THE ISLAND FLOWERS/ AS FLORES DA ILHA

CASA DA ARANHA, AUGUST 2013

 

 

The Three Silphiums

Once upon a time, more than ten years ago, a friend from West Virginia came to the Eastern Shore of Maryland with a gift of three tiny, scraggly native plants called Silphiums. Today they are doing well in the garden, favorites of mine, the birds, the bees and the butterflies.


All three develop deep tap roots, the ability to endure rough weather, bright sunflower like yellow blooms, great structural form in winter and a definite desire to attract wildlife of the flying kind in all seasons.


Large, strong plants with a controversial past, one is considered invasive in New England, another made the endangered list in Michigan, the third is known for medicinal properties – all three silphiums enchant my place and will, I hope, choose to stay. Or as I like to think of them, the plants for the future of gardens,reminders of the great prairie spaces inhabited by buffalo in the Midwest, of ancient days when ferns were trees, and clubfoot pine grew to heights unimagined.


Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum)

A water needy plant, yet it grows well in my yard, it multiplies (happily, it invades) with our disturbing and alternate regime of drought and flood. I do set the hose and water it for ten minutes, when things get truly bad. Tiger swallowtails, black swallowtails, monarchs, cabbage white, skippers and a myriad of bees and wasps play and feed with the mineral water sweet nectar food of the flowers.

Silphium perfoliatum quenches the thirst of an infinite number of insects. While photographing butterflies, I am always careful of the wasps and spiders hovering and crawling about. The common name refers to the intersection of the square stem and rounded leaves, where a virtual drinking vessel is formed. (Photo above)


I do not collect seeds because the plants self seed and spread. In my garden this is desirable and I enjoy the tall showy mass of yellows in flower. It is threatened in Michigan and considered invasive in Connecticut.


Prairie Dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum)

The second Silphium is Prairie Dock. Silphium terenbithinaceum, or the one that contains turpentine. It sends roots down deep and survives harsh drought conditions. Rough leaves spread out in a rosette and strong stalks reach up for the sky in multiple yellow blooms. This year it is starting to bloom only now, later than in other years. I fotographed the flowers for the first time and have not seen butterflies there yet.


Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum)

Then we come to the forgotten one, the endangered one – the Compass plant. Described in the literature as a guiding companion to explorers, it blooms in July and August here. Favorite perch for goldfinches in the fall, when seeds are ready and plentiful.


When young it reminds me of the tropical Monsteras deliciosas of my teen years, house plants in the Northern Hemisphere, but wilderness statements in the South.

The Compass Plant sends strong shoots up into the blue sky and it blooms, like sunflowers tend to bloom. The stalks are so heavy they eventually fall. I leave them on the ground and have seen early spring birds feeding on the seeds.


In a recent article in the Missouri Conservationist, Carol Davit explains how the basal leaves arrange themselves in a North South direction so as to maximize exposure to the morning sun and conserve energy during the heat of the day.


The Compass plant is my wild companion, it dies in winter and I wonder every year if it will come back to grace my territory. So far, for some twelve years, it has. This year I will try to propagate it by seed.

The ephemerals of my summer

Click for more Butterflies of the Shore

Ritual dos beijinhos

Beijos de papel


As borboletas, aos jardins, aos amigos, aos gatos, aos cachorros, aos passarinhos,
e aos rituais dos beijinhos.

Um beijo, então
Beijinho
Grande, apertado abraço
Beijo beijão por hora
Um super beijo
Um enorme beijo
Beijaço


Beijo com cheiro de saudade
Abraços e mais abraços
Beijos, beijos
Te envio beijos
Saudosos 
Carinhosos
Beijin


C’est ça ma petite, baisers
Bons sonhos mon cher
Saudadinha
Três beijos alternados
Kisses na correria
Bracitos
Pitani bwino


Um beijo divertido pras borboletas
outro pro Rio de Janeiro,
Saudades coloridas
Gracias por tudo
No amor de mais uma lua cheia


Beijocas pra ti


Bacci baccini.



Um poeminha desenhado inteiramente
dos beijos virtuais
de cinco anos
de correios eletrônicos

Dreams

Grandes sonhos pontuam meus pensamentos

no fazer dormir
a inocência
do meu querer.

Fantasmagoric dreams place periods
onto my thoughts
lullabye to sleep
the innocence
of my wants.

The Poetry of Botany

Travelling without a gun and a box of watercolors

If you travelling to Brasil, stop by Belo Horizonte and visit the Margaret Mee (1909/1988) botanical illustration exhibit at the Palacio das Artes – a celebration of 100 years of her life and work.

Born in England, she came to Brasil in her fifties and in her sixties and seventies she was travelling alone to the Amazon to find, document and paint Brazilian flowers. In a marriage of poetry to science, she made important contributions to the understanding of Brazilian tropical botany and to the need for conservation of what we may only see in watercolor wash.

The exhibit spans three elegant halls on the first floor of the Palacio das Artes, a modern building nested inside the Municipal Gardens (Parque Municipal) planned by Burle Marx - bromeliads and orchids in bloom inside and out.

One of her book is for sale at the Palácio’s bookstore and already on my shelf. Tomorrow I go to enjoy my third visit.

About the flowers, she said once:

“They’re extraordinarily aggressive, some of them. The bromeliads, that’s the pineapple family, have great thorns. In fact, they’re extremely difficult to collect, as you can imagine. They have hosts of creatures living in them, including scorpions, poisonous spiders, ants, well, almost… and even snakes in some cases. But of course, there are the others which are so beautiful, delicate color, orchids, for instance, the Cattleya violacea, and the blue orchid, Acacallis cyanea, which is absolutely a dream.”

Borboletando na Mata: As Borboletas da Passarada

Os Papagos, índios norte americanos, explicam que a tempos atrás, o Creador teve pena das crianças, quando se deu conta de que o destino delas era mesmo o de envelhecer, engordar, ficarem mancas, cegas e morrer. Daí que êle pegou as fontes de tôdas as côres mais belas, das flôres, do sol, das folhas, do céu . Misturou tôdas dentro de um pacote e as deu de presente as crianças. Quando elas abriram o pacote, dali voaram as borboletas, coloridas e encantadoras. Note-se bem que naquele tempo as borboletas também cantavam, para delícia das crianças e grande espanto dos passarinhos. Êstes finalmente se reuniram em comício e reclamaram junto ao Creador. E deu no que deu…

Clique no link para um versao da estoria em ingles:
http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/HowTheButterfliesCameToBe-Papago.html

Como as bruxas, as borboletas são classificadas pelos biólogos como insetos dentro da ordem dos Lepidopteros, os unicos insetos que tem asas com escamas. Do latim Lepido= escamados e ptera= asas. Achados fósseis, embora raros, sugerem que elas tenham aparecido na terra ao mesmo tempo em que apareceram as flôres, durante o período do Cretácio - por volta de 135.000.000 anos atrás, sim, milhões de anos atrás.

Borboletas da Passarada

Já foram descritas mais de 180.000 espécies de borboletas e mariposas no mundo e destas , 15,000 são borboletas. O Brasil tem umas 5.000 espécies conhecidas até agora e ouvi dizer que só na região da Mata Atlântica brasileira podem ser encontradas 1,200 espécies.

Documento aqui uma dúzia de espécies de borboletas que ou fotografei, ou reconheci durante a minha estadia na fazenda da Passarada, perto de Piracaia, no estado de São Paulo, um periodo intermitente e curto de 2007 a 2010.

BORBOLETA-MONARCA

(Monarca) Danaus plerippus (Linnaeus) Família: Danaidae.Nome em inglês: Monarch butterfly.

Originárias das Américas, as borboletas monarcas atualmente se encontram espalhadas pelo mundo inteiro. Os adultos podem passar longos periodos em jejum e pesando menos de uma grama, podem voar enormes distâncias.

As borboletas precisam e se alimentam quase exclusivamente de liquidos, do nectar de flores de côres variadas, e dos minerais encontrados em poças de lama.

Visite o link para mais fotos da metamorfose:
http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/

As lagartas das monarcas se alimentam exclusivamente das plantas Asclepias (da mitologia grego-romana, o deus Esculápio era o deus da Medicina e da cura.) e tem sido residentes constantes da Passarada, onde a Asclepias curasavica ou algodãozinho do campo é protegido.

Na América do Norte a sobrevivência dessas borboletas está ameaçada por perda do “habitat” para suas lagartas.


Foi grande a minha alegria quando vi a larva da monarva nessa planta brasileira na minha primeira visita a Passarada em dezembro de 2007. A foto acima foi tirada agora em 2010. Observei que a borboleta adulta continua preferindo o algodaozinho do campo.

Playing with Butterflies: (Borboletando na Mata)

The continuing legend of the Atlantic rainforest – is it ending or not?

I was born in the middle of the famous Brazilian Rainforest and did not even know it - semi temperate and semi tropical Mata Atlantica, seemingly always on the verge of disappearance.

My best memories from childhood are linked to the Mata, inside the mined mountains of Minas Gerais, with the hunting of rats with Father in the corn stalls, with being scared by spiders and vipers, sliding down the mud, learning to swim with the frogs. As a teenager, I left for the coast, the ocean and the state of the Holy Ghost. There, at twenty three, I left the forest behind and the Country for good.

The world was wide and it took time to return. I am back at sixty, and I am told the Mata is still disappearing.

How can I enter this land to see if it is still necessary to vigilate it? So I imagined to build a garden up there made for butterflies. My good friend Roberto R. has a wild and beautiful farm up high in the Mata and he generously supported my adventures.

I imagined the world of butterflies because, like me, they respond badly to environmental hardship and can be indicators of health. Like frogs, they tell tales of degradation.

I like them because they are flighty, because I wanted to learn a bit more about their territoriality. Mechi Garza, a Cherokee elder from my syndicate of women writers, the IWWG, told me once I belong to their clan. Armed with my Cherokee name, Laughing Cloud, widowed, tanned white, born Brazilian, raised Gringa, feeling seriously lost and trying to find my way out of the loneliness of recent widowhood, loss of parent, sibling, country despair and job...

I landed in Passarada, where birds fly more freely than we do... The farm lies deep inside the Mantiqueira mountains, about two and a half hours drive northeast from the big city of Sao Paulo. The last urban frontier is the village of Pião, one of the very early settlements left from the days of the Bandeirantes, the European explorers who came hunting for gold in the interior of Brazil, back in the 18th century.

High up, inhabited by forest spirits, fountainheads, ferns, bromeliads, good for nothing sticks, natives, invasives, wild cats and during evening fire chats, even a soul from the dead and werewolves. The roads are terrible in the rain, you may get stuck going there or you may get there and never leave (willingly). There is talk of improvements, both at the private landowner level and at the Municipality of Piracaia.

The Atibainha river runs by it, and it is fed by two or three pristine water sources. It is part of the Cantareira water system that eventually quenches the thirst of almost 60% of the Sao Paulo city region.

It is a place of unexpected discoveries and goose bumps. My best story thread is to continue to fetch drinking water from the brook, at dusk, a few minutes away from the house, year after year. I was afraid of snakes and dressed in high boots, in the beginning. Now, I am aware of them, I still wear high boots, but am more impressed by the walk, the water and the gifts.

I share here what I learned there and what I learn now. There are some fascinating new guides for ornamental plants, for invasives, birds and trees in Brazil, but not for butterflies. So I worked with American material I have been collecting, I took photos, I talked with the folks that live at the farm.

Out of this experience, well, I opened up this blog, I have a new digital camera and I now read books again, from cover to cover. Necessary practice while I waited patiently for yet another almost perfect moment to photograph these elusive creatures of light.

The forest is not ending yet and I am witness to the vitality of the creatures that live inside it.

What may be ending comes, not from the forest, but from the outside.
The butterfly garden is as ephemeral as their flight.

And butterflies, well, they continue to be symptom, diagnostic and remedy, all at once.