My Quiescent Butterfly and Hummingbird Garden

How quickly my flowers, shrubs and trees changed their colorful summer attire and donned their more demure autumn outfits - almost overnight, or so it seems. Shorter daylight hours have turned the green leaves of our white birch tree to dazzling hues of yellow and gold. Our nights have begun to get much cooler as each day goes by. After Jack Frost pays still colder visits to our area, myriads of those leaves will fall from this white birch tree, creating a gorgeous soft carpet of burnished gold that will cover the grass beneath it. Our lawn has been mowed for the last time this season and is ready to go dormant until spring - a big relief for my dear hubby who does all the mowing!

There's nothing quite as striking as a dogwood tree all dressed up in her fall robe of burgundy-colored leaves. With each passing day, its curled leaves turn a little darker purplish in color, becoming even more striking while still clinging tightly to their branches - probably not wanting the icy chill of Old Man Winter to arrive any more than I do! However, this is Nature's way - each tree knows precisely when it's time to drop its leaves.

Just recently, a wide variety of visiting birds had a real hey-day for several weeks harvesting a mass of tiny red berries that appear every fall on this flowering dogwood tree. They were a delight to observe through our kitchen and dining room windows as they expertly stripped and ate the outer rind and juice from those little red berries, leaving the part that will be next year's blossoms nicely intact. I must admit, the first year I saw a whole flock of birds "attacking" what I thought were the following year's blossoms on my dogwood tree, I quickly dashed outside and chased them away several times -- to no avail. Little did I know back then that the birds were really helping the dogwood blossoms "do their thing" for the following spring. After I learned this from a local nurseryman, the harvest of these berries by our fine-feathered friends became an annual affair that we look forward to every fall just as soon as we see those berries turn bright red.

Our two vigorous buddleias (butterfly bushes) that sported abundant pink and purple blossoms of eight to ten inches all summer are also entering their dormant stage this month, along with the canopy of wisteria that surrounds two sides of our back deck. The fragrant blossoms on the buddleias provided nectar all summer for butterflies, pollinator bees, an occasional hummingbird that spied their bright blossoms, and a variety of other flying insects. Swallowtails, monarchs, sulphurs, fritillaries, mourning cloaks, cabbage whites, tiny little blues, and yes -- sphinx moths all dined at the buddleias. The dainty cabbage white and sulphur butterflies are always the last species of butterflies we see in our yard in the fall -- and are usually the first ones that appear in the spring. We also saw a completely different species of either moths or butterflies this year that we were never able to identify. They always came to feed on the buddleias just at dusk every evening until several weeks ago. Perhaps next summer I'll be able to identify them.

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