ART BY ANN LITREL, ANNLITREL.COM
Beauty and the Blade BY ANN LITREL
The distant roar of a tractor mower interrupts the morning quiet. I jump up. Setting down my morning coffee, I run, fuzzy slippers still on my feet, down the backyard to my butterfly garden at the edge of the golf course. Rumbling toward me is a tractor mower, toppling large swaths of tall grasses and flowers under its blades. I’ve played golf. I know that the rough along the fairways has to be cut. I stand at the edge of my garden and wave, waiting for the driver to approach. Beside me, an orange fritillary butterfly clings to a goldenrod stem. At my feet a large bumble bee stirs in his flowery bed, a purple passionflower, where he has dozed all night. When the driver gets close, he stops his tractor and idles the engine. He has a friendly face edged with a short, gray beard, head topped with a baseball cap. He smiles. 46
AROUND WOODSTOCK | September 2020
“Hi,” I say. “I was hoping maybe you could mow around my butterfly garden.” “Yeah, I saw where you had mulched the edges,” he smiles again. “They told me to go around it.” This is not my first conversation with the accommodating folks at the golf course. I garden on borrowed land, as do many homeowners here, in an unspoken agreement to blur the boundary between backyard and golf course with azaleas, loropetalum, and crepe myrtles. But my patch is a little wilder: blueberry bushes framed with drifts of native grasses, waist-high to deter the deer. Bright among the grasses bloom native flowers for butterflies and bees: pink billows of joe-pye weed, sunflowers taller than my head, asters that bloom, come September, in a burst of blue. “Most of those are just weeds, you know, “ he says in a kind way, pointing to the tall, feathery plants beside me. “Oh, no. This is dog fennel. It’s a host plant for six kinds of butterflies.” He nods and we talk more. His name is Terry. He has worked on golf courses most of his life, and he’s been here for 15 years. As we talk, I pluck a large, green katydid from the dog fennel and move it deeper into the garden – just in case Terry changes his mind about the fennel. Before he leaves, I show Terry a few more plants in my garden – milkweed for the monarchs, passionflower for the fritillaries, pussytoes for painted ladies. Terry and I wish each other goodbye, parting as friends, I think. He shifts into gear, and I watch him resume his course, skirting my garden. I stand among the flowers as the mower rumbles away. The grasses rustle around me, swaying in a small breeze. A flash of yellow – a swallowtail, so close I could touch him – alights on a plume of pink joe-pye weed. He drinks avidly, fluttering from one nectar-filled blossom to another. The mewl of a catbird sounds close behind me, well along in her daily forage for food. Her nestlings, hidden somewhere nearby, need hundreds of caterpillars and insects each day until they are ready to launch on their own. As the sound of the mower fades, the quiet hum of myriad bees rises to my ears. A pair of fritillaries dance together mid-air. I’m in the suburbs, standing in this little patch of nature. And it fills me with a drink of its beauty. Learn more with these simple steps to make your yard a Certified Wildlife Habitat. www.nwf.org/Garden-for-Wildlife/Certify.
Ann Litrel is an artist and certified Master Naturalist. She instructs nature journal workshops and paints in her studio, Ann Litrel Art, in Towne Lake.
