Last Year's Pipevine Swallowtails!!!

 So, I have been growing Woolly Pipevine for at least 14 years. I went with Aristolochia macrophylla over A. tomentosa because it's less aggressive.... or at least, it's easier to control. A. tomentosa sends up new stems from everywhere its roots spread out, so just one plant can take over a whole garden bed with new stems poking up and climbing all over the plants that grow there. A. macrophylla doesn't do this. It's just the one main trunk and lots of stems that come off of that and climb all over whatever. Put another way, the roots stay where you planted them. 

I initially planted this as a host plant for the Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly. But this isn't a species very common to my area. They are found in New Jersey and have been sighted in my county, but there aren't any large populations nearby. The reason for this is there aren't many host plants around. Black Swallowtail are abundant because they're a generalist on the carrot family, so every field that's been invaded by Queen Anna's Lace, or home gardener growing Parsley, Carrots, Fennel, Dill and so on are helping this species thrive. Tiger Swallowtails are even more common thanks to Tulip Trees, Black Cherry, and what remains of the Ash population being staples in the patchwork of our local forest lands. 

The nearest sighting of the Pipevine Swallowtail to me is about a 30 minute drive from my house. So for 14 years the vine pretty much went unused aside for the occasional Robin's nest, and Ant which used it to get from our shed to the Redbud it's latched onto. 

Ohh yes, the shed. The vine is slowly consuming it on both sides, though hasn't quite taken over the roof yet. The shingles still get too hot for its stems to lay but each year I see it adding another layer as the leaves it makes up there grow larger and larger and shade out enough for new stems to safely sit without getting baked off. 

I'd been thinking about pruning it back but then one day last July I went out there and noticed these clusters of little orange eggs. "OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!" I shouted.

A female Pipevine Swallowtail had found our vine and graced it with four clusters of eggs. Sadly one of them was on a vine that stuck out into the path and I was going to prune off. Raising butterflies in captivity is normally frowned upon but I decided to make an exception here, and this would let me better document their life cycle. And for the record, the majority of the egg clusters I left outside. It was just a cluster of 9 eggs that I brought in and raised in a butterfly cage. Also a few days later I discovered additional egg clusters that seem to have been laid after the first four clusters, so I guess she came back or a second female flew by. 

Outside I noticed all of the egg clusters were laid on the newest growth. This is likely because the toxin in the leaves will be at the lowest here and the caterpillars will be better able to handle it.

 

After a few days, they entered the "Forbidden Gummy Worm" phase of development. Seriously though don't eat these. The toxin pipevine plants make, and caterpillars eventually store in their bodies, is an actual carcinogen. This is likely why the plant fell out of favor among gardeners. 

I was making a mistake with raising the ones indoors. You're not supposed to bring them inside it seems as this throws off their natural rhythm. Should I do this in the future I'll be sure to keep the butterfly cage outside. 

It was neat having them inside though. Their constant chewing is loud and with nine of them going at it there was an ambient Yule Log effect going on. I wish I had recorded it.

Being Swallowtails, this meant their caterpillars have "horns" this yellow/orange tongue-like appendage that comes out of their head and sprays a kind of formic acid or foul smelling chemical out. The idea is should a bird try and pick one up, BAM!!! Awful Perfume Sample right in the eyes! The caterpillar will likely die soon after this happens but rest assured, that bird certainly won't be picking one of these up to feed to their kids. 

All that being said, I had to poke this thing with a pencil for a good ten minutes or so just to get him angry. 

Large black worms with orange dots all over them don't exactly blend in. It's almost like they're asking to be eaten. And as it turns out, this is exactly what they're doing. This is the same/similar strategy the Monarch Butterfly uses. Monarch caterpillars are black, white and yellow, and they actively feed in the day in full view of predators. They taste nasty though and have bad chemicals in them that might kill a baby bird. Eventually through repeated predator, the birds learn not to feed these caterpillars to their babies. The trouble with this strategy is there's always a new generation of birds to teach but eventually the local population learns to leave them alone and the caterpillars thrive.

 

It's around now that I noticed none of the outdoor caterpillars have survived past the second or third instar. This makes me glad I at least brought a few indoors. Maybe I'm greedy but I didn't want to wait another 14 years to photograph them. Also as far as caterpillars go, they look really cool.

 Chrysalis Day!

 One by one, they all shed their last layer of skin off and formed a chrysalis. 

10 to 14 days later, they started to emerge. 

BTW I have no idea how you tell the gender in this species. Some people say the females are this navy blue color while males are more of a green... but uhhh.

This is the same butterfly as the navy blue one pictured just above. I don't think the color thing is accurate. Either that or I somehow managed to hatch 8 girls. (1 did not emerge from its chrysalis at all. I'm assuming it's going to hatch out sometime this Spring.)

I released all 8 of them once their wings were expanded and they were able to fly. Sometimes they would hang out on the flowers I put them on but not for long. Within the hour they were fueled up and flew out into the world. 

A few days releasing them all though, I was delighted to come home and find one in my garden. This wasn't staged at all. I had to pull out my phone and quickly snap a picture. 

Hopefully they'll find my garden again this year. And hopefully more people will give Pipevine a try so this butterfly becomes a more common sight every year.

Gardening Goals and Achievements

 

When I first started gardening my initial goal was to provide nectar sources for my honeybees. Early attempts were an abysmal failure as I relied upon plants that simply looked pretty from a local nursery. The issue of course being that most nurseries sell cultivars with looking pretty in mind, instead of plants that are pretty useful. They do sell some useful plants but not as many as they should.

Realizing I would have to do some research, I started to set goals of what I wanted to get out of the garden. Along the way my focus changed from simply providing nectar fro my bees towards seeing what ecological effects my garden could have. I wanted to see how much biodiversity I could fit into one acre of land. Nothing was measured scientifically (I'd likely need at least 30 yards to make any conclusions,) but my achievements are as follows.

Probably the simplest achievement with gardening came in the form of a simple pack of sunflower seeds. They're the favorite food of the Eastern Goldfinch (The state bird of NJ) and their beaks are actually the ideal size and shape to dislodge a sunflower seed from the flower disk. Planting $5 worth of seeds not only brings in the pollinators but also a very attractive bird as well.

The next major milestone for my garden really had all the stars aligning perfectly. I met a fellow beekeeper who was really into native plant gardening but also advocated nonnatives like Catmint and Salvia. One of the plants that really caught my eye was his clump of Butterfly Weed which he grew along side an impressive clump of Lavender. I wanted to copy his garden as much as I could but chose a different species, Asclepias incarnata, Swamp Milkweed, or Fragrant Milkweed as I like to call it. I had no idea at the time, but Monarchs favor laying their eggs on the plant. The leaves are less tough than Common and Butterfly Weed, and because it tends to grow in moist soil the humidity in the air is more favorable to insects in flight. What's more the first chrysalis I found was on the host plant, which is uncommon. Normally the caterpillars abandon the host plant to get out of the way of the next generation. And again 10 days to the hour I first found the chrysalis I watched as it hatched into a beautiful butterfly.

Over the past several years now I've started to go after some of the more obscure natives that not a lot of people grow. For example, I'm the only person I know who has a Button Bush, and I'd love to grow more of them but I just don't have the space.

Purple Milkweed, while commercially available, doesn't seem to be grown by a lot of people. As I've discovered though, that's probably a good thing. Unlike Butterfly Weed, Swamp Milkweed, and Common Milkweed, this species requires cross pollination in order to produce viable seed. Individual plants don't produce as many flowers as other species. And tragically, the wildlife people grow milkweeds to attract target the flowers and seed heads first! You basically need to remove Monarch caterpillars, Milkweed Beetles, Milkweed Seed Bugs, Four-eyed Beetles, and keep the stems completely free of Oleander Aphids for this plant to do well! Of course it doesn't help that when it does successfully flower ants come and steal the nectar!

Purple Milkweed still grows in my yard but I've not been able to get it to flower again because pests keep eating it!

Rarer Still, I tried growing the true Red Milkweed, Asclepias rubra. I call it the true Red Milkweed because one of the major mail order nurseries has started calling Asclepias incarnata, Red Milkweed. They're wrong of course as is whoever came up with the common name for this species. The flowers are clearly a shade of pink! The plants I bought (and suspect were dug out of the wild) grew well the first year and flowered but have yet to emerge again. The roots are still in the soil, still slightly green or white if you cut into them, still fleshy like an ordinary rhizome but for some reason they don't produce any shoots or green growth of any kind. Very odd. If I locate them again I'll move them to an even wetter spot of the garden. I'm pretty sure they're a bog species.

This is an achievement for me in that I got to photograph it flowering. I have no plans of trying to grow it again as all the sources for plants at this time I suspect might be from plant poachers.

Aquatic Milkweed, Asclepias perennis. This is you can buy on the internet easy enough but it didn't do well in my yard because all the wet bog-like places are already have lots of weeds and plants growing in them. It's a small species with some of the smallest flowers in the genus too. I was hopeful that it would be successful in my garden but it wasn't. I may try planting more of this again in a true bog garden some day, but for right now, I'm just glad I was able to photograph it flowering.

Discovered Flame Azaleas are semi-carnivorous. Actually they're not carnivorous at all but to protect their flowers from nectar thieves, their stems have hairs on them that dispense a type of glue to stop ants dead in their tracks. Now when the hummingbirds come to feed at the flowers they can find an added tasty treat clinging to the stem.

Red Flowering Raspberry. This plant was a huge surprise. The flowers are as pretty as our native roses, though they're also a poor replacement for a rose. You can't really use them for a cut flower, and they're short lived. The stems lack any prickers and instead have a sticky feel to them. They have yet to produce fruit but I believe that's a cross pollination issue I'm hopefully fixing in the coming year. I've planted three more specimens that should flower. If they don't produce fruit then I'll likely move them some place else so I can plant things that are more productive. But man, look how pretty that flower is!

Companula americana. This is a biannual I decided to try one year and it's easily my new favorite plant for dry shade. It grows in bone dry soil, in full shade conditions! The first one I got growing grew 7' tall and flowered robustly from June to frost. It got to the point where it was making bloom and buds on existing seed pods because the stem had become so overcrowded with flowers. I've never seen anything like it. The following year's plants weren't as great, but they're biannuals so they take an added year. Then on the year past we had new windows installed, and one of the workers took a rake to the garden and got rid of all my plants while cleaning up! Good to know they're easy to control if they get out of hand but I was hoping for a whole backdrop in the garden of 5 to 7' tall spires of blue flowers. Hopefully I'll get to see that happen this year because I emptied a pound of seed or two in the spot.

A lot of the ephemeral plants I grow disperse their seeds with the aid of ants. I'm overjoyed that I was able to not only grow a few species of Trilliums and other plants that have elaiosome on their seeds but also able to witness the behavior in my own backyard. And I've also realized I'm probably the only person in North America who's bothering to photograph this behavior!

Very recently I was approached by a museum about using one of my photos for an exhibit. Unfortunately I'm not a professional photographer (Yet!) and don't normally save images in as high a resolution as their project required. Still, to have been asked was an honor!

Roughly 40% of our native ephemeral wildflowers disperse their seeds this way and most gardening books treat the topic like a cliff note... There isn't a whole lot to tell, but I've found certain species of ants favor certain plant species and some are better about dispersing them a greater distance than other.  

Getting Wildflower to reproduce, and ephemerals at that! This is huge because some of these plants I buy cost $25 each, and they're not always successful! Knowing that the plant is happy enough to do what it would normally be doing in nature, in my yard, it the best compliment a plant can give you. (Or the worst if it's invasive.) Now if my rare Trilliums would just stop reseeding in the lawn I'd be in business.

Getting my Paw Paw tree to flower. For years I'd been planting saplings of this species all over my yard and for one reason or another they just couldn't survive the winter. It's annoying! Finally I found a spot where they get enough water in the summer and don't burn up in the heat, and are sheltered in the winter enough to survive. And I immediately planted a second one right next to it. So one tree is of a flowering age, now I just need the second one so they can cross pollinate and maybe I'll get some fruit.

Dutchmen's Pipe. I've had this vine growing for a good 7 years at least and it finally decided to start flowering... Not the prettiest things but I had a theory that the seeds to this plant have elaiosome on the seeds so I'm eager to see if that's true. Unfortunately they seem to require cross pollination, so I won't know that until several years later when the vine's counterpart I planted finally reaches of age.

I planted this as a host plant for the Pipe Vine Swallowtail and I'm still waiting for them to find it. :( though this seems a common problem among butterfly gardeners.

Yellow Passionflower, Passiflora lutea, is another species I'm proud to say I grow. Unfortunately it seems I don't grow enough of it. This is a plant they tell you to grow in the shade and let it grow up the stems and branches of another plant. There's nothing wrong with that, but the absolutely charming leaves, flowers, and fruit get completely lost in the foliage. I have a vine of this in my garden still, I think. But now that I've seen it growing at the Mt. Cuba Center, clearly I'm growing it wrong. It still gets lost, but they have it growing right on a fence in full sun where it thickly covers the fence almost like an ivy. It's a great little vine that doesn't get out of hand, and I'm curious to see if Fritillary Butterflies use it as a host.

Georgia Aster, probably the last plant in temperate North America to stat blooming aside from Witch Hazel and Heathers. This is a plant I look forward to every year now. I've only been growing it for three years, it's flowered the past two. This year I collected seeds and hopefully I'll get a lot more of it to grow. The flowers are nice and large, and the purple is a great contrast of the leaves from fallen trees, which are shades of yellow, red, or brown.  

Discovering that Black Swallowtails do use Golden Alexander as a host plant was sort of a happy accident. I planted these as a host plant but later learned they rarely use it! Seems they heavily favor Parsley. But I've noticed that Golden Alexander has more foliage to offer early in the year before Parsley really gets going, so it's likely used as one of the earliest hosts then they switch over to Parsley with subsequent generations.

Adding all these native plants of course had an effect on the insect life. More herbivore insects means more sources of nectar, protein, and seeds. The increase in resources caused the colonies of Formica incerta and Formica pallidefulva to expand and get even larger than before. That got the attention of a slave making member of the genus, Formica pergandei. Seen above a colony of F. pergandei (bicolored) has invaded a colony of F. pallidefulva (copper tone).

Formica pergandei, is one of many slave making and parasitic species in the Formica genus, the largest ant genus in North America. They are completely devoted to maintaining their Formica hosts to maintain their own colony. F. pergandei workers don't forage at all. They spend their time raiding other colonies of Formica for brood and often do a complete invasion where the whole F. pergandei colony moves in and kills the host queen(s) and reproductives. They take over the current work force, and all the new workers born into their nest become part of their colony. The host species do all the foraging and nest building but eventually die off, so the F. pergandei workers are always looking to invade the next nest.

It's hard to say that F. pergandei wouldn't have found the colonies in my yard eventually. But in all the years I've lived here never noticed the species. They may have eventually come and moved on, as they did, but I believe the increase in resources made the F. pallidefulva and F. incerta colonies a bigger target. 

New Jersey Tea. This is one of those plants they're always touting for all its benefits but no one ever grows. Part of the problem is it seems to only ever be sold in plugs.... Why? It's a shrub. It should be a large or medium sized pot at least. I planted dozens of these over the years and ran over all but one of them with the lawn mower. Well I'm happy to say that after several years, it's now flowering robust enough to get honeybee attention.

As an added bonus it's a host plant to Spring and Summer Azures. And.....

I found that Sourwood trees are also a great honeybee plant. Which....

Is also a host plant for Spring and Summer Azures. And the caterpillars to this group of Butterflies are tended by ants for protection.

And I raised the caterpillar in captivity to see what it would become. Sure enough it's an Azure.

Early on in gardening I had dreams of sweeping meadows full of Lupins to see this behavior of ants, plants, and butterflies. I'm happy I already have plants doing this for me. As I've found out Lupins require full sun and basically want to grow in 80% sand.

Lastly, my yard is becoming something of a hummingbird hot spot. Not year round though, we usually get one or two of them flying about intermittently over the summer, and then several of them consistently for a full week... presumably fledgling birds following their parents around.

Pipevine Leafing Out

Dutchman's Pipevine have started leaving out. I forget whether I planted Aristolochia macrophylla, or Aristolochia tomentosa though I don't think it matters much. Neither is technically native to my area. A. macrophylla is listed as being native to NJ, however it's true native range is up in the mountains and was only planted as a neat garden vine in lower altitudes.

As it was spread around, this increased the range of the Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly. This butterfly is somewhat elusive and I've heard of whole house that were covered in their host plant and yet never had them arrive. Generally the reason is that females don't always stick around where they were born to replace the population they came from but rather they venture out to find different populations of males and keep the gene pool flowing. So while I have two nice sized plants, roughly as long or as tall as I am, I might not see the butterfly for some years. One vine I'm hoping will finally take over the walls of the shed, and the other looks like it's about to strangle the back fence.

Umm May and June is when these plants are supposed to flower and I'm looking forward to that as well. But also I'm planting three more vines to hopefully take over other parts of the yard as well.  

Some Flowering Perspectives

I have to say I'm particularly proud of the spring garden this year. So I've decided to discuss the plants here in this photo with some detail. Pictured here in the front are clumps of Viola sororia cf. It's seeds are distributed by ants, but as you can see from all the sprouting seedlings all around, they have no trouble spreading otherwise. They're the host plant to the Diana Fritillary, Speyeria diana, which is pretty butterfly found in the southern Appalachian mountains. The female is a mimic of the Pipevine swallowtail, both are black butterflies with the rear wings trimmed in cyan blue. Now it's worth noting that Pipevine is a recent addition to my garden, not pictured here, but I found a black butterfly with cyan blue trim flying about recently, and I wasn't able to get an ID. It will be neat to figure out which one that is.It's way more likely that I saw a true Pipevine swallowtail, Battus philenor, as I'm just outside of the Diana Fritillary's range.

While we're on the topic of Pipevine real fast, I've stumbled upon something of a mystery. On another blog we have a photo of ants covering the elaiosome covered seeds to  Aristolochia serpentaria, Virginia Snakeroot. Supposedly though ant dispersal of seeds in this plant is inconsistent. Apparently the elaiosome often dries up, (or perhaps ants of an inappropriate size are making off with the stuff without the seeds) and the true disperser of the seed is unclear. I may have to add this cousin of the Pipevine to my garden and see what the case may be. In the mean time I'll keep an eye on all of my plants should they decide to flower this year.

Next up we have the Trilliums, which are probably the best example of myrmecochory. I did a video on it last year and will probably do another later this year. I have so many Trillium flowers I can't wait to see how many pods I'll get to mess around with.

Claytonia virginica

Lastly we have a patch of Spring Beauty. This isn't my favorite plant for lots of reasons. Not the least of which being it has almost nothing to do with ants. The only ant related thing to mention about this flower is that flower stems are thin on purpose to discourage ants from walking up to the flower and stealing all the nectar. From The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History by Jack Sanders we find more interesting facts though. For one the corm is edible and said to be delicious. Pinker members of the species are more likely to be pollinated by bumblebees than the whiter flowering forms. As a result white flowers get more attention where blooming and colder weather over lap, and are pollinated more by flies than bees.