“one failure to seed
haunts the butterflies to come;
my hubble milkweed”
Our front garden sports a number of pots from which rise, each year, true milkweed plants. My mother started the practice sometime during her career as a kindergarten teacher. During the course of the year, the kids would watch the growth processes of stick insects, Monarch butterflies, Silkworms and the beautiful web construction of the garden orb-weaver spider or Golden Argiope which was given an upright frame standing in a basin of water to ensure it wouldn’t wander off somewhere. The spider and its web were very popular with the kids until an arachnophobic visiting parent demanded, ignorantly, that the (beautiful, totally harmless) large, horrible, obviously dangerous spider must be immediately removed from the room and banned from the lessons to keep the children safe. sigh. And so passes the baton of the lack of Understanding Life; but, I digress . Where was I… Ah, so the milkweed-at-home program was started as fodder for the classroom Monarch caterpillars, but soon became a small oasis for the few stragglers from the Monarch migration route, either late-bloomers or blown off-course. Apparently a few liked the local nectar and we eventually had a few homegrown Monarchs. In the last couple of years, however the Monarchs have all but vanished; this year only one appeared in the garden and that one did not stay more than a week. The small grove of eucalyptus trees, about four hours south of here, where they overwinter in tree-coating swarms or flutters (a flutter of butterflies, a murder of crows, a clowder of cats *grin*), was well populated this last season so I guess the winds aren’t blowing many off-course, at least in this direction.
I don’t know what it is lately, whether it be the drought in our area or the lack of a good long string of the hot summer weather that many of the plants thrive in, but the pods of the milkweeds are setting on late and many are failing to open fully, trapping the silky, wind-catching strands that are attached to the top of each seed in the pods’ twisting, drying form. As disappointing as this is from the butterfly-feeding/gardening point of view, it affords me a photographic opportunity.
Have you ever sat low, next to a dandelion and tried to capture the right moment when the wind (or if you are impatient, a sharp exhalation) blows the seeds on their strange little fibrous hang-gliders from the center of the seed-head, sending them off to enhance the dandelion-ness of the world at large? Well, the trapped fibers of the milkweed seeds’ wind-drifting structure affords me the opportunity to try for an image similar to that launch with more than one chance at it; as the wind puffs, the seeds rise and fall with it, but remain ensnared to rise and fall on the next puffs as well.
On the day I stumbled across these, tucked in behind a juniper bush, the late afternoon sunlight was just beginning to get close to grazing across the tops of the coastal hills on the west side of the valley, shattering as it passed through the pine and birch branches in turn. Planting my backside down on the wooden rim (read: torture device) of a planter full of strawberry plants, I set the tripod legs splayed one notch wider than the normal angle between the camera base and vertical, getting them leveled by extending one leg down a foot more into the path way that curves past on the left. Then it was a short game of tag with the gentle breeze gusts to expose an image with the seeds lifting away from the pod. The resulting image above, with it’s muted color from being lit low from the side against the backdrop of the dark juniper came out with a very ‘painterly’ look to it, and immediately reminded me, for some reason, of some of the astro-photographic images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and put on display at NASA’s web site about the Hubble. I dubbed it, ‘My Hubble Milkweed’ and added it to my favorite recent images. Today, I post it here and hope it is pleasing to your eye.
May good fortune be yours,
Pete S.
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