My favorite Moonflower and Sphinx Moth photo taken after a rain one evening in 2007 on a hot summer night. I spent hours (days---my entire life!!) stalking this moth and got ate up by mosquitoes in the process. And yes, 'ate up' is correct grammar in regard to mosquitoes chewing you to pieces here in the South.
MOTHS
By Eavan Boland
Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation
and memory.
This has been a summer for moths.
Their moment of truth comes well
after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our
window-
ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.
The books I look up about them are
full of legends:
ghost-swift moths with their dancing
assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.
The moon is up. The back windows are wide open.
Mid-July fills the neighborhood. I stand by the hedge.
Once again they are near the
windowsill---
fluttering past he fuscia and the
lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to
warn them
they will fall down without knowing
how
or why what they steered by became,
suddenly,
what they crackled and burned
around. They will perish---
I am perishing---on the edge and at
the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends
towards:
the stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.
And the kitchen bulb which beckons
them makes
my child’s shadow longer than my own.
From:
“New Collected Poems” by Eavan Boland, pages 220, 221
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(Thank you, dear Erin, for mentioning Eavan Boland to me not long ago. I went and found 5 used books of her amazing poetry. Once again, you feed me.)
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In winter, rabid gardeners such as
myself read seed catalogues and books about gardening. My latest favorite gardening book is “The Evening
Garden, Flowers and Fragrance from Dusk Till Dawn” by Peter Loewer. I learned, to my surprise, that of the order Lepidoptera, to which moths and butterflies
belong, there are over 11,230 species and only some 800 of these are butterflies.
The rest are moths. I have been an avid
night-blooming flower grower for over 20 years (my Moonflower seeds are already
planted, sprouted and have two leaves on them) and am well-acquainted with
moths. I just had no idea they
outnumbered butterflies by that much. Also, night-blooming flowers smell like heaven...they have a much stronger scent that day-blooming flowers in order to attract the moths.
Here’s the conundrum I have about loving
moths, especially the gorgeous Sphinx Moth, which I especially enjoy stalking and photographing: one of their favorite meal is tomatoes---every
part of the plant. I also grow
tomatoes religiously. So, as soon as I learned this
little tidbit about tomatoes being moth caviar, I began growing some extra (is there such a thing????) tomatoes for the caterpillars to
devour. I know, crazy, right? But I’m happy to share my bounty. And crazy runs in my family.
It's almost Spring. Do a little happy dance and plant some flower seeds. (I found my first packet of Moonflower seeds at Wal-Mart quite by accident. The flowers go to seed in the fall and now I have my own supply of seeds.) I highly recommend that you grow Moonflowers, if only to have one whiff of their scent before you die... It's sweeter than Magnolias or even Jasmine. They're a member of the Morning Glory family and do well in pots. You just have to keep the seeds extra wet until they sprout. I've grown them in pots and in the ground and I prefer pots. They need part shade here in the hot South, but can do well with full sun further north. And they need a fence or trellis to climb.
Happy March.
xo,
Marion
"To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat."
~Beverly Nichols
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"Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself
alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the
flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling evening....~Heinrich Heine
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"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks." ~Tennessee Williams
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