Butter Side Down

I’ve been wondering who’s been chomping on my dahlias, as these are in pots too tall for the yard bunnies to reach.

Ah, yes, it’s Mr. Grasshopper.

I do believe it’s time for a nice big ol’ fat spider or two to come pay a visit to the dahlias…

I love roses! This bloom is from one of the three new rosebushes we added to our yard this summer. The roses pictured today (above, and in the two images below) are Buck roses. Over eighty different varieties of Buck roses are available, and they’re all beautiful.

What makes Buck roses special? Ah, Oh Best Beloved, now that’s a tale!

Buck roses were developed by Griffith Buck, Ph.D., a professor of horticulture at Iowa State University. Dr. Buck developed over 80 cultivars of roses which are capable of withstanding temperatures to -20°F and need no pesticides or fungicides to thrive. I bought varieties that are pink, but Buck roses range in colors from white to pink to deep red, and there are bicolor, yellow and apricot shades too.

They’re all they were claimed to be, and more. I had scads of blooms (and they’ve bloomed and rebloomed and are still blooming). The fragrance is heavenly - something which has been lost in many modern rose cultivars. They haven’t required anything but water and my homemade compost for fertilizer. And the leaves are glossy and healthy — the bushes don’t have a speck of any rose diseases or fungi, and the bugs have left them alone.

I’m convinced - if you want gorgeous, carefree roses, you can’t find anything better than a Buck!

Yowsers! Take a look at this huntress! She’s been hiding in a leaf she wove into a web, by our back door, all this week. Let me tell you, Oh Best Beloved, this gal can run like the wind, too…

Spiders used to make me shudder, but I’ve come to appreciate their incredible webs and the place they have in keeping down the population of flies and such. However, I still don’t like unexpected close encounters of the eight-legged kind, especially late at night when I’ve removed my glasses. With my poor eyesight, if I can see a spider pattering across the wall whilst my glasses are off, it means my little arachnid friend is roughly the size of, oh, an M1A1 Abrahms battle tank. Or larger.

I grabbed an old yardstick we keep in the garage, just to give you an idea of this orb spider’s size (sorry about the faded-out ink on the yardstick, but you get the idea). She refused to stretch out for me, so in this photo she’s sort of scrunched up and about 2/3rds of her real length. As you can see, she’s a respectable one inch long when crouched.

Here she is fully stretched out in her web, waiting for dinner to arrive. I’m guessing (as she refused to let me near again with the yardstick to get a second measurement) that she’s between one and 3/8ths inches to one and a half inches long — about the diameter of a silver dollar. These shots are all taken of her from her tummy side (that’s her ventral side for all you budding scientists out there), so you can see not only her legs but her rather sizable mandibles.

What’s that? Was I worried that she might scurry onto me?

No, no, of course not… well, maybe a little. Or maybe a lot. Or maybe…

Actually, truth be told, I would have shrieked louder than a blaring tornado siren if she’d bounded out of that web and landed on me…

Butterflies are much less stressful to photograph!

This gorgeous monarch was one of a parade of butterflies that visited our butterfly bushes throughout Tuesday. Every time I looked, the blooms had a new set of butterflies on them!

The monarchs never seem to sit with their wings fanned out the way the swallowtails do. But they are much more apt to hop onto my hands and say ‘howdy,’ which of course I love to bits.

Here’s a view of a butterfly bush bloom taken from a butterfly’s perspective… yummy, no? If you’ve never seen a butterfly bush (scientific name: Buddleja davidii) they’re rather scraggly looking plants - except for the blooms, which remind me of lilacs. They are scented, to my nose, with a delicate honeyed fragrance that is delightful. We’re at the very edge of the zones where they can grow. Our winters are too cold for butterfly bushes to thrive, according to all the plant books. The bushes, however, apparently didn’t get that memo (thank goodness), and are going great guns.

*sigh!*

Gorgeous.

Woot! Woot! Kris, me n’ the bunnies are sending a salute to you!

After you told me about bracketing, I went spelunking through my 200 page camera manual and found this:

It lets me automatically push the exposure in several different ways on its own, and combines with other pre-set or manual options.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you, Kris!

(The little bunny pictured, btw, lives in one of my flower beds - she was a gift from Michael. She’s the only bunny in our yard that doesn’t eat my flowers!)