Yes, that's what prompted me to let the few milkweed plants grow beside my driveway two years ago. The Monarchs, that is. I used to be able to go out in the field behind my house and find a milkweed with a chrysalis on it for a neighbor's science class and wondered if any would lay eggs on these closer ones.
I love monarchs. One summer about thirty years ago I saw some flying over the house where I lived in the Chicago suburbs. Then I realized they were coming in a steady stream. I lay down on the ground and watched them -- for HOURS. A column of butterflies several feet wide stayed right overhead. It was one of those most special happenstances in life where if you hadn't happened to step out the door right that moment, you might have missed it all. That was the same summer when everyone else who lived there had gone away for a week or so. I had the place to myself and discovered that for several days in a row a spider made a huge web between two bushes right across from each other in front of the front door. Each day the previous web was gone and a new one spun. And it was huge. I felt that all this was happening just to reward me for spending some quiet content days with myself.
Monarch migrate from Mexico up North to the US and back again. Well, it's after the next generations that they return to Mexico. I saw a photo in National Geographic once of a large tree in Mexico so totally covered with butterflies that it was wrapped in orange.
So last year after returning from the World Cup in Germany I found that many more milkweed were growing. Okay, I hoped, maybe there is a chance that a monarch will find one.
Nope. Not one.
I then read that they like to return to the same area. And MY area is evidently not close enough to the field right behind my house.
So today I was outside doing everything but checking this area where the milk weeds grow. This isn't a happy story about monarchs in my yard since the milkweed isn't even showing yet. Maybe it won't even grow this year.
I'd struggled through making sense of those crazy peony circle things to support the future flower-laden stems and was planting a few more annuals and some perennials and filling a new pot with soil and plants.
As I turned away from one bed I saw that the entire side where the milk weed grows was overrun with berry brambles -- prickers I call them -- and Virginia creeper. Together they were drowning out the rugosa roses. The roses that somehow have managed to fight back and not to totally succumb after being crushed and broken when some tree guys working for the power company took the grey birches down.
A few winters ago the birches were heavy laden with wet winter snow, draped over and pressing down on the power line that goes into our house. We had gotten very tired of running outside after grabbing the longest thing we could find to poke up at the branches to unencumber them. The tree guys were out and when I called the electric company they happened to be right in our neighborhood. Fast response.
Now that the trees are gone letting in more sun, all sort of things have crept in. And not lovely things at all. It looks nasty and ugly there. One thing is a regiment of these green things (I used to know their name) that remind me of a plant near the Fort Josef geocache in Mainz on the Rhine in Germany. Before the trip when I was looking for possible caches to find, I was using one of those on-line translator services to translate from German to English. There were warnings about a plant that if you touched it, left you not only with raised vesicles on you skin, but feeling itchy.
I deduce the ones in my yard are related. Several years ago I discovered while pulling them out without gloves on (or maybe I did have on gloves, but my forearms weren't covered) I had this nasty eruption on my arms that evening. If you catch these plants early, before they are tall and stiffer, they come out easily and with no skin reaction.
So I found myself outside for much longer than anticipated pulling and yanking at the vines. And the green things.
If I'd ignored this much longer I would have had a real problem when I finally got around to calling the fellow to remove the old junk car from the driveway. The vines were making there way UNDER it - at least 15 separate strands were well under it. In one leap my mind envisioned the entire car encased in them by summer's end.
That whole side of the yard seems to be turning into an old abandoned secret place. But not at all a pretty garden. In among the trees that separate our yard from our western neighbor's is an old pile of rotting sawn tree logs left from a poplar taken down a good eight years ago, I think. And everything that's grown in all the chips the tree guys shot in there. It would have cost so much more for them to cart all that away. But the creeper seems to have thrived in the no longer visible chips. Previous years I've spent hours yanking it down and clipping it off from it's roots to save a few of the trees. And grapes vines joined in to wind their way skyward as well.
I've decided the car has to go this week. It served its purpose for a year or two. It was a $300 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra that I bought from a neighbor for my younger son to drive. And our Japanese friends' daughter used it as well for 10 months. It was the one bad purchase of a used automobile that I've made. Why? On the back there is a small chrome remnant of the script that used to say Oldsmobile. "...mobile" My older son's ex-gf christened it with the perfect name. It stuck. The Ghettomobile.
Turns out that it had been parked on a street in Chicago. Right place, wrong time. Someone in a gunfight had ducked down behind it shielding himself, and had managed to shoot his gun leaving not only a crease on the trunk lid, but shattering the back window and embossing the roof with the bullet's impact. Whomever replaced the window did a lousy job. It leaks. But not in an obvious way. After it rains the head liner hangs down bowed with the weight of saturation. The back seat can be damp. And the salesman that used to own before my neighbor it must have thumped his body down into the driver's seat over and over again leaving a dip so deep we had to fill it with a pillow. None of this did I realize when I told her I'd buy the car.
Now all that car has done is sit on perfectly new all season tires for over three years shielding a bunch of junk in front of it: garbage cans, a car top carrier beside the garage, chimney terracotta liner pieces that I thought would make great planters (but seemed to kill whatever I was trying to grow in them), a broken snow shovel left from the first big winter storm. And all those vines stuck onto the asphalt drive. Working their way toward our front walk....
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