Mr. W.T. Swingle? Cuz I know you are. Here: http://www.multilingualarchive.com/ma/dewiki/en/Walter_Tennyson_Swingle