Pollinator Garden: Success and a Fail

I’ll start with the good news. Yesterday I saw a monarch flitting around the back yard in the vicinity of the new plantings which include some rose milkweed. I suggested she stay and lay some eggs. No sooner had I said that than she lighted on the top of one of the plants and deposited this little jewel.

There’s another egg to the right of it, but I doubt she laid both of them. From what I understand a monarch will only lay one egg on a plant. It will be fun to watch the little bugger hatch and develop over the next weeks.

Now for the bad news. In my haste to get some plants established last fall I resorted to buying a cultivar of Monarda rather than a local species. They were on sale, after all! Well, now they’re blooming for the first time and I have big time buyer’s remorse.

I wish I had kept the label or could remember the name of this pink monstrosity. The picture doesn’t do it justice; it’s positively gross. Nothing like the nice lavender Monarda fistulosa blooming in the prairies right now. I’ll keep my eyes on them to see if any insects feel otherwise, but for now I think I’m going to have a hard time adjusting. Maybe they’ll turn out to be thuggish spreaders and I’ll have another excuse to introduce them to the compost pile.

A Design Touch-Up

This is a view of the back yard from upstairs. It was earlier this summer when things were probably at their most lush. In early spring the garden is a patchy sea of blue Scilla, a bulb I have mixed feelings about. Then the trees leaf out and the perennials fill in and it looks like this.

A few weeks ago I re-established the edge of the lawn. It was originally a perfect circle but over the years overhanging perennials have encroached in spots and the lawn has crept into gaps in the beds. I took a few measurements to see where best to set the center, drew a radius and went from there. In the end it was a bit smaller than the original design. I had to add another stepping stone at the main entry and fill a few perennial gaps with extra hostas from here and there.

The next step in my cunning plan was to set stakes every 16” around the circumference of the circle. For some time I’d been contemplating planting a ring of some variety of Crocus to define the lawn in spring. But something that low would probably not show in the marauding Scilla.

Instead, I picked up a big ol’ bag of mixed daffodil bulbs at Costco. I’m planting them three to a hole and many of the bulbs in the bag were double-nosed. I hope the clumps don’t look too weak. I’m almost done. There are still nine spots to do and I’ll need to get a dozen more bulbs to finish those, provided I go all the way up to the beehives. I can’t wait so see how this looks next spring!