Sex in the garden

Love is in the air, and butterflies know it.

Yesterday, while standing by the bottlebrush tree, I watched a pair of Gulf fritillaries engage in Lepidoptera foreplay.

The female chose a bottlebrush leaf, lit upon it and held on tight. While she stayed still, her male counterpart landed on her back and flapped his wings furiously. A few seconds later, the pair parted only to reunite a after the female resettled on a different leaf. As I watched, the couple repeated their pre-mating ritual several more times.

Although it looks like one butterfly, it's actually two gulf fritillaries performing a pre-mating ritual

I might have continued watching the fritillaries amorous activities longer if the sight of two other butterflies had not distracted me. Another romantic rendezvous was taking place.

Eastern black swallowtails are almost twice as big as Gulf fritillaries. With large black wings edged by a series of bright yellow spots and highlighted in the center of the lower wings by two orange “eyes” and several blue dots, they are stunning to behold. I suppose the swallowtails found each other stunning as well — they participated in an airborne lovefest.

Eastern black swallowtails are one of many species that woo potential partners by performing aerial acrobatics. While I stood quietly by, the two butterflies fluttered up, down and all around the bottlebrush tree. They flew together in a closely choreographed dance. Not only did I find the prelude to butterfly procreation interesting to observe, it was beautiful to watch.

Butterflies in pursuit of passion

Beautiful though it be, a butterfly’s life is brief. After emerging from the chrysalis, most live less than a month, and some species last only a few days. During that short time, they must accomplish two tasks — find food and mate. To help with the latter, both sexes exude scent secretions called pheromones from pockets on their wing patches. Male butterflies patrol the air in search of females or perch patiently on a twig, leaf or flower until a member of the opposite sex passes by. Either way, once the male senses or sees a female, he puts on a show to prove his worthiness as a reproductive partner.

One day last year, I encountered a tangle of four monarch butterflies hooked together in what looked like a butterfly bouquet. With wings flapping, the orange-black-and-white beauties fluttered a few feet above our front walkway before eventually settling down together on the concrete path.

Until that day, I had never seen such an entanglement of butterfly bodies. I later learned that males of some species exhibit this type of behavior to attract the attention of a nearby female who then chooses one of the participants as her mate. I don’t know if the monarchs I watched last year were successful at attracting a partner but I do know they put on an impressive show.

Butterflies mate only during warm times of the year. Because they are coldblooded, they depend on warm weather to regulate their body temperature. When it is either too cold or too hot outside — below 50 degrees or above 108 degrees — butterflies are unable to fly. Lately, it has been perfect weather. A butterfly’s search for food typically is met by a ready supply of nectar from flowering plants, leaving only the drive to find a partner and mate.

A pair of queen monarchs mating

Reproduction is a basic need of every species, humans included. I find it odd that many people spend more time watching acts of violence than displays of affection. We could all do with more examples of amorous attention. There’s reason to care when love is in the air.

Plant it and they will come

I have a hummingbird feeder, but it isn’t hanging outside. It’s sitting on a shelf in my closet attracting dust instead of birds. I haven’t put it up because I want to attract hummingbirds with nectar-rich plants instead of artificially colored sugar water.

Sometimes stubbornness pays off.

After months of weeding out garden beds, shifting plants around and installing new cultivars, those precious gems of the sky finally have found my garden.

Male Ruby-throated Hummingbird lapping nectar from Wendy's Wish Salvia

In addition to being the smallest birds in the world, hummingbirds are also the lightest. The littlest hummer, the Bee Hummingbird, is only two inches long from beak to tail and weighs less than a penny while the largest member of the species, the Giant Hummingbird, is four times as long and 10 times heavier. At 20 grams, it weighs almost as much as four nickels.

Neither the Bee or Giant Hummingbird lives in Florida but all hummers — there are over 300 species — live in the Americas. Of those, 16 are found in the United States, and three, the Ruby-throated, Rufous and Black-chinned, regularly are sighted in Florida.

Hummingbirds have frequented our property before but not often enough to be considered “regulars.” To change that, I decided to establish a hummingbird garden filled with plants the birds couldn’t resist. I decided to place it on the south side of our house just outside the bedroom window where a bottlebrush tree already grew. 

With its sticky red blossoms, the bottlebrush tree, Calistemon viminalis, attracts butterflies, bees and other birds so I was confident it would draw hummingbirds, too. In the past when I’ve spotted a hummingbird, it was usually flying from one bottlebrush bloom to another.

Hummingbird resting on a bottlebrush branch

My first addition to the new garden was Wendy’s Wish Salvia, a magenta-colored sage that is a cinch to grow, easy to propagate and a known hummingbird magnet. I was thrilled to find one at Simon Seed in Leesburg.

After installing it in the ground, I transplanted some scarlet-colored Tropical Sage plants, Salvia coccinea, to the garden and positioned a raised container of Orange-flame Justicia, Justicia chrysostephana, next to the window in the hope of providing an up-close feeding view.

Justicia chrysostephana

Once everything was in place, I fell asleep each night anticipating the morning. Would today be the day hummingbirds arrived?

One day it finally was.

“A hummingbird!” I screamed to my still sleepy-eyed spouse. “Look! Right there on the bottlebrush tree.”

I sprung out of bed but by the time I was up, the bird was gone.

“Where’d it go?” I lamented. “It moved so fast!”

With wings beating about 80 times per second and a flight speed of 25-30 miles per hour, hummingbirds look like flashes of shimmery color. After initially losing track of it, I eventually spotted the long-beaked bird a short distance away from the garden methodically going from one aloe vera flower to another.

When selecting plants for the hummingbird garden, I hadn’t considered aloe. Yet it seemed an obvious choice seeing how perfectly the hummingbird’s beak fit inside each pale red, pendulous bloom.

A hummingbird consumes nectar by lapping up the sweet substance with its grooved, hairy-tipped tongue at a rate of about 13 licks per second. Since it must visit about 1,000 flowers every day to gain enough nutrition, it’s not surprising that it sometimes gets tired. While watching the bird at the aloe plant, I saw it stop flying and perch for a few seconds on the plant’s slender stalk.

Hummingbird legs are short and stubby. They can barely walk but they can grab hold of objects. In fact, most of a hummer’s life actually is spent perched on a branches or stems. The bird I watched not only rested on the stem, it ate while sitting. Without flapping its wings at all, it stretched its neck upward into the flower.

Eating while resting, a good way to conserve energy

Since that morning, little capsules of energy have flown into my new garden several times a day — and that only counts the times I’ve been watching. To replenish the immense amount of energy it takes to fly from one flower to another, hummingbirds feed approximately seven times an hour for 30 to 60 seconds at a time. In addition to the aloe, I’ve seen a Ruby-throated hummingbird go to the Justicia and bottlebrush blooms plus both varieties of salvia. I’ve also watched it feed on the bright pink four-o’clock flowers growing in my east garden, another plant that it seems to enjoy.

In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, an Iowan farmer built a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield after hearing an ethereal voice pronounce, “If you build it, they will come.” I’ve discovered the same concept works for gardeners. If you want to attract hummingbirds, leave your store-bought feeder on the shelf. Plant the right flowers, and they will come.

Bottlebrush tree provides fly-by feast

Our bottlebrush tree (Calistemon viminalis) is flowering again and what a wildlife magnet it is.  All day long butterflies, bees and birds fly in and out of the sticky red blooms to sip nectar and gather pollen.

Gulf fritillary sipping nectar on bottlebrush bloom

Pollen-seeking bee on bottlebrush bloom

A hummingbird rests on a bottlebrush branch in between nectar-gathering trips

Red-on-red  - A male cardinal enjoys the sweet taste of nectar

Renovation project yields unexpected benefits

We are in the process of replacing our house’s 22-year-old wall-to-wall carpeting with flooring less likely to trigger allergies.

It’s a big project, so we’re doing it in stages. We began with a room on the south side of the house that used to be my office. After removing the carpet and tiling the floor, we moved our bed there. It’s a small room, but that’s what we were after. We wanted an uncluttered space that we could easily keep free of dust and allergens. So far, the experiment is working. I’m sleeping better, sneezing less and waking up with eyes that are no longer watery.

I had hoped sleeping in a carpet-free room would help my sinuses, but I didn’t anticipate another positive change brought about by our recent room rearrangement: The view from my new bedroom is spectacular. Just outside the large picture window is a mature bottlebrush tree (Callistemon citrinus) that draws wildlife like a magnet. Birds, butterflies, lizards, bees and wasps are constantly coming and going in and out of the tree’s flower-bedecked branches.

The first thing I usually hear when I wake up in the morning is the sound of a male Carolina wren. The wren, a small bird with a loud voice that belies its diminutive size, likes to sit on the uppermost branches of the bottlebrush tree and welcome the day with his trilling tune. Although his song rouses me, rather than getting up quickly, I find myself staying in bed longer to see what other treats the tree will provide.

Although the Carolina wren seems uninterested in bottlebrush flowers, it likes to perch in the uppermost branches in the morning to sing its wake-up song

Lately, I’ve spotted yellow-rumped warblers landing on the red, bristly blooms. I’ve yet to learn whether these pretty birds are there to enjoy a sip of the sweet nectar or to eat tiny bugs caught in the sticky substance. It could be they’re after both.

The yellow-rumped warbler can't seem to get enough of the sticky sweet nectar

Cardinals also are drawn to the tree, although they don’t frequent it as often as the warblers do. When they do come, I usually see both male and female cardinals feeding together. If I didn’t see them fly in, I’d probably miss them entirely. The male cardinal’s coloring is exactly the same shade of red as the bottlebrush blooms, and the bristles are about the same length as a cardinal’s body. I wonder why cardinals don’t spend more time in the bottlebrush tree since it provides such excellent camouflage.

The male cardinal and the bottlebrush bloom are the exact same color 

In past years, I’ve seen hummingbirds hover over the blooms, but I’ve yet to see one arrive on the tree outside my new bedroom’s window. Hummingbirds like bottlebrush trees since they are such a rich source of nectar. One of these mornings, I’m sure one will appear.

A hummingbird rests on a bottlebrush branch

I may not have seen hummers yet, but I sure have seen bees. Yesterday, the tree was abuzz with pollen-gathering insects. We’ve all heard about bee colony collapse and the shortage of honeybees worldwide but in our yard, especially around the bottlebrush tree, bees are working overtime. Along with them, various wasps zoom in and out of the tree. Like bees, wasps also are pollinators, but because they lack a bee’s fuzzy hair, they aren’t as efficient at gathering pollen.

Although it is already heavily laden with pollen, a honeybee approaches yet another bottlebrush flower

One recent afternoon, I watched a male green anole try to attract a female from his perch on one of the tree’s thin branches. The native lizard bobbed up and down displaying his bright pink dewlap. However, I don’t think he was rewarded since I didn’t see any females approach. Instead of trying to attract a mate, the anole might have been marking his territory or trying to intimidate another lizard. Regardless of whether his efforts worked on other anoles, he succeeded in attracting my attention, putting on a show I was happy to have witnessed.

"Look at me!  Look at me!" says the green anole

Butterflies tend to flutter about the bottlebrush tree a little later in the season when the weather is warmer, but the other day as I was still lazing about in bed, I noticed a beautiful blue-colored butterfly land on one of the uppermost blooms. Few things motivate me to move faster than a wildlife sighting. As soon as I saw the butterfly, I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera and ran outside. Since moving into the new bedroom, I’d gotten into the habit of keeping my camera in the room with me. I took several pictures that morning and later identified the flutterer as Limenitis arthemis astyanax, commonly known by the descriptive name, red-spotted purple butterfly.

A slightly damaged wing isn't enough to keep this pretty butterfly away from the flowers

When we decided to enter into a renovation project to free our home of allergens, I had no idea our efforts would result in such unexpected bounty. Not only can I now breathe easier, I also enjoy an endless array of wildlife sightings from the comfort and sneeze-free zone of my tiny new bedroom.

Bottlebrush trees bloom from spring through summer. I’ve seen so much already in just a few short weeks from my new view. I can’t wait to see what the next few months will reveal.

One tree - many visitors

Zebra longwing butterflies are among the wildlife attracted to nectar-producing bottlebrush blooms.

Simply Living

February 27, 2012

A bouquet of bottlebrush blooms is sitting on my kitchen counter. The red, bristly flower spikes add a bit of brightness at a time of the year when most plants are just beginning to awaken from their winter rest.

A flurry of butterflies, hummingbirds and bees hovered over the pendulous blooms as I snipped a few flowers from low-hanging branches. The nectar-covered blossoms attract so much attention from the buzzing and fluttering crowd I had to be extra careful when making my selections, not to get in the way of any stinging insects.

The bottlebrush's long blooming season adds to its popularity among people as well as wildlife. Although this woody shrub is native to Australia, it thrives in Central and South Florida's warm climate growing in all but the most alkaline soils. It tolerates dry, moist and even salt spray locations. Although susceptible to freezes, bottlebrush recovers quickly. During the last four winters — three of which were unusually chilly — cold damage was limited and each of the trees recovered without affecting the next season's bloom.

Bottlebrushes are compact trees rarely exceeding 20 feet in height. Their diminutive size makes them a fine choice for small, tight spaces. Many people also choose them because of their weeping willow-like shape, but bottlebrushes have something willows don't have — flowers. For most of the year, the tree is adorned with 4- to 6-inch-long cylindrical flower spikes.

A bottlebrush's floral display is quite the sight. Bright red flowers dangle from the ends of each of the tree's many thin, swaying branches. From afar, the blooms — which really do resemble bristly brushes used to clean a bottle's narrow neck — look like one long tube-shaped flower. Actually, each spike is composed of many individual flowers. Sweet nectar — the calling card for butterflies, bees, wasps and birds — forms on the tips of red, needle-thin filaments along with yellow pollen, and every flower contains clusters of filaments. Whenever I gather the red blooms for a bouquet they sparkle with droplets of nectar.

About twice a year, I give my bottlebrush trees a trim, a process not unlike cutting hair. Using hand-held clippers, I do my best to even out unruly growth. My aim is to prune the hanging branches to form a straight line just above head height so I can walk under them easily. It's not a difficult task and only takes a few minutes. Trimming low-hanging branches is the only care we give our trees. We don't fertilize them or treat with chemicals. The two trees in our yard receive a bit of irrigation when the lawn is watered but the young saplings that sprung up on their own do just fine on rainwater alone.

A bottlebrush tree is in the genus Callistemon, one of 34 species in the same family as melaleuca trees. Melaleuca is on the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council's list of highly invasive exotic plants (Category 1). The weeping bottlebrush tree (Callistemon viminalis), is listed as a Category 2 (less invasive) plant for South Florida but it is not considered an invasive species in the central part of the state. In the 15 years since we planted our two bottlebrush trees, only three volunteer saplings have appeared on our property.

In addition to colorful filaments, clusters of brown bead-like seeds form on each flower spike. When I'm out collecting plants for a dried flower bouquet, I often include a few seed clusters in the arrangement. The bottlebrush seeds can remain on the tree for years. Wildfires can cause the seeds to open and seed-eating birds help disperse them but the plant can also be propagated through softwood cuttings. Young trees are usually stocked by most nurseries and garden centers.

If you're looking for a hardy, low-maintenance ornamental to add to your landscape, consider a bottlebrush tree. It's not a Florida native plant but it certainly attracts native wildlife. One small tree will provide sustenance to countless birds, butterflies and bees with plenty of material left over for decorative indoor displays.