Not quite last, this very tired young hummingbird roosted on a broken sunflower stalk a couple of inches above the ground for hours on October 2nd. Intermittently he’d fly up and drink some nectar from the bountiful hummingbird mint, Agastache, that seemed to be a godsend for a lot of late birds. It’s still blooming! I’ve seen two more since this one, the latest last Wednesday, October 8th: a record in my 14 years taking note.
Not only the hummingbirds but bumblebees and wasps are enjoying the long-lasting blossoms of this licorice-scented Agastache.
Sandhill cranes spiral and soar overhead on their raucous way south.
A lone monarch was lucky to find some nectar left in late-blooming Gallardia.
Snapdragons still blooming profusely are also providing late nectar for hummingbirds and bees, their colors and velvety texture keeping some hot spots in the garden’s yellowing autumn palette.
A honeybee seeking something along the turning leaf of the Amur maple beside the hive.
For a few weeks, rabbitbrush was buzzing…
Preparing for a show in spring, we’re naming all the bees again. This one is Saddlebags.
…and in photographing bees, I found this tiny little creature which appears to belong to a group called Micromoths.
A honeybee hovered at a single late flax flower at my feet; I ran in to get the camera. In that one minute, the bee flew and its breeze blew four petals off the bloom.
Checking on the medicinal herb I found this tiny white spider.
Garlic chives are the early October “bee-tree,” swarming with honeybees, flies, and small wild bees…
Beeplant and sunflowers grow with abandon in the hottest, driest part of the garden, a lush late summer banquet for bees and birds.
Rocky Mountain Beeplant, sown twenty years ago around the rustic trailer I used to inhabit, down where the Butterfly Bed is now, blooms and seeds prolifically in areas where I let it, and seems content to do so. I pull stray seedlings when they’re tiny, so easy they are to recognize, and let them flourish in certain spaces. Knowing what delight they’ll bring in late summer, for honeybees, wild bees and hummers.
They start to flower in late July and just keep on going, growing new blooms up and up the stalk, transforming downward into seedpods.
These green-eyed, pollen-packed wild bees constantly prowl the sunflowers. Hey! Get off! This one’s mine!
Despite not being in right relationship with the grasshoppers, I can recognize a striking composition when it’s given.
And that pesky doe. Caught her in the act again, eating the last half dozen tomatoes this tired bush is likely to ripen. Just look at her! I can’t begrudge her, though. She needs them more than I do.
But I can try to salvage a few bites for myself, so I gently spook her away. Next year I’ll fence the food gardens, for sure.
Today the garden is full of yellows, oranges and greens, and full of buzzing bees. Summer is a full on ride, roller coaster or tilt-a-whirl, it’s hard to know; reeling through colors and days so full.
July arrivals in the garden, the variously colored Ratibida, or Mexican Hats, and an unusual, fast bee that flies with its tip up.
At first I blamed the damn deer for demolishing one of my Roma tomatoes, until I looked closer. Love the little manatee hands.
Why do you think they call it Hornworm?
Little solitary bees work the tomato blossoms diligently.
And at last, overnight, one of the Early Girls begins to ripen.
The new raised bed in the south yard grows squashes from Earth Friendly Farm.
I transplanted them into walls-o-water, then implemented a trick I learned at a dinner party recently: keep the walls on longer than you’d think you need to, and turn them down into collars, to hold water better and protect the plants from wind.
All the squashes are thriving.
One of three visiting catahoulas, Jupiter, Last Son of Sundog, romps with Raven’s birthday bunny, still remarkably intact six weeks later.
I could not figure out what these tiny green beads were that the ants were so busy around, scattered in clusters along the path through the woods. Husks of tiny beetles! What’s up with that?
Bloody Mary with a lovage straw. This huge tropical-looking herb grows well in wet soil north of the pond, and its aromatic stalks are hollow, the perfect garnish.
This Memorial Day Sunday, a week early if you ask me, has truly signaled the beginning of the roller coaster that is the summer season. Despite last night’s fresh snow on the mountains. We got half an inch of rain! It was great to wake up and not have to water anything; I had a pie to bake. After a kickoff brunch with Bloody Marys, arugula-ricotta-wild mushroom tart, veggie and homegrown-beef kebabs and venison ribs, fresh-picked wild asparagus, garden salad, and a homegrown-rhubarb pie with whipped cream, I returned home to my desk, and looked out the window to see a Bullock’s Oriole peering in at me. They winter in Central America and summer here; ergo, it must be summer! It’s a rare sighting, I’m lucky if I see one in a year. I hope he’ll stay around. I’ll buy an orange tomorrow, as incentive.
I’ve spent the past two weeks managing out-of-control weeds. Mustards, cheatgrass, and Poa bulbosa, my new nemesis, and many more, are rampaging through the yard sucking spring moisture from the ground, growing as fast as I can get them cut. But they tend to stay gone when they’re pulled by hand. Some zones in the garden get this special attention, while the farther edges of the yard get weed-whacked by Chris now and then. I have surrendered to the Bad Grass. All of it. I will never win. The bumper crop of Bulbosa this year finally made me throw in the towel. The best I can hope for, I’ve concluded, is to carve my paths through the bad grasses. Maybe a good approach to life in general. Live and learn. Never let someone else spread grass seed in your yard. Also, be careful of planting a perennial that someone tells you “can spread.”
“They love to look like each other,” said Katrina yesterday morning as she was pulling dwarf goldenrod shoots from among the Penstemon strictus shoots. I’m sure these two plants resemble each other even when they’re not mingled in the same bed, but the ones you want to get rid of seem to be able to look more like the ones you want to keep the more you try to get rid of them. Bindweed, for example. And these intransigent goldenrods: At the time I planted a one-gallon pot of this ornamental goldenrod I didn’t really understand the concept of “can spread.” Like many ornamentals they are just an attractive exotic invasive. I bought a grass the other day in a small pot, thinking it was a bunch grass. When I looked it up, sweet vernal grass, it turns out to be a problem weed in some parts of the country; it “can spread.” So that one will go in a pot for the summer and probably die next winter.
The past two weeks, days have either been cold and grey or been crazy with bees.
Nepeta everywhere is covered with bees of all kinds.
At least five kinds of bumblebees are feeding in the garden. When I get time, when the roller coaster slows a bit, I’ll sit down with my bumblebee images and the Western Bumblebee Guide and find all their names.
The sphinx moth is also attracted to Nepeta, and sometimes out in the morning.
The Little Red Bumblebee, I call it…
May 9, the bee tree was briefly the crabapple down by the pond.
Honeybee on Fuji.
May 17, these caterpillars are crawling the walls all over Crawford. Covering the walkways, on every living thing, looking for a place to pupate. We hope they are innocuous salt-marsh caterpillars and will turn into benign white moths. We’ll know more later!
Even Marrubium, the silver-leaf horehound, is covered with tiny flowers and intermittent bees.
I let the dandelions grow on the fringes of the garden beds, on the edges of paths. They’re an important early source for all the species of bees.
I’ve only seen a hummingbird once at this scarlet gilia that sprang up in the spring border. I sometimes sit nearby and wait with the camera. One of these days…
Little mat daisies spread readily, beautiful and benign. I don’t mind.
Their little white petals have pink candy-stripes on their undersides, making little red buds.
This little red fly also enjoys the mat daisies.
The first big iris opened a week ago. Two days ago this one popped and the little red bumblebees love it.
Friday night’s rain.
The bee tree yesterday was the Amur maple, which came as a surprise…
I expected it would be the lilac, but it took me three days to get three good shots of bees on the lilacs, and three minutes to get three good shots of bees on the maple.
The first blue flax opened just a week ago, and now waves of this delicate flower flow through the garden feeding bees big and small.
Mixed in with the flax and also in waves here and there through the garden, I let the native plains mustard grow where it will.
Pink chintz creeping thyme flowers between flagstones.
All the bumblebees are all over the Ajuga blooms.
This giant yellow bumblebee is twice the size of the little red one. Probably Bombus nevadensis, or morrisoni, but I’ll have to study on that, compare things like tongue length and facial structure, count colored bands, all with the guide and images before me. Maybe I’ll print it and take it outside with the Papilio binoculars.
Unsettled weather. The days are a riot of ups and downs. Five days in a row of clouds and rain, then eighty degrees and shining sun for a week bake the ground. Carrots and beets emerged two days ago, and transplanted tomatoes and peppers hang on despite cold nights, while melons, zucchini, and more peppers and tomatoes in pots continue to come in at night. Arugula, parsley, lettuce and kale are popping up, and peas are two inches tall. I cling to the illusion of control in the wild ride of the summer garden. Soon the weeds will be tamed for the season, and before you know it harvest madness will be upon us. Let the party begin!
On April 11, the honeybees finally examined the hybrid tulips.
And I caught the elusive white butterfly.
The honeybees also started enjoying the creeping thyme.
April 14, that sweet snow decorated the forsythia.
Today the wind literally blows bees off the Nanking cherry as another spring snowstorm threatens. Inside for awhile, I catch up with images from the past two weeks.
April 17, the bumblebees showed up.
April 19, honeybees were all over the European pasqueflowers.
April 20. Surprise!
And a bigger surprise, the broad-tailed hummingbirds showed up five days early.
As the golden currant blossoms begin to open, the green (or blue?) bottle flies arrive.
Nanking cherry buds begin to burst open and the little native bees are among the first to partake.
April 21, dandelions begin to pop open throughout the yard.
Bumblebees and honeybees continue to sip at the almond blossoms.
April 22, the Nanking cherry calls all species of bees in the vicinity.
And begins to get crowded.
April 23: Meanwhile, down at the pond, the honeybees have found a sweet place in the reeds to sate their thirst.
On April 24, the Nanking cherry exploded with bees of all kinds, in clouds, drunk, like me perhaps, on all the pink beauty.
Count the bees and types of bees in this image. Spring wave of the roller-coaster is in full swing. On this day, the Colonel would have been ninety-five years old. I spent the entire day with one of his last gifts to me, my Canon 50D, in a pursuit he might have considered at one time in his life a waste of time; but he introduced me to cameras, and took great pleasure during our last visit looking through his album of special photos, seeking his personal best, a shot of a duck with water dripping off its beak. I think he would have liked these. Meanwhile, my days fly by so full I can’t keep up.
As the jonquils continue blooming the occasional bee investigates.
Prunus besseyi “Pawnee Buttes,” a ground-creeping variety of the western sandcherry, begins to draw bees.
“Pink Chintz” creeping thyme blooms.
Occasional native bees and honeybees check out this little rock-garden plant whose name I’ve forgotten.
Buff little bumblebee on the golden currant.
The frenetic beeflies are everywhere, on the sandcherry…
The day began in cinders; all that was left of the morning’s drama a few filthy tail feathers on the ground.
Yesterday’s smoke was so thick from neighbors clearing fields with fire that it kept me inside most of the day, even though it warmed up to 75. This morning it wasn’t so bad, just a singed aroma to the air. So warm last night, fortunately, that I didn’t light a fire in the woodstove for the first time all year. Fortunately, I say! This morning the cat leapt onto the wall by the stovepipe and the dogs jumped barking out of bed all at once. I didn’t understand why at first, then heard the desperate skritching inside the pipe: a bird had somehow fallen in.
I put the dogs out and left the door open. My woodstove has a peculiar double ceiling, which might have made it easier. I lifted the griddle out of the lid to see a pile of creosote ash on top of the false ceiling. I reached my hand up into the chimney and felt feathers, startling both me and the bird, who flapped and scratched in a panic, billowing clouds of ash out the hole. The second time, knowing better, I covered the hole with a dog towel, reached under and into the pipe swiftly, and grabbed a fistful of feathers and a leg, pulled the bird down and out into the towel, and took it outside, letting it flap under the towel to clean itself off a little. In a minute I let go, pulled away the towel, and watched a young starling flap frantically away, leaving a half dozen sooty feathers in my hand.
Watering tools. Time to sort through all the connectors for my flexogen irrigation system. I’ve got the time, home in April, long cool days. All these accouterments make moving water so much easier.
Taking stock of hoses, measuring, assessing. Three hoses out of play this season with both ends bad on each; I’ll snip off the ends of these, mail them to Gilmour, and get three free replacements. The best garden deal I know of.
It’s been so dry and windy, despite occasional spring snow showers, that it’s time to start watering all around the yard, trees and beds. Time to sort the hoses and lay them out around the garden, make sure all connections are secure and won’t waste water with leaks.
Still no bees in the red tulips, but a passel of blooms.
Almond blossoms opening against the warm stucco of the house.
The new bee tree is the apricot.
A bee fly if I’m not mistaken.
In quest of the elusive white butterfly, moving too fast for me to get close, flittering through the nepeta.
A tiny wild bee plastered in pollen in the mini yellow tulips.
I love the way the honeybees dive in face first, deep into the corolla.
Keeping up with my goal of photographing bees on each new variety of flower as it blooms. This girl made my day.
So I spent a pleasant morning, grateful for the one that got away, chasing bees and butterflies through the spring garden, then drove to Eckert to the frame shop to drop off a new print for a show next month in Salida, and to pick up a couple of framed giant bees for the Grand Opening tomorrow night of the Church of Art in downtown Hotchkiss. Slowly gearing up the first rise of summer’s roller coaster.
The crabapple tree in bud. I planted this sweet tree beside the grave of Little Doctor Vincent, one of the most amazing cats I’ve ever known.
A lot has happened in the garden in the past few weeks. Many days were cold and windy, overcast or outright snowing. Little popcorn snowballs blustering in with a dark cloud, pounding down and coating everything quickly, and melting in an hour. The bees kept largely to themselves on days like that. The past few days have really felt like spring, though; waves of purple mustard splash across the ‘dobies between Delta and Hotchkiss, along the roadside from Hotchkiss up to Crawford. Sandhill cranes have all but completed their migration through here, just a stray spiral or vee of them now and then. Snow covers the mountain tops; all the summer brown fields and ‘dobie hills are green, lush or barely brushed. Soon the surprise of some of those rare wildflowers that bloom only once a decade or two may pop up in swaths of white or blue.
Forsythia in bloom a week ago in a brief spring snow. I planted this forsythia in remembrance of my mother long before she died, knowing this day would come: she’d be gone and its blossoms would remind me of her.
Everything is full of promise, lifting my spirits with inordinate optimism. The river is muddy with snowmelt and the redtail hawk is sitting in her nest above the Smith Fork. Yesterday I watched her soar out of sight, circling slowly up and up, smaller with each revolution, a glint, a speck, a recollection. The bees, the bees are out around the grape hyacinths, blue and white; after snow two days ago the first little yellow tulips opened, their buds like almonds finally pushed up from underground and flowers spreading like the sun.
Tall coral tulips have been cross-pollinated with the splashy red short ones to produce a unique hybrid.
Blooming Veronica creeps across a sandstone slab.
The years unroll, one season following another. Truer words were never sung. The golden currant is full of small bright green new leaves. All the columbines are up with their rounds of feathery foliage, daylily spikes are four to six inches tall. More Veronica blooms have opened, and Nepeta is taking over everywhere. Chicory keeps spreading its rosettes farther into the path. This garden gives me great delight. I broke back the Basin Wild Rye last evening and pulled a patch of bur buttercup, that precious nasty weed I took such care to spare the first year I saw it, decades ago. Some almond blossoms are already open up against the stucco house, the apricot’s about to burst; the first dandelion has bloomed and Nepeta is taking over everywhere.
Apricot buds ripening…
…unfolding…
…opening!
The bee tree today is as thick with bees and flies and tiny undecipherable lives in the later stage of these clusters. I must come back with the camera when it’s less breezy.
I baked a halibut filet on top of some tender tarragon shoots the other night. Winter arugula is already sending up flower stalks in the covered garden, still feeding me several salads a week, and baby spinach will soon be ready to eat. Down at the pond a leopard frog emerged a few weeks ago. I’ve spooked it three or four times, and it spooked me when it splashed from the curly rush through the water, in one smooth arc, to bury itself in silt.
The resident leopard frog hides at the edge of the pond. I first spooked her weeks ago finger-combing the rushes, and still she sits there every day.
Sneaking up on her to catch a shot ~ such camouflage!
Another frog watches over European pasqueflower and iris shoots by the bottle wall.
A greenbottle fly on grape hyacinth.
And a honeybee drinking deep in another.
Though they’ve been blooming about a week today’s the first time I’ve seen a bee at the white ones.
From the songs in each of our individual heads, our unique threads, our song lines, springs the meaning in our lives.
The last cat, Brat Farrar, struggles through a health crisis, striving, like me, for balance.
Honeybee sipping raindrops, I think, from a hanging basket; that, or the fading flower is dripping nectar.
I, too, am always after the new. It gives me a thrill to capture an angle on a bee that I haven’t caught before, to see a new species of fly or wasp on a flower. I, too, am always after the new: I simply choose my new to be tamer, less risky, than many people do. Not for me a new black diamond ski slope or a slackrope across a canyon, not for me an undersea dive for treasure. Just, for me, a new bee.
Not only are there more than a dozen bumblebee species that live around here, turns out there are some flies that are extraordinary bee mimics. Who knows which this is? I guess if I do ever go back to school it will have to be in entomology.
Another bumblebee, I think Bombus huntii.
What I once thought were shiny black bees, before I looked at them through my magic lens, turn out to be probably a species of Tachinid fly, perhaps Voria ruralis.
Autumn came on August first. It’s not been summer since. Monsoonal flow brought rains and cooler nights. Summer seems to have evaporated. The yard has become a jungle, ten foot tall sunflowers I’ve had to limb up to allow light to the vegetables. Grasshoppers demolish potato plants. I’ve hardly had to water in the past week. Rocky mountain beeplant, or beeweed as the ranger calls it, looked scrawny, unpromising earlier, is now thick and blooming, claiming the attention of the bees and hummingbirds.
And finally another honeybee, who can’t keep her tongue in her mouth while flying.
You just never know what a day will bring, what joys and delights, what trials and fears. My friend has returned to the hospital with complications following West Nile virus. My aunt has had a second surgery for a fracture following her partial hip replacement. Both of them the dearest, kindest people one could know; neither deserving such suffering. I am doing what little I can do from here for both; and, I am doing my best to enjoy this gorgeous day. My “basic flaw” may be my tendency to believe I am never doing enough.
I stumble into evening, into this playground of beauty. It is dusk and the garden is still buzzing and fluttering with pollinators. I feel great. I’ve reclaimed two major areas of weeds, and tamed the pathways between them. I worked inside in the heat of day, went out to a client in town, drove home and saw again the smoke from the roaring fires to the southeast. Yesterday, too, in the afternoon, under thick cloud cover, as I drove home I saw sandwiched between the low, grey sky and the dark ridge of horizon, a different, dark, curly billow, the roiling plume of this monstrous blaze. Today, the big fire more of an ominous smudge, and a smaller plume a little farther west. This beauty feels precarious.
Prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata, or Stanley’s Piñata Rosie called it) waves brilliant yellow behind purple and pink salvia, firecracker penstemon, blue flax, gallardia, silver sage, and milkweed.
Prince’s plume provides a wealth of lovely insects sipping at its flagrant flowers.
A Saturday. A morning rounds day. The dogs agitate restlessly, subtly, for a W-A-L-K. But I can’t go yet. I must spend this morning among the wildly blooming flowers of such variety, and the infinite shades of green in the lush growing leaves. Winecups, Callirhoe, with pink salvia; palmer penstemon at its best. Time to pick up all the buckets, pails, bales, bags and hoses strewn about, and make this garden the showplace that it is.
Cloud cover rolls in as I’m photographing flowers with bugs and bees, sun in, sun out, the wind stirs and calms. Camera is best set aside. I have another day of roses, of pink penstemons; yellow and orange columbines, creamy panicles on the golden elder, aromatic lilac twigs of Larry’s eyebrow, purple penstemons will last at least a few more days. Gallardia, salvias pink and purple will last a long time. The roses will be gone overnight when they go, replaced by swelling green hips then ripe red ones. A bumblebee lands on a wild rose blossom… I cannot resist despite the fickle light, and move to the rosebush camera in hand.
These two tiny bugs danced around the same rose for awhile before meeting face to face and greeting one another.
It looks like this insect is eating an ant. I can’t be sure.
Rose bee.
Though I couldn’t catch the bumblebee on the rose, this wasp cooperated.
All kinds of bugs disappear into the corollas of penstemon strictus, then either turn around to leave…
… or back out.
As the honeysuckles wind down they continue to attract wild bees.
Still and overcast, excellent for the firefighters throughout the state, and the west. Last night smoke from a new fire on the western slope, just north of I-70, layered the northwest sky purple and pink as the sun set. Today, after a calm morning with clouds intermittently obscuring the sun, the winds have picked up and thick grey clouds are trying to spit rain. One brutal long gust and one rolling thunder lay all my peace of mind to rest.
