Today, I’m beholden to The Far North Garden for my stringing consonants on my blog instead of spewing curses at the neighbours. Among the many well written and balanced postings available for whiling away a Sunday morning in a non-confrontational manner was a recent one on volunteer borage (Borago officinalis), one of my favourite alien plants. As a home bug gardener, I suppose I should claim that I plant borage for the bees, but really I like its “feed me” ‘Little Shop of Horror’ looks. Besides, I only planted it once five years ago and after that it has planted itself. Every year now I can enjoy its true blue flowers and spindly and spiny spread with no additional effort.
An added bug garden advantage of borage is that when the Painted Lady Butterflies (Vanessa cardui) make one of their rare, northward migrations into Edmonton (last one was 2005), their caterpillars love it. Of course, even a home bug gardener isn’t necessarily delighted with spiny black caterpillars devouring their plants (they hammered the lupines, yarrow, and globe thistle too), but a bit of plant biomass seems a small price to pay for the silent beauty of the Painted Lady. Also, those were the days when an acoustic guitar hootenanny was the worst we could expect from the rental neighbours and getting enough sleep is a pre-requisite to rational approaches to garden problems. Our rational approach was to let them feed (except on the newly planted globe thistle) and we now have enough of all of these plants that we would welcome another migration.
Although the rare Painted Lady migrations get the local Altalepers pretty excited, another rare migrant is far better known – the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Edmonton is far enough north and deficient enough in native milkweeds, the larval food, that the Monarch is a rare visitor. In 2007, however, we had the extraordinary delight to encounter a visiting Monarch in our backyard, watch it oviposit, and enjoy its larvae later chowing down on our ‘butterfly weed’.
Actually, although the seed packet from the Devonian claimed our milkweed was the Butterflyweed Asclepias tuberosa, a beautiful and not very aggressive plant with flat heads of orange flowers that would be marginally hardy here (usually rated to Zone 4), what actually emerged from the ground was a much more vigorous monster. I believe this is Swamp or Rose Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, which has ball-like umbels of pinkish lavender flowers and wandering roots that quickly took over our primary potager bed. Once its roots were contained in a smaller bed, however, it became a welcome addition to our garden.
I do miss the Monarchs from my time living east. What a treat for you!
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear about the bad neighbours - we had them next door when we lived in a previous house and I always thought that some people just aren't adapted to city living and should really be out in the woods somewhere :-)
Great post! I love the karaoke caterpillar.
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