Gee, it's been quite awhile since I posted!
I've been, of course, singing in the rain! And I've been reading like mad-books that I put on hold at the library only to have six come in all at once, enjoying the few days left to me of my Granddaughters summer vacation, trying, to no avail, to get a picture of the Acorn Woodpecker's baby peeking out of his nest on the underside of a long dead Ponderosa Pine branch, and planting and transplanting in my little garden while we are blessed with rain and there is humidity in the air to help plants get a start in our granite based soil.
The other day, Omegamom mentioned watching hummingbird moths close to her home. I, too, have always been enamoured of these huge moths that appear in the evening to hover, wings moving as rapidly as real hummingbirds, around the sweetest smelling flowers in the garden. I found that they are officially called Hawkmoths and I ran across this old illustration of the various types.
Sadly, I only recently learned that one larva of these lovely moths is the horned tomato worm,and regret having killed many of these tomato and tomato vine munchers in the name of gardening. Had I known in those days, I could easily have allotted a plant or two to their use.There have always been a few hawkmoths hovering about the flowers in my garden as the summer twilight deepens to night, but this year I have seen only one. Next year there may be none.
I found this site that tells about our most common hawkmoth and the Datura it feeds upon. Datura is in the deadly nightshade family as are tomato and potato plants. It has huge, white, night blooming flowers that fill the air with heady fragrence. Like tomato and potato plants, the Datura plant is poisonous and Datura seeds are a powerful and dangerous hallucinogen . It's also called Jimson weed in the west and I think it must have been a city fella who wrote that old Sons of the Pioneers song claiming the lonely cattle feed on the lowly Jimson weed.
Datura flowers were a favorite subject of the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Here are a couple of her paintings.
This is the last week we get to play with our girls. They are back in school the sixth and seventh of August................
8 comments:
So hawk moths and the nightshade family go together! News to me & thanks for the info. Just this afternoon, I scattered a bunch of seed, including datura seed from a couple of years ago. With all the rain, the seeds might even hatch -- one or two. My luck with datura has been so bad that I had to resort to a nursery-grown plant to get one in my wild garden.
GJ, I lucked out with that nice volunteer right by my front step. It lived about four years and then died. E. has a couple in his meadow, so I'll try some seed from them. The demise of my Datura probably has something to do with the lack of hawkmoths this year.
When I was a child, there were Datura trees growing behind a house we lived in, for a time. My mother hated them, & she hated the smell of the flowers. For some reason I was always fascinated with them, & used to play with the flowers, as they fell off the trees.
I dont remember any Hawk moths!
What are datura trees, Meggie???
meggie, your remembrance of the Datura trees made me curious so I googled it and found a site..seedman.com that has many varieties of Datura as well as Brugmansia that is more tree-like.
One is Datura Tree Brugmansia x arborea that grows about 15 feet high. I hadn't reaized how many varieties of these plants there are and how spectacular they can be!
Datura used to grow wild around St. George UT when we lived there. They look like giant white morning glories, and I think they might be the morning glories the hippies used to get high on, since the datura is also called "sacred," because of its hallucinogenic properties. Whatever...O'Keefe painted some awesome stuff. I have a huge book of her works.
liz, yes, Sacred Datura! I remember now that it was used by Native American Shaman...
It's interesting to know that you lived in the Southwest before you went North to Alaska..........
Actually, I was born in Reno. Went to Alaska the first time in 1944, as a baby. Then to Utah in 1949, back to Alaska in 1964, back out to Utah in 1988, then to MN, then back to Alaska in 2005. Shoosh. You'd THINK I'd learn!
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