Friday, June 28, 2024

Pollinators and Milkweeds

Enough is happening in the garden these days that I could fill the blog with just garden posts.  And we're just getting close to Day Lily season!  Let me know if you get sick of flower pictures!

We have several quite showy big Clematis plants, but this is my favourite, with very small flowers.  Planted against the Sugar Maple tree on a small trellis, it's a shower of tiny white stars.  I remember the one in our previous garden quite clearly, where it rambled over boulders.  I think the tree provides a great backdrop for it.

There are a couple of pretty pink Cosmos.

The first of the big bright Michaelmas daisies are in bloom.

Our first Milkweed are in bloom and Mrs. F.G. got intrigued with the number of pollinators visiting them.  Here, just a single fly.

But here - how many can you count?  We see at least four.

And on this bloom there were even more, seemingly almost on top of each other.  Mrs. F.G. wondered if some of these were parasitic wasps, targetting the flies.  I'm just not enough of an entomologist to know, but certainly for a plant usually seen as a weed, it attracts a lot of pollinators.


14 comments:

  1. Nothing smells sweeter than the milkweed. Love it! I have monarch caterpillars!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I for one won't get tired of seeing all you beautiful flowers.
    Wow the close up of the fly is amazing!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Love the blooms, FG. Keep them coming,

    ReplyDelete
  4. I always so enjoy your flowers, and never get tired of the photos, it gives such a life to our darker colder winter days down here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That Clematis with the small white flowers looks a lot like the Clematis that grows wild and adorns many fences in the Okanagan, the one often called Travellers Joy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Beautiful flowers, beautiful garden. Check this out re all the critters stuck in your milkweed.
    http://capitalnaturalist.blogspot.com/2015/06/milkweed-traps.html

    ReplyDelete
  7. You do a very fine job photographing your flowers.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Nope, I am never sick enough to be sick of flower pics. I wished we had the sunshine in our yard to grow Clematis like you do. Well done on that close-up fly picture.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I cannot imagine getting tired of these wonderful pictures of your flowers and garden.

    ReplyDelete
  10. i NEVER get sick of seeing the mrs. flowers. cosmos are one of my favorites!! i am sick of my daylilies right now, they have bloomed and now need deadheading. i have a real love/hate relationship with daylilies!!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Your flowers are beautiful, i never get tired of seeing them!

    ReplyDelete
  12. That small-flowered clematis looks like one that folks about a mile from us have on about 100 feet of a split-railed fence, it's spectacular when it's in bloom.

    ReplyDelete
  13. How pretty! The milkweed has such a lovely flower, but while I appreciate pollinators, seeing that many at once would creep me out.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Milkweed has an awesome fragrance! I have that white clematis here we call it Virgins Bower:)

    ReplyDelete