The Butterfly Has a Shoe Fetish.

6-26-16 VERMONT: We’re back in summer with near 90° today. Yesterday we went to friends Melissa and Dick’s house to get perennials to transplant. They are moving to the Durham, NH area and leaving her beautiful gardens behind. Melissa has a striking collections of unusual perennials in her shade garden, including lady’s slippers of both local varieties. We took and transplanted some lupin, anemones, toad lily and primrose. Some of it was essentially bare rooted so will need lots of water when it’s this hot.

Add to that a little more snipping and pulling, and your have a day in the garden. Today I was going to relax, but after watering all the new plantings and transplants, and finding a few misplaced volunteers that I moved, it ended up as a busy day.

We walked around the pasture this morning, and a butterfly fixated on my feet. It spent 10 minutes tasting the top of my shoe, both shoes actually. These are old shoes reserved for gardening only, but the butterfly’s fixation made me wonder if it was getting sugar from my sweat-soaked shoes. Am I diabetic? The fabric it was suckling on is a synthetic that would have no natural attraction for an insect I suppose.

New blooms: valerian, foxglove, campanula, red spirea, yarrow.


Great Spangled Fritillary sucking something out of my shoe.

Now he's trying the other foot.

We call these roses 'fence roses.'

Barns, pond and fence roses.

These yellow flag iris hanging out by the barn are volunteers. They are 4-5 feet tall and not to be trifled with. Last summer they were mowed to the ground, but here they are.