Hope Springs Eternal Into Summer!

       Gardens are exercises in optimism, a quality especially needed these days. One plants, and sows, and waters, and hopes. So many forces are outside one's control. Yet life keeps going, and growing, and pushing forward, and in a few short weeks, from late April to the present, one goes from the scene below...

... to this!

     The garden is much further along at the end of May than it has been on our first two years. Like party hosts, we have laid out the drinks and hors d'oeuvres, but the guests have yet to fully arrive. The swallowtails fly over, as if determined to get somewhere else. Many of our usual guests, like the silver-spotted skippers, have yet to appear (although a few zebulons have been basking in the sun on warm days.)  Bless the little pearl crescents, which spin delightedly through the air and already seem to have caught the mating spirit, fluttering at each other on the marigolds and coneflowers. 

      We have had a few random and surprising visitors. In a first for Grundy Country official sightings, a battered Funereal Duskywing landed in late April, soaking up minerals  and moisture from the soil.

     One untold tale from last season involves a butterfly called the Red Admiral, below. Territorial and a night owl, he comes to the garden at twilight (the only one who does), not to eat or drink but to perch, ready to defend territory against competitors who, so far, have never come. Last year we saw him regularly in July. His early visit was a surprise that we expect will be repeated, but not yet. 

     Go back to the picture at top, of the garden in April. Imagine a few days after that was taken, a Monarch female flying north from Mexico, somehow spotted it, somehow found the two foot tall milkweek plants just emerged, and laid eggs that somehow, over subsequent weeks,  developed, and hatched and whose caterpillars found enough to eat, shivering through the cold nights, eluding the spring menace of paper wasps killing at least five of the original 11, to get to this below, the transformation of the caterpillar into a chrysalis. 

     We know of three chrysalises, and hope that a couple more are hiding. With wary hope and optimism, we will be watching carefully the health of these three. With luck, they will be emerging within the next week.  Watch for updates!
     And my heavens! Look, the guests are finally starting to arrive! This Aphrodite Fritillary came today with an appetite.