Field of Dreams

by Ruth Ann Grissom

October 14, 2015

As the Chicago Cubs began their historic run in the major league baseball playoffs, I realized I had built my own field of dreams

this season – a backyard pollinator garden at my house in Charlotte – and the butterflies, bees and hummingbirds had come.

After clearing a tangle of invasive plants last winter – including ligustrum, privet, ivy and wisteria – I discovered a damp, sunny spot in my backyard.  This is highly unusual in a neighborhood of hundred-year-old willow oaks where most gardeners complain of dry shade, so I thrilled at the opportunity to grow a cheery suite of natives including lobelias, liatris, joe-pye weed, hibiscus, ironweed and bee balm.

Since my main goal was to help the imperiled monarch butterfly, I also included swamp milkweed.  My plants settled in and started to offer up their pink blooms in June, but I worried the monarchs wouldn’t find my new garden this season.  Still, the milkweed attracted a dazzling array of busy bees, ranging from large bumble bees and carpenter bees to tiny metallic creatures that wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to identify them.  Hoards of red and black insects also appeared on my milkweeds.  After a little research, I learned they were called milkweed bugs, appropriately enough.  I don’t understand their purpose in life, but they’re native and didn’t seem to damage the plants.  (I must add here that the milkweed was also covered with aphids, which I tolerated only because they didn’t migrate to other plants.)

Then, in August, a few bedraggled monarchs showed up in the garden.  One had tattered wings and lasted for only a couple days.  They seemed less interested in the milkweed than the ‘Miss Huff’ lantana which screamed for attention with a bounty of yellow, pink and orange blooms beside my screened porch.  Alas.  I assumed they were merely using my garden as a pit stop to fuel themselves with nectar.  Perhaps they were spent.  Maybe they’d already laid their eggs on a milkweed somewhere else.  Monarchs continued to trickle in.  These looked fresh and vital, but I’d given up hope at having any monarchs use my fledging milkweeds as a host plant.  So the day I noticed a yellow, black and white striped caterpillar on my milkweed, I was elated.  In the following weeks, I sometimes found a dozen on a single plant.

At the end of September, I stumbled upon a monarch chrysalis on the ironweed adjacent to my most popular milkweed, the one that had been defoliated down to the stalks.  The green cylinder is a little fatter than the tip of my pinkie and has a ring near the top that sparkles as if it were encrusted with gems. I check it daily.  Several times a day, in fact.  As I submit this article for publication, I’m still waiting for it to hatch.  I make excuses for why it’s taking so long and blame the long stretch of rainy weather earlier this month.  There’s a lot at stake.  This generation could use the nectar from my lantana, swamp sunflower and eupatorium to fuel the long and treacherous journey to the patch of forest where monarchs winter in central Mexico.

In the Uwharries, we’ve managed our old fields and pastures to promote the native habitats that benefit monarchs and other pollinator species, so this drama has presumably been playing out around me for years, but the intimacy of having it on display in my own backyard has left me even more invested in the monarch’s plight, and even more amazed at their beauty and resilience.  It’s also humbling to realize it takes so little space and effort to help sustain a species, especially if we all work together.  In neighborhoods not far from mine, Angel Hjarding, a doctoral student at UNCC, has been helping residents install pollinator gardens as part of  The Butterfly Highway Project (http://www.butterflyhighway.org/).  It has proven so successful, the N.C. Wildlife Federation hopes to replicate the model in communities across the state.

Follow the monarchs’ fall migration at http://www.learner.org/jnorth/maps/monarch_all_fall2015.html. 

For information on establishing a pollinator garden, go to http://millionpollinatorgardens.org/. 

To identify pollinators in your garden, go to http://www.xerces.org/download/pdf/PA_Xerces%20Guide.pdf.