Borage, Butterflies, and Bimbos: Reflections in the Rain

It was a grey and dreary morning in the Home Bug Garden, three days past the first killing frost of the Fall. The Home Bug Gardener and his wife were grumpy and poorly slept. On the positive side, the drought had relaxed a bit last night into an extended drizzle, doubly appreciated for its dampening effect on the party in the revolving rental next door. Not enough rain to short circuit the blasting boom boxes or drown out the bikinied bimbos blabbering in the rented hot tub. Nor enough to wet down to the buried bulbs that should be spreading roots in preparation for next Spring’s bursting forth. Enough, however, to keep me inside and blearily reading blogs, rather than ranting at the neer-do-wells next door, and to put me into an alliterative ambience about better times with borage, butterflies, and not so noisy neighbours.

Today, I’m beholden to The Far North Garden for my stringing consonants on my blog instead of spewing curses at the neighbours. Among the many well written and balanced postings available for whiling away a Sunday morning in a non-confrontational manner was a recent one on volunteer borage (Borago officinalis), one of my favourite alien plants. As a home bug gardener, I suppose I should claim that I plant borage for the bees, but really I like its “feed me” ‘Little Shop of Horror’ looks. Besides, I only planted it once five years ago and after that it has planted itself. Every year now I can enjoy its true blue flowers and spindly and spiny spread with no additional effort.

An added bug garden advantage of borage is that when the Painted Lady Butterflies (Vanessa cardui) make one of their rare, northward migrations into Edmonton (last one was 2005), their caterpillars love it. Of course, even a home bug gardener isn’t necessarily delighted with spiny black caterpillars devouring their plants (they hammered the lupines, yarrow, and globe thistle too), but a bit of plant biomass seems a small price to pay for the silent beauty of the Painted Lady. Also, those were the days when an acoustic guitar hootenanny was the worst we could expect from the rental neighbours and getting enough sleep is a pre-requisite to rational approaches to garden problems. Our rational approach was to let them feed (except on the newly planted globe thistle) and we now have enough of all of these plants that we would welcome another migration.

Although the rare Painted Lady migrations get the local Altalepers pretty excited, another rare migrant is far better known – the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Edmonton is far enough north and deficient enough in native milkweeds, the larval food, that the Monarch is a rare visitor. In 2007, however, we had the extraordinary delight to encounter a visiting Monarch in our backyard, watch it oviposit, and enjoy its larvae later chowing down on our ‘butterfly weed’.

Actually, although the seed packet from the Devonian claimed our milkweed was the Butterflyweed Asclepias tuberosa, a beautiful and not very aggressive plant with flat heads of orange flowers that would be marginally hardy here (usually rated to Zone 4), what actually emerged from the ground was a much more vigorous monster. I believe this is Swamp or Rose Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, which has ball-like umbels of pinkish lavender flowers and wandering roots that quickly took over our primary potager bed. Once its roots were contained in a smaller bed, however, it became a welcome addition to our garden.

By an extraordinary stroke of luck, my wife and I also had the delight to watch a new Monarch Butterfly emerge from our milkweed and fly away, presumably to eventually head for Mexico. That is about as good as it gets in the Home Bug Garden – the rare opportunity to contribute to an insect phenomenon that actually has a lot of popular appeal. Alas, no monarchs or painted ladies have graced our garden since then, and with the climate seemingly in for a long cold spell, I wonder if we will ever see them again? On the other hand, as I recall the renters that summer were even worse than the current batch and we were treated to flashing red lights and a police helicopter with search light scanning the neighbourhood at 3:30 in the morning after one particularly violent party. No sense in dwelling on the negative though. Perhaps the sun will wake up and shed some extra warmth, another monarch will grace our milkweed, and the next batch of renters will be a nice, quiet family.