Tag: scent

Monarch dance

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Earlier this year I watched as one of the first monarch butterflies circled the milkweed/swan plant below our deck. This time I grabbed a pencil and traced her flow on paper, intrigued at her mysterious path of many careful circuits. The drawing ends up a puzzling maze, as if meant to confuse. My notes read she spends minutes circling and making approaches to the plant, swooping past pumpkins, the mustard seed, the raspberries, the snowball tree, diverting attention? Perhaps checking it’s safe, scenting? It’s a dizzying energetic dance, never still. I trace the lines over and over trying to follow the complicated passage.

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Seeds, winds, circlings

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Autumn equinoctial winds whip through neighbourhood lanes. It’s a circling back to this time last year when I began consciously noticing and photographing what’s happening with insect pollinators and other more-than-humans living here.

Hopping chaffinches laboriously harvest the oily black seeds spinning out of cracked flax pods. And the wax eyes have arrived back in the hebes, picking at a potpouri of seed heads. Swollen fruit and berries – from flowers fertilised earlier by pollinators – begin to release and die. A profusion of their seeds scatter out. Capsules of future life. The valley reminds me of the repeating pulses, patterns and cycles. Old friends again.

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Following fragrance and frenzy

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We are slowly tilting towards the sun’s warmth. Our neighbourhood is flushed with colour and fragrance. A frenzied relationship between flower-insect-bird is taking place: pollen movement and fertilisation for the plant and pollen protein and nectar energy for the pollinating insects and birds. The wild energy is understandable. Life is impermanent. The exchange is momentary.  

Ornamental cherry, lavender, magnolia, camelia, and rhododendron were the first noticeable signalers on berms, leaning over private fences. Now it’s the dreamy scents from the less obvious flowers of our native trees which are luring me and the pollinators. There’s the small cream, white or pale green florets of tarata (lemonwood), rangiora, tī kōuka/cabbage tree, pāpāuma/kāpuka/griselinia and the dark purple/red of kōhūhū, karo and the stunning spiky orbs of rewarewa. Frustratingly I can’t follow everywhere the bees, moths, beetles and flies go, up high or deep into bushes or in other people’s gardens.

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Moments in Warmth

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I think I’m becoming obsessed with the temperature gauge as the weather flip flops between extremes. No sooner has a cold southerly snap arrived than it vanishes, followed by sudden and often intense heat. The other day it climbed to 17C in the shade and, for a time, the sun strike on our deck was 32C. Too hot to sit there! We heard on the radio that Japan had recorded its hottest June temperature ever – 40.2C. But the northern hemisphere is not even into its proper summer yet!

When the air temperature climbs I come across moments of frenzied insect activity on some of my walks. It seems to be the exotic plants they are dipping into such as flowering bottlebrush, dandelions, gorse, lavender, rosemary, buttercups, tree lucerne and nightshade, plus some natives including the odd manuka bush and hebes. What would they forage on in winter if it wasn’t for the introduced plants – some of them considered weeds.

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