Caching In...the woods

I normally don't work on the weekends, but I was at the site last Saturday when I received a call and discovered a fellow garden blogger was in the area. Here's Kylee's account of her visit and some pictures of the site.

I enjoyed showing the garden to Kylee; it was interesting to see the garden through her eyes. Sometimes all I see is what needs to be done--weeding, deadheading, redesigning. No matter what, though, I thoroughly love being there in the woods, along the water, in a garden.

I knew that there was one geocache at the site, as I talked to some geocachers last fall. I learned Saturday that there are two on the site. If this is your sport, don't look at the photos below because this cache is in a very distinctive place.
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Here's Kylee honing in on the cache. Notice how another geocacher is leaning on the bole of this tree.





















Here she is checking out the contents, and another view of the bole.

Eacles Imperialis or Yellow Emporer

I was sitting on the bench in front of the Visitor's Center yesterday talking to Ed, the site naturalist, when his eyes got big and he pointed behind me. Here is what he saw. Note the eggs she laid on the doorframe. She left but we are still watching the eggs.


















While it is an unusual moth for northern Indiana, what made this especially interesting is that Gene's best-selling book, A Girl of the Limberlost, centered on a young girl's search for this moth and...























Gene documented in words and photos the life cycle of what she called the Yellow Emperor in Moths of the Limberlost.























Here is a close shot of its head.


















Look at the image on the back of the head. Doesn't it look like an angry face?

More restoration work

Earlier this summer, they restored the roof of the garden shed and now they are working on a new front porch to the cabin. I was amazed at the deep gaping cavern, maybe 12' deep, when they removed the rotted floorboards. Unfortunately, I had to maneuver over these joists to water the planters on the front porch. This picture may give you an idea of the scale.


















The workers were very skilled and the floor looks wonderful. This is where the porch turns 90 degrees.

Hot and Cool

When the crocosmia is blooming, every visitor stops and asks about it. It is really a showstopper. I think it is large enough to divide, as there is room for a large drift of these hotties.


















Another hot plant in the garden now is the gallardia.


















Is this hot or cold? I love the blue and yellow combination. There are quite a few balloon flowers in the garden but I like this combination planting the best.























And the coolest plant of all now blooming? Globe thistle. An Amish women asked me why in the world I had a large thistle in the garden. I explained about globe thistle but she insisted that no thistle would ever be in her garden.

Daylilies

The daylilies are blooming. While there are a lot of daylilies in the garden, there is little variety. There is a rather large overgrown daylily bed with only two varieties; one variety is pictured in the middle and the other is a soft peach. One of our goals is to expand the collection of daylily cultivars with a longer bloom season in a reworked daylily bed.

Nonetheless, these are beautiful and add a lot to the garden mid-summer.

Milkweeds

There are three genera of milkweeds in the gardens. This is the swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), but it is growing well in a sunny dry location. Perhaps that is why it is over 5 feet when the reference books say it is 1-4' in height. The juice is less milky and it is less fragrant than the common milkweed.


















This is butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), which attracts many butterflies with its showy bloom and is a favorite of Monarchs. When you visit, see if you can find the caterpillars on the plants.


















As I was looking up the botanical names, I found this little factoid about the milkweed family (Asclepiadaceae): "The unusual structure of the flower regulates pollination. Sacs of pollen snag on insects' legs, are pulled from the stamens and then must be precisely inserted in slits behind the crown. If inserted backwards, pollen grains germinate in the wrong direction and are wasted. This may explain why so few pods occur on most plants. Insects too small to pull free die trapped on the flower." (The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers--Eastern Region)