The daily lizard and the annual flycatcher

One of the windows on the party porch is losing its netting. The strip of rubber that holds the netting into the screen has come loose, and the netting has curled down to one side. I keep forgetting when I'm out in the yard to attend to it. During the past few days, around happy hour, a lizard appears in the netting. He's not trapped. He knows how to get in and out. He's there to catch bugs. The cats noticed him, too. They know about window glass, but they still try to paw at him from inside the porch.

Yesterday a funny thing happened. The cats were waiting for the lizard to appear. They waited near the window, because now the lizard had appeared for several days in a row at the same time of day, they expected him. Sure enough, about ten or fifteen minutes later, the lizard was there. Cats are master scholars of recognizing and enforcing routines. At two o'clock, especially on the weekends when they hurry through breakfast so they can go outside, they start watching me and chirping that it's time for dinner, which is usually around four o'clock.

Another regular event occurred today. I was looking out of the window at the back yard, and there in the abelia bush was a little brown bird. I caught a flash of yellow at the neck. A juvenile great crested flycatcher. Every year the juveniles who have fledged from the tall trees in the back yard come down to the back of the house and look in the windows at us. They are curious. Then they remember, oh, right, I'm an arboreal bird, and they fly back up into the tree tops.

Fall in July

Today was amazing. It's July 25. There is heavy cloud cover most of the day. The high was 81 degrees at noon, and it's 79 now. I got my butt out to the garden and made the most of it, working out front where there is no shade until late afternoon. Got the grass edged by the Rose of Sharon. Got the mandevilla trimmed. With no freeze last winter, it was bullying everything around it. Pulled some more salvia which is also being a bully all over the yard. Tidied up the Alachua red climber rose on the trellis.

Sadly, where the salvia was muscling its way through the flower bed I used to have a twenty foot row of daylilies. Some survived, but most could not compete with the salvia. I lost Persian Market, and Mountain Violet, and some unnamed favorites. I will plant something in that bed later. For now, the focus is on clearing and cleaning up and mulching the beds.

Among the surviving daylilies was one that I had cross bred myself. Another survivor was a rescue from a nursery whose owner had lost interest in caring for all of his plants. So this is a tough little daylily! One of my favorite camellias is also from there, a very deep red double peony form. Every since I brought it to my yard, it has rewarded me by blooming heavily.

I could stand a few more days like today, heavy cloud cover and cooler temps.

Passion vine

One thing led to another. We didn't have a hard freeze last winter, and the passion vine never died. It uses my camellias and citrus as a trellis. I never got around to pulling it off, so it is really vigorous this year. I knew last spring that the first citrus I planted, beloved ponkan tangerine, was sick with the greening disease. Then I discovered the Duncan grapefruit was also sick. The tangerine was clear, but the grapefruit had vines. I agreed with the arborist that I would pull the vines off and they would take down the two sick trees, along with some others. 

When I pulled the vines I thought there would be a shower of caterpillars. There were none the first day, not even one. The second day there were two. I moved them to safety. I speculated that the zebra long wings and fritillaries were laying their eggs on tender shoots instead of mature vines. I've noticed them doing that. But I fully expected to see the tips of the mature vines with some eggs or caterpillars. None. So I did just two days of pulling vines and left the rest as they were for now. 

Two days later I was pulling some weeds out front when I noticed a zebra long wing on a camellia, looking me right in the eye. It appeared to be newly hatched and letting its wings fill out. It stayed there for two  minutes looking at me and then flew away. I will continue to pull up vines and try to liberate the yard, but there will probably always be a few for the butterflies, over on the edge of the woods. 

I was sad about the citrus. My neighbor said, you don't have to cut them down. But the tangerine had progressed so far that its fruit were misshapen, and it was clearly trying its best to bear in response to the organic fertilizer I had lavished on it, in hopes that it would recover. It was far sicker than the navel orange I cut down two years ago. 

This leaves one other ponkan tangerine, a pink navel orange (for the orioles when they visit in the winter), and a pink grapefruit. I hope they will stay well. 

What they don't tell you...

When you go to the nursery to buy plants, they don't tell you everything. For example, they don't tell you, "The deer will eat that one," or "That native shrub spreads by underground runners." No, you find out the hard way, because even the garden websites don't tell you everything. Because if they tell you which roses the deer likes best, then you won't need to buy Liquid Fence to spray on the antique roses, and the impatiens (stopped planting those years ago), and the cut-leaf coneflowers (which are glorious and worth the trouble).