With Covid making the winter ahead look rather long and devoid of travel and related fun, I’ve amused myself on my Facebook and Instagram accounts by posting a pollinator each and every day since November 1st. I might take a short break during Christmas week, but given that pollinator photography is one of my specialties, I’ve pledged to celebrate these little creatures throughout winter until March 31st, using the hashtag #janetsdailypollinator. Although my daily social media posts always feature a few extra photos showing either more insects on the plant I choose, or a few plant combinations incorporating the plant, or even a few items I bake with the fruit produced by the pollinator (!), I thought it would be fun to let my little pollinators star in a few blogs, too.
November 2nd – Bumble bee on fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’) in my Toronto garden.
November 3rd – Honey bee, hoverfly and bumble bee on fall snakeroot (Actaea simplex) in my Toronto garden. I wrote about this very late perennial combination in a blog from 2017.
November 4th – Squash bees (Peponapis pruninosa) in a ‘Marina di Chiogga’ squash at Montreal Botanical Garden.
November 7th – Bumble bees on showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka. If you want to read about goldenrods, have a look at my post “Sparing the ‘Rod, Spoiling the Bees” from 2014.
November 8th – Ruby-throated hummingbird on Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ at my cottage on Lake Muskoka. Want to see a video of the hummingbird on this plant? Have a look at my YouTube channel video.
November 9th – Monarch butterflies on Rocky Mountain blazing star (Liatris ligulistylis) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka
November 10th – Hoverfly on oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka.
November 11th – Honey bee on Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale) at the University of Guelph Arboretum.
November 12th – Bumble bee on nodding onion (Allium cernuum) with Russian sage in the background at Toronto Botanical Garden.
November 13th – Megachile bee on hoary vervain (Verbena stricta) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka.
November 14th – Pure green gold sweat bee (Augochlora pura) on sacred basil or tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum) in a deck pot at my cottage on Lake Muskoka.
November 15th – Honey bees on banana flowers (Musa acuminata Cavendish Group) at Miami’s Fairchild Botanical Garden.
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November 16th – Bumble bee on Virginia bluebell (Mertensia virginica) at Toronto’s Casa Loma.
November 17th – Bumble bee on eggplant flower (Solanum melongena ‘Gretel’) at Montreal Botanical Garden.
November 19th – Bumble bee on yellow cosmos (Cosmus sulphureus) at the Ottawa Experimental Farm.
November 20th – Painted lady butterfly on plum blossom (Prunus domestica) at Toronto’s Spadina House garden.
November 21st – Monarch butterfly on drumstick allium (A. sphaerocephalon) at Toronto Botanical Garden.
November 22nd – Bumble bee on yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. I love the white flowers of June in the cemetery; have a look at my blog “June Whites” from 2017.
November 23rd – Honey bee on ‘Red Sprite’ winterberry (Ilex verticillata) at the High Line in New York City.
November 24th – Ruby-throated hummingbird on ‘Apricot Sprite’ (Agastache aurantiaca) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka.
November 30th – Monarch butterfly on New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) at my cottage on Lake Muskoka.
And that’s it for November’s little pollinators! If you want to see my multi-photo posts with their associated anecdotes, join me on Facebook or on Instagram! See you later this December with the pollinator crew from the last month of 2020!
For someone growing plants in meadows and naturalistic planting beds at ground level at our cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, I spend an inordinate length of time each summer watching a few mismatched pots on the upper deck right outside my cottage living room window.
At first it was just a pair of oversized resin pots planted with conventional annuals. In 2007, that meant ‘Profusion Orange’ zinnias, nasturtiums, ivy geraniums and peach and yellow African daisies (Osteospermum ‘Symphony Series’).
In 2011, I planted both pots with an eclectic mix of succulents, agastache and spiny porcupine tomato (Solanum pyracanthos) that I bought at the Toronto Botanical Garden’s spring plant sale.
That was the first year I noticed that the ruby-thoated hummingbird seemed to be enjoying nectaring in the agastache flowers.
In 2012, my pots featured the few succulents I was able to winter over in a sunny ground floor window as well as a swath of colourful portulaca.
In 2015, with photography on my mind, I paid more attention to hummingbird favourites, shopping at a favourite nursery (Toronto’s Plant World, sadly now closed) to buy a selection of salvias and agastaches (aka hummingbird mints) I called my “hummingbird groceries”.
One pot featured deep-pink calibrachoa, orange portulaca and ‘Zahara Double Orange’ zinnias with Agastache ‘Kudos Series’.
The hummingbirds loved Agastache ‘Kudos Coral’.
I added a third pot that summer, planting it with Bidens ferulifolia ‘Campfire Fireburst’ (an over-rated plant)….
….. and some special salvias or sages, including Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’.
The hummingbird supped a little in an ordinary nasturtium too.
In 2016, I couldn’t find all the plants I wanted so I filled in with assorted fancy petunias. I also found holy basil or tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum) which is one of the most amazing bee plants. Since I do a lot of native bee photography, I never had to go far to find a huge assortment of bees to photograph…..
…… including the tiny green sweat bee (Augochlora pura).
But that was the year I discovered that hummingbirds love the Wish series of salvias, including Salvia ‘Ember’s Wish’ below.
The next year, 2017 (notice I added two additional very motley pots from the back of the cottage), I had a pleasant surprise. The striped and ‘Wave’ series petunias I’d grown the previous year self-seeded in the soil over winter and…
….. produced a beautiful mix of healthy hybrids in all kinds of jewel colours. I liked them much better than the originals, and some had that old-fashioned fragrance.
I also grew heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens) for its sweet perfume and was pleased to welcome back self-seeded ‘Apricot Sprite’ agastache (A. aurantiacum)……
….. which is always a hummingbird menu choice.
That year I also grew blackeyed susan vine (Thunbergia alata ‘Susie Yellow‘) on a tripod in one of the pots and caught the hummingbird checking it out on occasion.
In 2018, I worked on my close-up photography. It’s not that easy to get photos of the male ruby-throated (it’s the male that sports the rosy neck feathers or gorget), since males migrate south much earlier than females, usually by the end of July. But here is monsieur on Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’.
It was fun to try Lantana montevidensis that year, and someone approved!
As always, the self-seeded ‘Apricot Sprite’ (Agastache aurantiacum) was popular not just with hummingbirds, but with the odd bumble bee too.
For 2019, my motley pots featured the usual suspects in the sage department, and I added a little birdbath which was never visited (though pretty)…..
Which brings me to 2020. Actually, let’s go back to November 2019. When I knew my Toronto source for plants of Argentine sage (Salvia guaranitica) was going out of business, I decided to dig up my tender ‘Black and Blooms’ plants and bring them down from Lake Muskoka to the city. I left the pots on the deck in early autumn for my husband to keep watered when I travelled to Greece to take a botanical tour with my pal Liberto Dario. Alas, my husband also travelled to New York on the coldest night of November and my poor sages sat outside in Toronto as the thermometer plunged to -9C. When I came home, they seemed to have died. But I put them in our basement laundry tubs, gave them a watering, and just watched. Sure enough, little leaves emerged eventually and by March they announced themselves ready to greet hummingbirds for another season.
For some reason, perhaps Covid-19!!, I decided that this would be the year I would return to seed-sowing at home. Alas, I had long ago discarded my old basement grow-lights, but I did have a few LED lights for the gooseneck lamps which I sometimes use for small-scale studio photography. And I also had an empty 3rd floor guest bedroom window-seat. Voilà, I had seedlings in April!
I had long wanted to try sowing Petunia exserta, a rare, threatened endemic from limestone outcrops in the Serras de Sudeste in Brazil. It was first described in 1987; thirty years later, only fourteen plants were found during an expedition. It is reputed to be a good hummingbird plant, so of course I wanted to try it. A friend in Victoria gifted me seeds and it turned out to be amazingly eager to germinate and grow!
I also thought it would be fun to grow an old French marigold from seed, a tall single form that was supposed to have been grown by Linnaeus himself in his garden in Upssala, Sweden. So I ordered seed for Tagetes patula ‘Burning Embers’. You should know that although this species is called “French” marigold, it’s actually native to Mexico and Guatemala. It got its common name because it was brought back to Europe in the 17th century by Portuguese explorers. The seeds germinated quickly, but they were a little wonky as they twisted vigorously toward the light.
By June, the annuals were planted in Muskoka and the petunias looked stunning.
I wasn’t sure if any hummingbirds had found them, but I was convinced later when I saw the watercolour that my son’s girlfriend, Italian artist Marta Motti, made for me as a birthday surprise. That’s the male with his ruby throat, by the way.
Hummingbird on Petunia exserta by Marta Motti
Late June and early July saw an unrelenting heat wave and drought. On July 4th, I put a thermometer on a chair on my sundeck near my pots and it read 104F-40C. It was a huge challenge to keep the pots watered sufficiently, and I realized these two annuals were meant for rich, moisture-retentive meadows, not crowded pots. And the petunias grow upwards in the fashion of indeterminate tomatoes, making flowers only on the end of the shoot and dropping the withered flowers by the dozens. If you want to revive gangly plants, it’s recommended to shear them back in midsummer to the first branching shoots and new growth will form.
Finally, on July 16th the rains came. It poured. My meadows rejoiced and the motley pots were saturated. I did notice that the bright red of the Petunia exserta faded to a pale rose in the heavy rain, but that seemed to be temporary. Notice that I had added a few rustic willow arbours to host the red morning glory (Ipomoea coccinea) that I seeded in the pots and has yet to flower.
Fast forward a few weeks to mid-August and the pots look wild, overgrown and the most motley they’ve ever been. Fortunately, I’ve never wanted to win a beauty contest with these containers; it’s all about hummingbirds and bees.
This gold-edged red flower is the classic seed catalogue look of Tagetes patula ‘Burning Embers’,but the seeds I sowed produced a sunset mix of colours, some striped or streaked.
Bumble bees arrived in droves to forage for pollen on them.
They look very festive with the ‘Black and Blooms’ sage.
Though they’re usually listed as growing to 18-24 inches (45-60 cm), mine have reached 41 inches (104 cm) and may well grow taller. I was curious about the connection to Linnaeus, and asked my Facebook friend, Swedish ecologist Roger Holt, who was at one time a gardener at the Linnaeus garden. He said: “I asked botanist Jesper Kårehed, responsible for the Linnaeus heritage parts and got the answer that both Linnaeus and his precursor, the universal genius Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) who built the first Swedish Botanical Garden (that later become the Linnaeus garden), had Tagetes patula (and erecta) and from paintings you can see that Rudbeck had the high elongated forms. In the 1920’s seeds from a form, said to have been picked in the garden of Hammarby, Linnaeus’s private home, started to be around in the trade. The Linnaeus garden was recreated in the 1930’s, and the tagetes have been there all from the start but probably not the same line of seeds.”
It’s a bit like having Linnaeus’s meadow right outside my window.
The petunias have hosted the odd wasp, and a handsome slaty skimmer dragonfly made it his sunny hunting perch for a few days.
But it has been fun to watch the hummingbird make its way around the flowers, taking a sip out of each.
Here’s a little video I made starring Petunia exserta.
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However, the champion this summer, as every year, is Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’.
Let me leave you with a musical nod to my motley pots and their faithful feathered visitors.
Back in late June, I noticed the odd dark, spotted caterpillar here and there on our property on Lake Muskoka, 2-1/2 hours north of Toronto. On July 2nd, my son informed me I had a caterpillar on my leg. Looking down, I saw a European gypsy moth caterpillar (Lymantria dispar) resting on my pink capris. Knowing how I love photographing insects, my son actually said, “Or… did you put it there?” Uh, no! Recalling that the bristly caterpillar can produce an allergic dermatitis, I used a paper towel to remove it and toss it outdoors. Perhaps it was a sign, a portent of the next month as I discovered the extent to which the caterpillars had laid future claim to the trees – mostly oaks and white pines – on our 2 acre property. Though I had heard from friends about massive defoliation of poplars and other hardwood trees in the farming areas northwest of Toronto, I could detect little or no damage where we were. Yet. But given the large numbers of female moths and egg masses I found in July, it seems that the caterpillars on Lake Muskoka were just preparing for their assault for 2021, a cyclical peak that normally occurs every 8-10 years..
This last stage of the caterpillar’s spring/early summer existence is quite beautiful, if destructive insects can be said to be beautiful. The studio shot below is by Dr. Didier Descouens of France, via Creative Commons.
Lymantria dispar
“France” and “gypsy moth” have another connection: the scenario that saw an invasive forest pest introduced accidentally by a French artist/entomologist/astronomer named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot.
He was not yet 30 when he emigrated from France in 1857 and settled in the house below on Myrtle Street in Medford, Massachusetts. For a decade, he attempted to raise caterpillars for silkworms, especially those of the North American native Polyphemus moth, a giant silk moth with a 6-inch wingspan. Silkworm experimentation was something of a fad at that time and it was noted that at one time he had a million larvae in a netted woodland behind his house. Sometime in the late 1860s, he travelled to Europe and returned with gypsy moth eggs, evidently hoping to hybridize them with natives to be disease-resistant. Around 1868-69, some of the eggs or larvae reportedly blew out his window, a fact to which he confessed in professional circles. However, there was no USDA in those days, no means of inspecting animal or plant species imported from other countries. It took a few decades for their population to build but by 1889 Medford’s trees were being defoliated by a caterpillar that required massive eradication strategies. And, as we know, that hasn’t worked very well as gypsy moths have made their way north and west in North America, decimating forests as they go. As for Trouvelot, he gave up on moth-rearing and in 1872 was invited to join Harvard College’s astronomy department, where he became renowned for his celestial illustrations and published some fifty papers. By the time he returned to France in 1882, his gypsy moths were well into their reign of terror in Medford.
At Lake Muskoka, we have a lot of oaks. They grow all around our cottage, a mix of the predominant red oak (Quercus rubra) and scrubby white oak (Quercus alba). It’s on the oaks that we see blue jays cracking acorns and woodpeckers, flickers, thrashers and nuthatches scaling the trunks looking for insects. Red-eye vireos nest in oaks. In fact, as entomology professor and best-selling author Doug Tallamy says in his book Bringing Nature Home, oaks are the best trees you can grow to sustain wildlife in your garden.
We have oaks up near our septic field….
…. and at the back of our cottage facing the little bay to the north of us.
I started to pay attention to the gypsy moths flying around. I checked the trunks of the oaks and found a few of the late-stage larval caterpillars….
…. and lots of the next stage — the reddish-brown pupae, below, the bigger ones being the female moth, smaller ones the males.
Some caterpillars had even pupated on the leaves of oaks.
I looked at the sign I had made for our cottage displaying the big white oak trunk in the centre of our main room….
…. and lifted it up to find pupae on the wall behind.
I even found a pupa on a window frame.
I began to inspect the trees and found a female gypsy moth newly eclosed from the pupa. Isn’t she lovely? (Or she would be, if she wasn’t the mother of 200-500 destructive leaf-eaters.)
Down near the lake, on the bark of trees we had previously wrapped with wire mesh to protect from the teeth of beavers, I found a female moth hanging onto the wire.
Not long after the female moth emerges from the pupa, she produces a pheromone which attracts male moths, sometimes more than one at a time.
Male moths spend their lives flying around looking for females, while non-flying female moths often walk upon the bark of the tree, first to find a suitable place to attract males; later, after copulation, she might walk about to find a place to lay her fertilized eggs and cover them with hairs.
Once she has fulfilled her role and produced the distinctive, rusty-brown egg mass, the female falls off the tree and dies. Though many authorities recommend removing or spraying the egg mass in autumn or winter, I realized that it was much easier to try to control the egg masses while the female was still clearly visible. Our hillside is often under many inches of snow by November, and I didn’t relish slipping and sliding over rocks trying to scrape off egg masses.
Where I saw unhatched pupae, I used a stick to squish the bigger female ones.
Broadleaved trees defoliated by gypsy moth caterpillars in spring will refoliate in mid-summer. Provided there is enough rain, the trees should survive. But conifers do not have this ability, so it was particularly depressing to find a few white pine trees hosting egg masses. However, I have read research that indicates that white pines are very poor hosts for larval development, compared to oaks.
For the female moths and egg masses, I made up my own horticultural oil, aka “dormant oil”. There are many recipes on the internet with various ingredients, but I mixed ½ cup of vegetable oil with 2 tablespoons of liquid dish soap. I then used a tablespoon or two of this concentrated mix in 2 cups of water to make my spray. My oil will not damage plants but is intended to suffocate the eggs. (You can also buy horticultural/dormant oil formulations at garden centres and big box stores; these generally use refined paraffinic oils.)
It was satisfying to spray the female moth and egg mass. I also used a stick to squish the moth.
I discovered that moths often favoured a particular tree, where I would find ten or more clustered together.’
This moth had made her nesting spot in the centre of a patch of moss high up an oak trunk. It became my challenge to figure out a way to reach these high locations without killing myself on a ladder.
I adapted an 11-foot telescoping pole used to change the pot lights on our high cottage ceiling, tying a sponge to the mechanism and soaking that in the diluted horticural oil.
That allowed me to reach moths and egg masses some 16 feet up a trunk….
…. soaking the moth and her egg mass with the saturated sponge, below. For the moths further up on trees, I can only keep my fingers crossed that next winter will be severe enough to damage the eggs. In observations in Michigan, it was found that eggs on southern and western aspects were much less likely to survive severe winter temperature swings than those on northern and eastern aspects.
Some of the literature on gypsy moth control recommends removing litter under trees. That might work in suburban or urban yards, but it isn’t realistic or desirable in a forest like ours, below, where a diverse understory supports all kinds of insects, birds and other life.
In fact, while moving around under my trees looking for moths, I was rewarded with the sight of two interesting parasitic (non-chlorophyll-producing) plants that are sustained by the mycorrhizae on the roots of oaks: Indian pipe or ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora), below….
… and bear corn or American cancer-root (Conopholis americana).
I did a lot of videography while I was preparing this blog, and made an 11-minute video that provides a little more information.
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Though some panicked property owners and civic officials call for aerial spraying of the biological control agent Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki or Btk in late spring when the caterpillars begin their climb into tree canopies, it is non-specific and will kill the larval stage of all lepidopterans (caterpillars of moths and butterflies) active at that time, including many native insects that co-evolved with our native plants and feed our birds. Some will say it’s not going to harm the summer caterpillars of monarch or swallowtail butterflies, but that is to ignore a vast web of life that exists in our environment without us noticing.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ll be happy to know I have had rewarding experiences with native caterpillars in the past, especially the monarch love affair I wrote about in last summer’s blog “Bella and Bianca: Our Monarch Chrysalis Summer”. I only hope that the steps I’ve taken this summer will curtail some of the damage we can expect to see next spring. I’ll be thinking about that as I gaze up at our beautiful oaks when their leaves change to russet and scarlet this autumn. And I’ll report back next year.
I’ve been meaning to write this blog for years, but it took a global pandemic – and the fact that this is National Pollinator Week – to spur me into action. Because in a pandemic we need essential workers, and on this planet there are no workers more essential than pollinators. Think of it: in all flowering plants not pollinated by wind (grasses and many trees are wind pollinated), bees, buterflies, moths, birds, beetles, ants and other insects are responsible for transferring pollen from a flower’s male anthers to the receptive female stigma, ensuring fertilization of the ovum, the creation of fruit and later the ultimate dissemination of seed. Without pollinators, the world as we know it would be as it was more than 135 million years ago: boring. No need for colour, since grasses and birches and pines don’t need to wear flashy hues to have the wind disperse the pollen the produce. No need for flower fragrance, since the wind doesn’t need to be lured to flowers like moths to a nocturnal species. And wind pollination is so wasteful! Look at how many male white pine cones fall to the ground in the evolutionary effort to pollinate the receptive female cones. (This is my dock on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, by the way).
No, insect pollination was a giant step forward, beginning with plants that looked vaguely like modern magnolias, likely fertilized by beetles. (I couldn’t find any beetles so substituted honey bees on Magnolia grandiflora, below).
Bees evolved initially from wasps. The earliest honey bee ancestors emerged in Asia roughly 120 million years ago. Bumble bees arrived on the scene between 30 and 40 million years ago. Modern honey bees and bumble bees, like those below on globe thistle, are the descendants of an ancient lineage of insect pollinators
As gardeners, we sometimes forget that there was a time when the natural world did not revolve around us. It got along just fine without Homo sapiens. In fact, there are quite a few people who think earth fared much better without humans, but then consciousness and evolution have given us the ability to perceive our achievements and actions with feelings of pride tempered by a growing sense of guilt. Climate change, conservation, overpopulation – they are all serious issues today, but that’s not what I’m focusing on here. Instead, I’d like to write a little love letter to the workers in earth’s most essential essential service: pollinators. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time courting them over the past three decades and more. Here’s one of my Toronto Sun columns from 1997.
And here’s a story I proposed and wrote on urban beekeeping for the now-shuttered Organic Gardening magazine in 2012.
Researching nectar- or pollen-rich flowers for beekeepers for that story and finding very little in current literature launched a multi-year focus on honey bees and their favourite plants. Out of it came a quite spectacular poster……
….. and the occasional magazine cover.
In time, I amassed such a large inventory of honey bee imagery (like the forget-me-not, below) that I decided to create an online photo library devoted just to them. If you’d like to have a browse, it is located here.
My beekeeping pal Janet Wilson out in British Columbia drove me to her hives in a blackberry thicket on a farm, and let me photograph her checking on the hives.
When I was on safari at Kicheche Camp in Laikipia, Kenya in 2016, I loved spending time with the camp’s beekeeper William Wanyika, and learning how he does his work.
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At Toronto Botanical Garden, I photographed the beehives and the student beekeepers….
….. and later that year I returned to photograph the honey harvest.
I enjoyed paying attention to nectar guides, the markings that plants have evolved to show pollinators exactly where to look for nectar and pollen. The European horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), below, is an excellent example. Flowers with fresh nectar exhibit a yellow blotch; as the markings darken from orange to red, the bee knows that the flowers are old and no longer yielding nectar.
But as much as I appreciate the work that honey bees do, I have always understood that in North America, European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are very much domestic agricultural animals. They may be feral in places warm enough for them to overwinter, but in much of the continent they must be “kept”. Wild bees, or native bees, on the other hand, have co-evolved with our North American flora. Many of them are adaptable to a number of different plant species; they’re called “generalists”. Here is a montage I made of native North American bees and butterflies on native North American plants.
Other bees are “specialists”, requiring the nectar or pollen from one, or just a few, types of plants. The North American squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa) is one of those, spending its short life acquiring food from the flowers of native squash plants, like the one below.
On vacation in Arizona, I was interested in the specialist native Diadasia australis bees who forage solely on opuntia cacti, like this Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmanii).
At home, I have come to know my local native vernal or spring bees, like the polyester bee (Colletes inaequalis), shown below on early-flowering willow (Salix).
But I’ve been bemused in the past few weeks by native bees paying no attention whatsoever to my native plants and instead finding their sources of carbohydrates and protein in the nectar and pollen of non-native plants, such as the bicoloured sweat bee Agapostemon virescens working the wine-red flowers of European knautia (Knautia macedonica) in my garden, below….
… and a plethora of native pollinators, including the Eastern tiger swallowtail, avidly foraging on my neighbour’s Chinese beauty bush, Kolkwitzia amabilis, below.
But some plants don’t need pollinators. While I was videotaping the June plants above, the birds were squabbling noisily over the first ripening serviceberries (Amelanchier sp.) nearby. (I photographed the one below on the High Line one June.) I was curious that in all my years observing my serviceberries and their clouds of tiny blossoms, I haven’t seen any pollinators attending the plants. How could I have such an abundance of early summer fruit? Scientists have shown that several species of Amelanchier have evolved “apomixis”, bypassing sexual reproduction, meiosis and cell division entirely – thus no need for insect fertilization. In apomicts, the ovum in the flower divides parthenogenically.
I adore bumble bees (Bombus species), and I’ve spent years trying to identify the ones I see in my gardens and even the species I encounter during my travels. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I have a large photo inventory of bumble bees online. Below is my favourite of all, the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis). Isn’t that the perfect name?
And I do have a soft spot for Toronto’s (un)official bee mascot, the bicoloured agapostemon (A. virescens), shown here foraging on purple coneflower in my garden.
Though many people dislike them for their wood-boring trait, particularly if it happens to their pergolas or sundecks, I love watching carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica) using that strong tongue to bore into the corollas of certain flowers, like the Nicotiana mutabilis, below. Biologists call that “nectar robbery”, i.e. the bee is effectively bypassing the evolutionary pact between bee and pollinator to gain the reward without transferring pollen from one flower to another.
At the Toronto Botanical Garden, where I’ve contributed my photography as seasonal galleries, I spent a few seasons tracking pollinators on the plants, and made a musical video to celebrate them.
My city garden in Toronto was designed as a pollinator garden, too. It contains both native and non-native plants. I’ve shown this video a few times in my blog, but here it is again throughout four seasons.
And at my cottage on Lake Muskoka, I look upon almost every plant in my meadows, garden beds and planters as a chance to invite bumble bees, solitary bees and hummingbirds to sup on the mostly native plants I provide for them. (Please note that the vernonia should be V. noveboracensis).
So to celebrate National Pollinator Week, I would like to encourage all of you to think about your relationship as gardeners to the natural world. Should your garden really be all about you and what you like? Or do you agree with me that we should also consider that….
Water in the garden. What garden doesn’t benefit from the sound of water, the reflective qualities of water, the ability of water to create a shimmering focus in any scene? Monet was a master at water in the garden; in fact, he was obsessed with trying to capture the light as it played on the water where he grew his famous water lilies. I watched the light play on his garden when I visited one spring.
And water, of course, brings an abundance of wildlife to drink and bathe. Even a simple birdbath adds life to the garden. (The one below was custom-made for the gardener.)
My friend Marnie Wright has a birdbath in her garden near a bench where, if she’s quiet, she can watch them bathe.
Her birdbath is a little piece of art in itself.
But Marnie also has a meandering pond where she can indulge her love of aquatic plants and moisture-loving marginals. Have a look at my blog on Marnie’s beautiful garden in Bracebridge, Ontario in the Muskoka region near my own cottage.
Visiting public gardens can be inspiring for ideas on water gardens. At Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA (I wrote a 2-part blog on this, my favourite North American garden), the pond garden is large, with complex plantings. Here you see one side through a scrim of alliums….
……. and here through variegated water iris, I. laevigata ‘Variegata’…..
….. and then looking right into the pond at the water lilies (Nymphaea) and the pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) on the far side.
Chanticleer’s ponds meander through a damp area with moisture-loving primulas and carnivorous plants just beyond; but the planting in the other direction is inspiring and very floriferous.
Near Chanticleer’s entrance, the Teacup Garden features a different take on water gardening…. a simple, sophisticated, overflowing “teacup” fountain.
At New York Botanical Garden, the Native Plants Garden makes extensive use of water, and moisture-loving plants like Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) and cardinal plant (Lobelia cardinalis). If you want to read more about this wonderful garden in the Bronx, have a look at my blog.
At Wave Hill in the Bronx, it’s always fun to see the formal pool with its elegant lotuses. I included this gorgeous water feature in my blog on Wave Hill.
At New York’s fabulous High Line, water is introduced in a subtle way in the Scrim water feature. Moisture-loving plants flank this artificial wetland, where visitors – especially children – are known to cool their feet on hot summer days.
When I visited the Missouri Botanical Garden one incredibly hot July day, I enjoyed seeing Dale Chihuly’s blown glass ‘Walla Walla onions’ floating on the pond surface beside the large, platter-like leaves of the Victoria water lilies (Victoria amazonica).
At Filoli near San Francisco, formality dictates the perfect axis of the ornamental pools that lead the eye across the next garden room to the spectacular green hills in the mist beyond.
In my visits to Portland’s serene Japanese Garden, I’ve been impressed with the variety of water features, from the very large, below, to the small water basins. These all represent specific symbolism in Japanese landscape design.
This is the yatsuhashi zig-zag bridge, meant to deter the evil spirits that might follow you.
At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, a zig-zag bridge leads across an arm of the pond to the impressive Southern Hemisphere collections.
My favourite part of The Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria, B.C. in the sunken Japanese garden. Here is a wealth of water features, including a stone basin and bamboo spout fountain in a shady grotto…..
…. and a shishi-odoshi “deer-scarer” fountain that clacks regularly as the bamboo spout fills with water…..
…..and a few serene ponds, including this small one with a waterfall.
At Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate in Virginia, the Japanese garden arrayed down a hillside features several water features, including these dancing water spouts.
In Austin, Texas, I was enchanted with the wonderful garden of Jenny and David Stocker. In one of their ‘garden rooms’, a galvanized stock tank is used to grow aquatic plants.
But their swimming pool almost seems to be a water feature in itself, given the flowery landscape flanking it. How wonderful it would be to swim lengths beside all those blossoms! I wrote a blog about the Stocker garden.
Fun-loving Lucinda Hutson might know more about tequila than anyone else in North America! The Austin garden of the woman who wrote the best-selling book Viva Tequila is a colourful trip into the fantastic, indoors and out! Naturally, Lucinda got her very own blog. Her little pond and its trickling fountain occupy a corner of a siren-themed patio, below.
Garden writer Pam Penick also features a stock tank in her garden (yes, I wrote a blog on Pam’s garden too) but she’s added a little faucet fountain to enjoy the trickle of water and keep the tank aerated.
Pam also has a pretty blue urn fountain, one of many blue touches in her Austin landscape. It requires a receptacle below the rocks so the water can re-circulate, but is a less labour-intensive alternative to a pond.
My Denver friend and plantsman-extraordinaire Panayoti Kelaidis has a rectangular pond abutting his plant-filled patio at the base of a rock wall filled with alpine plants. Naturally, the pond features myriad plants as well! I wrote about Panayoti’s garden in a June blog last year.
Although Tatiana Maxwell’s stunning Boulder CO garden featured a large pond, I loved this little touch of water using two overflowing bowls. This also utilizes a below-grade receptacle to circulate the water.
There were a few water features in the Fort Collins, CO garden of Carol and Randall Shinn, but I especially liked this Corten-and-concrete wall fountain because it’s such a good example of how to bring the splash of water into a restricted space. You can read my blog about the Shinn garden here.
In Rob Proctor and Dave Macke’s exquisite Denver garden, a little faucet fountain poured into a watering can, below. That was just one feature of hundreds of perfect vignettes in this well-known garden about which I blogged last year.
In the colourful, art-filled Englewood, Colorado garden of Dan Johnson (of the Denver Botanic Garden) and Tony Miles, there were a few brilliant touches of water. I adored this container water garden surrounded by a large plant collection…..
…. and look at this tiny little gesture, below. Anyone could do this, with a small pump and some ingenuity! (Okay, maybe some glass cutters and some silicone, too….)
Chicago Botanic Garden’s Evening Island is a landscape surrounded by lake, so water is always part of the view here. I made a video of my lovely August morning on Evening Island a few years ago.
Garden designer Kellie O’Brien’s lion’s head wall fountain in Hinsdale, near Chicago.
Further afield, my 2018 garden tour of the north and south islands of New Zealand offered lots of design inspiration. Naturally, the spectacular pond of Di and Ian Mackenzie’s Akaunui (my blog on their garden is here) might be a little ambitious for most of us, but it does point out the beauty of the reflective quality of a large body of water.
In the Cloudy Bay area of Marlborough, Rosa Davison’s large pond at Paripuma (see my blog here) has no reflection at all – but then she installed it as a sanctuary for grey ducks which, of course, appreciate all the duckweed on the surface!
At Upton Oaks near Blenheim, which I blogged about in 2018, Sue Monahan carefully sculpted a circular hedge to echo the contour of her formal lily pool.
The Giant’s House, Josie Martin‘s otherworldly Akaroa garden is filled with her mosaic sculpture (see my blog here) and water is used cleverly in a few places. But I loved this water feature surrounded by “mosaic swimmers”.
At Penny and Rowan Wiggins’s garden The Paddocks near Auckland, a simple sphere sculpture burbled with the splash of water. There are many such fountains available in a range of sizes and styles.
Back in Canada, this large reflecting pool at the Montreal Botanical Garden features a collection of stainless steel “island containers” planted with moisture-loving flora.
At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, the reflecting pools also feature aquatic flora, but planted in containers below the surface.
At the residential level, I’ve stayed at James and Virginia Mainprize’s pretty bed-and-breakfast in Niagara-on-the-Lake where I admired their little water garden, which was nicely integrated into their border.
Garden tours are excellent sources of design inspiration and this Cabbagetown garden in Toronto inspired me with its Japanese-themed bamboo and copper spouts spilling into a small pond. However, the mechanics here might be a little beyond my skill level!
Speaking of vertical wall fountains, the Toronto Botanical Garden where I spend a lot of time photographing has one of the coolest water walls. Designed by PMA Landscape Architects , it offers the element of water without using a lot of space.
No matter what season…..
….. it adds a lovely splash to the entrance courtyard at the TBG.
On the Westview Terrace behind the front part of the Toronto Botanical Garden’s building, a lively focal point is the diagonal water channel that begins at a waterfall tucked between two raised plantings abutting the rear portion of the building. A stone slab bridge lets visitors cross the channel.
For parties at the TBG, they’ve been known to move containers into the channel.
In autumn, it’s particularly lovely when the grasses are in flower and the shrubs turn colour. That’s Indigofera kirilowii with the bright yellow leaves on the right.
Oh! I wonder how this old photo of my daughter and her groom got in here? (Didn’t they look lovely? They’ve got three kids now…)
So… that brings me to my own pond. It’s pretty old now. I dug it myself in 1987, acquiring a shoulder injury that required nerve surgery along the way! But it continues to be the main focal point in my garden as it visually anchors the dining patio.
It has been rebuilt once after the liner failed.
At that time, I added the boulder fountain, drilled through to admit the PVC tubing leading from the pump.
It looked pretty and worked for a few years, but the pump eventually failed and was replaced by another pump, which also failed. Do you sense my theme? Ponds like this are not low-maintenance.
In fact, if you’re not going to pay a pond service company to clean out all the leaves and debris that a pond like mine collects each season – as well as replacing the rocks that fall in during the freeze and thaw periods – you’ll have to do it yourself. And from personal experience (those boots are mine), it’s not a job for the faint of heart.
Even though the only book I’ve written was called Water in the Garden, on behalf of Canadian Gardening magazine (1995), I would recommend thinking small on water features.
But I will add that, despite the work involved in keeping it somewhat clean-looking, my pond pays me back in spades on that spring or summer morning when I look out and see the birds taking turns to bathe in it. Because the cardinals and robins simply don’t care how messy it is.
*****
Okay, let’s get to the title of my blog How would someone “Bring me little water”? Maybe as the waiter did in the rainforest in Costa Rica, with a sweet stick insect sticking to the side?
El Remanso Lodge; Osa Peninsula; Costa Rica
Or maybe someone would bring me a little water in song. For me, the ideal person to do that would be Moira Smiley. A singer-songwriter, composer and teacher with her own group called VOCA, I would want her to use her famed body percussion (clapping, stomping, bodybeats) to “bring me little water”, as she did with these young people at the Los Angeles Choral Workshop, teaching her own version of the 1936 song composed by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly (1888-1949).
And here she is with her own singers doing her official version of “Silvy”.
If you want to learn how to do body percussion, Moira will teach it to you, too!
When I was 12, my mother took me to see Harry Belafonte in Vancouver. He sang ‘Sylvie’ as a plea from an incarcerated man to his lover, the lyrics lamenting that Sylvie “brought me nearly every damn thing, but she didn’t bring the jailhouse key”. Here is Harry Belafonte singing the song from his Live at Carnegie Hall album that very same year.
And here’s the very rustic inspiration by Lead Belly himself. When he wasn’t in jail or on drugs, Ledbetter sang to earn his money. He said ‘Sylvie’ was inspired by his farmer uncle calling for his wife to bring him water out to the hot fields.
BRING ME LITTLE WATER SILVy (Moira Smiley, orig.Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly)
Bring me little water, Silvy
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Bring me little water now Bring me little water, Silvy Every little once in a while
Bring it in a bucket, Silvy Bring it in a bucket now Bring it in a bucket, Silvy Every little once in a while
Silvie come a runnin’ Bucket in my hand I will bring a little water Fast as I can
Bring me little water, Silvy Bring me little water now Bring me little water, Silvy Every little once in a while
Can’t you see me coming? Can’t you see me now? I will bring you little water Every little once in a while
Every little once in a while Every little once in a while Every little once in a while
*********
This is the 12th blog (marathon?) in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with
