Periodical Cicadas--Cicada Tourism

I flew to St. Louis to see the periodical cicadas, brood XIX, 13-year periodical cicadas. Why? Because they are a wonder of the world. No other organism spends 12 or 16 years underground to emerge, mate and lay eggs in the 13th or 17th year, with all of the periodical cicadas in an area synchronized at these very long intervals. Nothing in the world comes even close to it. How could this evolve? They are found only in the eastern U.S. from just west the Missouri River east almost to the Atlantic Ocean, from Wisconsin and New York south to Louisiana, Alabama, northern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and nowhere else in the world. I somehow was never in the right place at the right time to see them emerge. 

periodical cicada, St. Louis, Missouri

Grow Native Plants. Part 1: Why?

The conservation community is urging people to grow plants native to their area. At the same time, you can find articles arguing against planting cultivars of native species. It is difficult, buying a native plant, to figure out how to avoid a cultivar. And why should you? This is a big topic. I'll cover it in a series of posts. First, why grow natives at all?

Natives beebalm, black-eyed susans and a bit of grass

Thinking about Insects

We need to revise our attitude toward insects. 

It is probably fair to say we've waged war on insects this last half-century in the United States. Insects were generally bad: mosquitos when you ventured outside, cockroaches and ants in the kitchen, caterpillars and grasshoppers in the garden, moths in the stored woolens, weevils in the jar of beans of walnuts. You get the picture.

bumble bee on echinacea flower

So we deployed better and better weapons against them, to the point of spraying pesticide around neighborhoods to kill mosquitos. But of course that killed all manner of nontarget insects. (And, very few mosquitos; to reduce mosquitos, drain their breeding puddles.) So today insect numbers are way down. Not just monarch butterflies, but painted lady butterflies, swallowtail butterflies, and many, many more.

Becoming Part of Homegrown National Park

I've always liked native plants--stately cottonwoods (Populus deltoides), dramatic redbuds (Cercis canadensis), robin-attracting serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), blanketflowers (Gaillardia species), columbines (Aquilegia species)...I can go on and on. I grow them in my yard (well, not the cottonwood, too big) because I like them. But I also have a bit of Kentucky bluegrass lawn (Poa pretense, from Eurasia), creeping buttercup as a ground cover (Ranunculus repens, from Europe), a maple (Acer, not local to area), lilacs (Syringa vulgaris, from Eurasia), iris (Iris, from all over the world), peonies (Paeonia from China), crocus (Crocus from Eurasia) and many others. I like them too.

blanket flower, Gaillardia, native

What I learned recently is that native animals--butterflies and moths, but also wood-borers and leafhoppers--often cannot eat introduced plants. That makes sense to me. In fact, I used to teach that one of the reasons for species being invasive is that they left behind the animals, fungi, and bacteria that ate them, and, with very little damage in the new continent, could grow much better. I never thought about the reverse of that: the impact of nonnatives on the native food chain.