Two Gardens

I recently visited Athens, Georgia, with family members, where we walked through the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden on the University of Georgia campus and later along some of the pathways of  Georgia's State Botanical Garden. We had been to the State Botanical Garden previously, but there are always paths to walk that we haven't tread before. The Founders Memorial Garden is a much smaller garden, with concrete sidewalks and formally arranged garden areas; the larger State Botanical Garden has both formally arranged gardens and leaf litter trails that wander over ridges and under canopies of native and exotic trees. This time we stayed to the concrete paths and formally arranged areas.

Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden, Athens, GA

State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

pond in Garden Club Founders Garden, Athens, GA

partial view of larger pond at the State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

The weather was especially pleasant on the morning of our visit to the State Botanical Garden, as a cool front was blowing through, wafting away the clouds that had brought days of rain to the area. Tom and I noticed gardening techniques that we would like to transfer to our much more modest gardens (which are in great need of weeding and care at the end of a very wet summer).

Among the beautiful flowers and trees, the tiniest inhabitants carried on with their lives, largely unmolested and unnoticed.

This inchworm rolled up the loose threads of his silk thread as he climbed it to the canopy of a tree.

This spider hung suspended over an interpretive sign.

Every garden needs a yellow and black Argiope (garden spider).

This cricket was tucked head first between the stamens of this flower until I startled it from its bed.

Our walks in these gardens were among the highlights of the trip, as we lingered on benches and shared our reactions to the beauty of a natural world artfully arranged.  But the bitter sheen of history marbleizes these otherwise beautifully clear memories of our visits to these Southern gardens. As we were walking from the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden and exiting the UGA campus, we passed two historical markers, one commemorating the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961, and the other memorializing the university's connection to the Confederacy.

Just steps away from each other, the signs attest to the bitter fruit of the South's "peculiar institution" and the pernicious effects of the hesitancy in acknowledging the culpability of one's ancestors in a bloody war. The second sign, as our daughter pointed out, was established in 1991, over one hundred and twenty five years after the end of the Civil War, and still the creators of this sign chose to designate that war as "the War for Southern Independence." These two signs represent the tension between two views of the South: graciousness and gentility, freedom loving and loyal; brutal and tribal, oppressive and paternalistic. So many fail to recognize the venom that remains in our failure to reconcile this dichotomy.

A Summer of Pollinators

Many mornings and afternoons during this summer, I have photographed butterflies, bees, wasps, and other pollinators busily gathering pollen in my flower and herb beds. Moving slowly so as not to startle my photographic prey, I paid much more attention to the visitors in my gardens than I might have otherwise. I encountered small dramas I would never have witnessed: a spider eating a bee, a tiny anole munching on a bug it had just caught, butterfly skippers trying to mate (the male seeming much more interested in the enterprise than the female), a caterpillar camouflaging itself with spent mountain mint bracts. I was reminded of how much of life goes on around of us, oblivious to us, yet still so much affected by the actions that we take. I have determined that one of my actions will continue to make my yard a place for pollinators, and, as a consequence, the other creatures that prey on them. The mountain mint attracted a diversity of pollinators, and so I will prepare the ground so that the patch can spread into a little larger area. The weedy portulaca, with its yellow flowers that stay open only during a few hours in the morning, seemed to be loved by the bees, and so I will make more room for it next summer.  Having left the university classroom where I taught for so many years, I have become a student again in my own backyard.  

Note, added 18 August, 2013: The strange creature in photos 2-5 below is an ambush bug.

As the summer progressed, more and more of these small black and white striped bees appeared in the garden

 

At first I thought this creature was a couple of dried mountain mint bracts--until it moved....so tiny and strange...

 

A few days later, I saw the creature again and took more photographs.

 

And then I saw the strange creature eating a fly. Did it kill the fly... or was it a scavenger?

 

Life and death struggles were going all around me, largely unseen!

But sometimes I encountered a beautiful dance between pollinator and flower.

Here a metallic sweat bee seems drunk with pollen.

One morning in early August I caught a green lynx spider feasting on a bee.

Afterward, a spiny stink bug approached the "crime scene."

I was surprised that many wasps are pollinators, too.

I am not sure what this very tiny crab spider wanted with the caterpillar that had camouflaged itself with dead mountain mint bracts, but I bet it wasn't altruistic.

But sometimes one can find love among the flowers.

And if not love, at least food (look at those eyes!). . .

. . . and shelter