Design

One of my favorite warm-season garden activities is watching flower visitors. Bumblebees, carpenter bees, squash bees, blueberry bees, leaf-cutter bees, honeybees, butterflies, wasps, hoverflies, sweatbees, and hummingbirds collect either nectar or pollen or both. I can't imagine why I ever (as a clueless graduate student) thought that this wasn't interesting, preferring the germination strategies of weedy species (hmm, at least that turned out to be useful). But as a gardener, and garden educator, I've had SO much fun observing flower visitors, and encouraging other folks to watch. This morning, a (female) bumblebee was foraging on one of the purple coneflowers in the front meadow, busily working through the fresh young flowers that make up the 'head' of a composite, collecting pollen (note her pollen basket) as well as nectar. I had to check with my gardening companion (uh, he studied pollination biology in graduate school) about their foraging habits!

This has been such a wonderful spring for gardening (in the SE U.S.) After 10 years of drought, plants are responding to abundant spring rains with abandon. Our garden looks great, compared to what it's looked like in recent years. And my tomatoes, beans, squash and other summer vegetables are robust beyond anything that I've had before, since I started growing vegetables in earnest ~10 years ago. This volunteer purple coneflower ( Echinacea purpurea ) is huge and the meadow is looking robust. And the side border is looking as nice as it ever has. I've been so grateful for the rain, and it's heightened our appreciation of our garden landscape. Our gardening assistant (Mocha) likes being at home, too.