Two years ago I gathered seeds from a butterfly-weed, Asclepias tuberosa, a plant in the milkweed genus, though generally not called a milkweed because it lacks white sap. I have found the seedlings slow growing – this is their second year and they still have not flowered – but today I found the harvest was coming in, in its own way. Today I saw the first monarch-butterfly caterpillar on my property (in the picture at right). There were no Asclepias species on my property before, and the monarch caterpillar, which must have the leaves of Asclepias as food, was hence absent from my property. Asclepias plants are not always considered ornamental, and more are pulled as weeds than planted. It’s nice to know that this is at least one property where Monarchs have more habitat rather than less.
This is precisely the kind of gardening I want to do, and have written about before: one that is generative of life, not a picture-gallery of prettiness, but one that nourishes and sustains life. My butterfly-weeds will, in consequence of the presence of these caterpillars, be pockmarked with holes and damaged – but it will be a nourishing kind of damage, the kind I want to see in my garden. It’s exciting to see it actually happen, and ripen from seed carefully gathered and stored up and sown and tended to this purpose.
As I thought more about this caterpillar, now just an inch long, I realized he – or his body, or his maker, or his nature – intended, after being born here on Wildcat Mountain, to spend the winter in Mexico. He is part of the last generation of summer, which follows the aster and goldenrod blooms 2,500 miles down to the Sierra Madre. He’s not likely to make it, of course – he may well become bird food or be smashed by some car long before – but that’s his plan.
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