Winter Blues ~ Eastern-tailed Blue, Summer Azure and Silvery Blue

Dreaming of Blues fluttering around the garden can shake off the mantle-of-melancholy winter sometimes weaves about our spirits. Today, I gather some delightful, inspiring and tender butterfly encounters, from this past sizzling summer, and toss them on this page of white, that they may bring a ray of light, to warm the inner gardeners folded inside our longing souls. 

Eastern Tailed-Blue Butterflies of 2013

The progeny of these gossamer-wings are now chrysalises, or caterpillars in the Eastern Tailed-Blue's case, tucked away in crevices within mossy mounds, pods of vetches and clover, or along the frozen winter ground. Little fragile beings within their sleepy pupa or larva state, without realizing their fate, without questioning, without knowing, without hoping to survive the onslaught of freeze and thaw, human flaws and sharp bird beaks, simply, sweetly sleep, waiting for transformation. 

Summer Azure Butterflies of 2013

Holding on throughout the bleak winter months, many new Blues will emerge, along with our gladdened hearts, into the warm breath of spring. I hope and imagine hundreds of butterflies surviving the numerous perils that come between them and their completed metamorphosis. Such gossamery treasures tickle emotions and call the caring mind to action in thoughtful ways towards their wellbeing. An added appreciation for subtleties in shades of blues and grays awakens this slothful painter, when gazing upon the pastel Blues.

Silvery Blue Butterflies of 2013

Without snow cover, butterfly chrysalises and caterpillars are more vulnerable. Just beneath the old apple tree, gray birch and blueberry bushes, precious life is quietly in hiding.

I love birds too and they enjoy all the stages of butterflies equally, especially at this lean time of year.  No snow coverage is good news for this little Carolina Wren, who has decided to move in and live year round.

Wren and other bird beaks are perfect for lifting up the leaves and digging for larva nuggets below. Too bad for the butterflies being of the lower food chain, but then, butterflies fasten hundreds and hundreds of eggs to various host plants assuring there will always be trembling gossamer-wings to pollinate and touch our hearts. I say, always, but heedless humans do have a hand in the decline of butterflies of all kinds.

Foggy, frosty, winter morning sunrises are wondrous to behold just outside the windows and doors. I feel blessed to start the day in this inspiring way. A branch of the Mill River runs between the hill where Flower Hill Farm is situated and Carey Hill just due east, making for a great show of mist most every dawn. I am less excited about the sheet of wood smoke that is always more gray.

Millions of unique snowflakes fall, thickening a fleecy snow-blanket, sheltering tiny life. It is heart-warming to know of all the diverse, quiescent wildlife sleeping beneath the surface of snow in layers of detritus deeper below. In the dance of life, all is in limbo, uncertainties abound upon a blanketed earth.

Winter can be beautiful in its frozen snow-blossom way. Creating an ever changing wonderland with a great deal to explore, to ponder and exclaim about. It can soften the mind and loosen binding thoughts of gloom. If its beauty fails to lift our spirits, it may help to remember that the little Blues are placidly waiting too. 

Whites Continuing to Shimmer Throughout A Sweltering July

Bid farewell to July with a stroll through the gardens still shimmering in white . . . more mature blooms . . . some nearly fading . . . the buzz, broods, trills and furls relaxing into August along the fringe of summer. July passed with days of torrid, sultry heat. Amazingly I withstood it all and each day went about the gardens and fields, during the hottest hours, in search of butterflies, discovering new species to add to my list.

As the Bluebird couple's second brood continues to grow within the nestbox, hydrangeas swell into soft, full panicles attracting bees and butterflies alike. In the background the flowers of Japanese Tree Lilac are fading. Yucca filamentosa L. is beginning to ring its waxy bells with the other shimmering whites.

Gooseneck loosestrife Lysimachia clethroides, in the middle garden is a favorite white of many butterflies.

Aphrodite Fritillary . . .  a frequent visitor to the white patch of tapered starry panicles. 

Very unusual here to see a Little Wood Satyr sipping nectar in the gardens. They are mostly sighted skipping around low to the ground. 

Numerous sorts of Skippers are seen flying and nectaring within the gooseneck raceme. In the eight by ten feet, or so, swath of flowers, just in front of the Bluebird nestbox, there might be up to 40 or 50 tiny butterflies darting about. Comical interplay abounds.

Here a Pearl Crescent, also in some numbers, approaches a content Skipper . . . a chase follows. Butterflies can be very territorial or could this little butterfly be thinking the Skipper is one of her/his own.

Days become weeks with the stifling heat blowing open silky petals of snowy white. 

The Hydrangea paniculata 'Swan' graces the middle garden just behind the nestbox.

Large heavy snowballs fall within this old fashion favorite. 

A Cimicifuga 'Candelabra' catches the light in the upper garden.

Earlier July

End of July

'The Swan'

Among the globulous buds of Cimcifuga, a Summer Azure comes in for a landing.

Birds are going for the Viburnum berries which are spilling over into the white pom-pom-like blossoms of Hydrangea.

Tree Hydrangea inflorescence begins with a chartreuse hue. 

Looking down towards the lower garden another Hydrangea paniculata is still offering a show . . . now in full white display. 

A Greater Spangled Fritillary harvesting Hydrangea nectar.

Milkweed's bouncy, bountiful and beautifully fragrant orbs have come and gone with not one sighting of a Monarch butterfly.

A Common Whitetail dragonfly rests on the birdbath. 

Meadowsweet offers tall, white, flame-like plumes up nearer the farmhouse and studios. 

My first ever Baltimore Checkerspot! Gorgeous crescent moons and other patterns on its wings. After a champagne lunch, my dear friend and bubbly cohort, Eva, and I took a walk about the gardens and there it was, a good twenty feet away from us, just resting in an overgrown section of the north field! I will be writing about this butterfly and other unusual guests in a later piece.

For now, Happy August! The days cannot get any hotter (I hope!) but the garden colors can.

Gossamer Wings Part Two ~ Blues

The Blues are a subfamily of the family of Gossamer-wings that I particularly delight in. Standing in the north garden or the 'mini meadow' below the middle gardens, I will always think of the enchantment of these tiny butterflies and how they hold me captive and in awe of their beauty and frisky frolicking. 

One of the first Blues I sighted here at Flower Hill Farm is the Summer Azure Celastrina ladon. I wrote about the Summer Azure on the Summer Solstice . . .  sharing a wondrous encounter with two azures nectaring on lacy florets of goutweed. To my surprise and excitement one butterfly reveals its fine blue pigment usually held hidden within closed wings.

We are looking at teeny scales refracting light . . .  and as that light continuously varies, the eye is filled with a range of values and hues in soft, pale gray-blues.

Intricate marks and muted tones touch a tenderness . . . a mindful thread leading into wonderment at such creations. Leaving anthropomorphism aside, the features of these butterflies are precious and somewhat extraterrestrial, though Blues, along with thousands of other species of the Gossamer-wings family, are very grounded on this earth and have been so for a multitude of years. Seen together here with the complex and exquisite beauty of Milkweed florets I am lucky to frame two wild beings in play.

 Eastern Tailed-Blue Everes comyntas, is a Blue that wears tails and red eyes. This little guy was along the butterfly path where only feet are allowed to tread this year. I walk over from the lower garden in between grassy areas left to flourish in their wildly way, allowing certain butterflies to thrive, and enter a thin path that runs below a hummock, toppling down from the middle meadow garden, and above the blueberry field.

At the beginning, the land forms what appears to be a mini meadow. . .  and there . . . during June . . .  I was sure to encounter a fellow member of the Gossamer-wings family the American Copper on any day I venture there. Now, in July, I have found these little blues sunning and flitting about in this area and further up towards the end of the path that opens out into the north field. I can walk around the fields and gardens for an hour or more . . . even a day may go by . . . and return to find perhaps the same Eastern Tailed-Blue or another one claiming this little microscopic territory as its own.

July third and fourth were particularly fruitful in discovering little blues sunning with full wings open. The blues and grays they display are a palette I hope to emulate at a later date. 

The tails and markings of the Eastern Tailed-Blue reveal a link between the Azures, Eastern Tailed-Blues and Hairstreaks . . . all three fetching flyers.

Towering above this small and dainty being, wearing fragile diaphanous wings, as the heavy heat weighs down on my frame, I barely notice any discomfort, but feel grateful for the gentle breeze that soothes the flesh and aids in the drying of these fresh perfectly, fringed wings.

 Northern Silvery Blue Glaucopsyche lygdamus couperi or simply Silvery Blue.

Here a first discovery of a Silvery Blue in our gardens . . . possibly oviposting on Cow Vetch Vicia cracca,  since these "Switchers" have only one brood flying from May through June. As this female was sighted on June 22 , this rather faded and tattered butterfly is in the last days of its flight period.

Caught in flight the female exhibits a hint of a different hue of blue.

Silvery Blues (Northern ssp.) are called "Switchers" since they are among other Massachusetts butterflies that have switched host plants from a native to a non-native. They seem to reach for the more abundant Cow Vetch. I have now ceased pulling it from the gardens and I hope that the vetch will not become too unruly . . . still you will not hear me kvetch as long as I continue see Silvery Blues and even sometimes Eastern Tailed-Blues, as they too may choose Cow Vetch as a host plant for their young.

We have the blues here at Flower Hill Farm over many of the invasive non-native plants, but the Gossamer-wings Blues help us make peace with our lot. I can wish that your blues will always be of the Gossamer-wings family kind, though I know it cannot always be so. Still, butterflies can bring such a depth of joy and energize one towards being in nature in a less combative way.

Butterflies only demand a habitat, and by learning what their needs are to survive we may just realize our own potential towards finding another form of happiness through a simpler and healthier way of connecting with the earth.