Queen Anne's lace curving

Queen Anne's lace curving

down, droplets beading long stems --

soft sweet summer rain

Just as I open the door to walk to the mailbox, a gentle rain is falling. Good time for a stroll in the cool freshness under a big blue and yellow umbrella. Along the road a patch of Queen Anne's Lace bend and sway, rain drops beading along the long stems.

Other wildflowers with thin stems are also stooping almost to the ground.

While the sturdy stems of milkweed stand erect. Sadly, I have seen nary a Monarch butterfly this year.

Bee balm in bloom now, but of course the honeybees are holed up in their hives during the downpour.

A lone wild rose blossom, dappled with rain drops.

Trees are also producing flowers, dangling beneath a canopy of wet leaves.

I feel like I'm walking in the jungle, such profusion of greenness, glistening, wet, wild, like this wild grape vine.

Everything is in a hurry to grow, grow, grow, soak up the rain into the roots, make chlorophyll with the ever-expanding leaves while the sun shines, produce flowers, bear seeds, now, now, now!

curving back around

curving back around

a black-eyed susan, a monarch

caterpillar seeks

a twig to hang upside down

into a green chrysalis

I've been picking small fuzzy white caterpillars off of my goji berry vine outside our front door. They eat the leaves, so I carefully relocate them. But when I scan for creepy crawlies today, I'm surprised to see a large black, white and yellow striped caterpillar making its way slowly along one of the stems. It's really quite beautiful, with those striking stripes and curvy black horns on both ends. Almost as beautiful as what it will turn into, a Monarch butterfly. It's nice to know that there are still Monarchs around this area, even though they are threatened by all the pesticides applied to monoculture crops.

This specimen, born from eggs laid in September, is a fourth generation Monarch caterpillar. When it emerges from its chrysalis into an orange and black butterfly, it will not die after a couple of weeks of mating and laying eggs, like the first three generations that came before it this year. Instead, it will fly all the way to a warmer climate like Mexico, where it will live for six to eight months before starting the whole cycle again. 

I wonder if it is still looking for a milkweed plant to eat, or whether it's ready to turn into a chrysalis. The strange thing is, I have seen hardly any milkweed plants in our area this year. Usually the swath between the road and the trees is filled with milkweeds. I've looked and looked, but only found one small milkweed plant, with no flowers and no sign of the leaves being chewed by a caterpillar.

These photographs of the sequence of transformations of the Monarch from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly are from an excellent website, which describes the entire generational cycle: http://www.monarch-butterfly.com.

Perhaps if I had left the Monarch caterpillar on my goji vine, instead of placing it on a Black-eyed Susan for a colorful portrait, it might have attached itself to a goji stem, turned into a chrysalis and hatched into a butterfly. Wouldn't that be exciting? But the nights are getting cooler, and if frost threatens I may have to bring my potted goji inside. Then what would happen to the butterfly if it hatched inside? A warmer clime for sure, but no mates within thousands of miles!

yellow ray flowers

yellow ray flowers

on gray-headed coneflowers droop

by nature not heat

The Compositae are having their annual family reunion in the deer meadow. It's hot and parched in this patch of prairie grass, but the cousins are out in droves, hobnobbing in the slight breeze. The Compositae are composite flowers, so-called because each flower includes two different types of flowers called florets. Many tiny florets gathered together in the center of the flower head make up the disc. On a black-eyed Susan, the dark center of the flower head is actually a cluster of small disc florets. Yellow coneflower is sometimes called gray-headed coneflower because the disc flowers are gray until the florets open and change to brown. The disc flowers of purple coneflower are bigger than those of other coneflowers. What appear to be long petals surrounding the disc are actually ray flowers, each one attached to a pistil and thus considered an individual flower. Each of the florets of a composite has the ability to produce a seed. The composite cousins are similar, yet different. Yellow coneflower's rays droop and are longer and thinner than those of black-eyed Susan, while purple coneflower's rays are larger and pinkish purple rather than yellow. Nowadays, people are familiar with purple coneflower as echinacea, widely used for its anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-inflammatory properties. Many summer wildflowers take to the meadows in order to bask in the sunlight otherwise blocked in the woods by leaf canopies. They have adapted to the drying effects of sun and wind by having thin leaves, thick stems and deep roots to reach moisture. Even so, the ray flowers of all the composites are beginning to wither in this continuing heat and drought.