Exploring Marine Ecosystems and Native Plants: Insights from Coral Reefs to Backyard Gardens
We visited the Sunken gardens recently. This is an and utterly beautiful botanical garden. The highlight for me was when I sat down on a stone ledge and looked over to see who was sitting next to me. It was this guy who I had to look up later to know is a green heron.
I planted milkweed to entice butterflies and to support an endangered species by providing food, shelter, and host plants for their caterpillars. Last week, I figured out that I had planted the wrong milkweed. Not just a little bit wrong, or kinda unhelpful - I planted a type of milkweed that is actually contributing to… Continue reading The wrong milkweed!
My Beauty Berry bush has ripe berries and I finally got to taste them. They had a distinctly piney aroma and slight piney taste that was a little medicinal as well. The texture was very sweet and grainy/gritty. There was little to no sweetness. But WOW, they are SO brilliantly purple, it was like eating something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
I was so excited today when I discovered that a new butterfly species had come visiting the backyard. The Zebra Heliconian butterfly is strikingly beautiful.
For most of the summer, I only saw Gulf Fritillary butterflies flitting over my two passion flower vines and occasionally sipping nectar from the flowers I had planted. Then sometime in late September, I saw my first Monarch! It was utterly thrilling to see as many as three or four at a time nectaring on the Torch flowers and laying eggs all over the milkweed plants!
Erica Lauer Vose 