Paramount Protection

As if the continual struggle to maintain a socially respectable garden (or even a personally disappointing garden) wasn't enough, in addition to the obstacles of pounding rain, hail, late snows, early or late frosts, extreme temperature swings, tornadic winds, drought, insects, plant diseases, poor soil fertility, and just general calamity and misfortune, one must also consider the damages wrought by higher order creatures such as deer, rabbits, and the neighbor's occasionally-present dog.    

I've been oscillating all Spring on an action plan to limit the damage caused to my roses by a particularly prolific passel of rabbits in my garden.   At one point, a few weeks back, I recall looking out my back window and counting no fewer than 4 bunnies visible in my field of view (which likely doesn't even come close to the number that were hiding).  Bunnies, as many here are aware, don't eat daylilies or weeds or Wild Lettuce or native forbs, they preferentially eat, to my chagrin, roses, and go after the young tender ones first! When several young rose starts were pruned almost to the ground, I briefly contemplated ventilating their circulatory and respiratory systems with solid lead deterrents, but instead chose to spend $28 on a 25 foot spool of galvanized wire and made these protective cages, 11 of them so far.   I'll report back on how they work in the long run, but so far they seem to be keeping the rabbits away.

I was even more alarmed at finding this sight one morning; I've been watching this hollyhock patch daily, anticipating a fabulous bloom, but obviously another creature viewed it as an "all you can chomp" smorgasbord.  A creature measuring about 4 foot tall at the mouth and one that I suspect is hooved, with velvet lips and a fluffy white tail.   

The very sight panicked me, for this is just one "clump" in a large area of self-seeded hollyhocks, all otherwise healthy and forming some large delicate blooms.  I was counting on this patch to give me a luscious, even heavenly, hollyhock display, and now I was looking at the potential destruction of all of it, within a few nights, just bare stems and sadness left behind.  Should I stay awake all night with flashlights and a rifle at hand?  Keep pots and pans handy to startle them away? Hang soap and garlic from some stakes in the area?  Build a 10 foot tall peripheral fence topped with barbed wire and mined for 30 feet into the prairie?

Well, I won't keep you in suspense.   I ran quickly to the store to find a fresh supply of a repellent and chose this one.  Composed, among other things, of "putrid egg solids," I can attest, spraying it around the hollyhocks, that it indeed has an unpleasant odor, and I've found that Mrs. ProfessorRoush can detect it from more than 5 feet away, which is the closest she allowed me in her presence for quite some period of time after spraying the plants.  A week has gone by and the hollyhocks are blooming now and I can fully endorse it as a deterrent for close contact with deer and wives.  One takes a win where and when it occurs!

Oh, and the neighbor's dog?   Well, Liquid Fence doesn't work to keep that moron out of my flower beds.  In fact, evidently, rotten eggs are an aphrodisiac when you only have two neurons that synapse together.  At least the bumbling idiot hasn't trampled one of my wire cages yet!

And Where Did YOU Come From?

By the question in the title, ProfessorRoush is not trying to be nosy of you, the reader, but of this precocious Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) that suddenly appeared as I was puttering around outside, doing some trimming, some weeding, and a little planting.  I was shocked in the moment, first to see any butterflies at all this early in the season, and then shocked again to have it cooperate for these closeups.

You see, really I was out taking stock of things, because for the past few days, I've been in Washington DC, where I took the photo on the right during some moderate rain and wind at 6:41 p.m. (isn't it amazing that because of phone cameras, I will always know exactly where I was at 6:41 p.m. on Friday, April 11, 2025, because the data is forever embedded with the photo)?  If you're going to walk near the White House, I can now recommend doing it on a chilly, rainy Friday night because the streets were deserted at that hour, no protestors ranting and chanting and messing up my "chill", just a few tourists on the sidewalk and a half-dozen watchful Secret Service and Capital Police agents (that I could see at the time).  I was only sorry the landscaping lights weren't on yet, and, no, I didn't ask to knock on the door and see if President Trump was receiving visitors.

I was also fortunate on Saturday to have my return flight fly directly over near our home, and so, on April 12th at 2:40 p.m., I was able to capture this photo from the window of the plane.   Our home and gardens are in the white circle center left, surrounded by the darkened prairie ground exposed from our burn last week.  Click on the photo to enlarge it (hitting "escape" will then bring you back to the blog).  Mrs. ProfessorRoush was presumably not at home at the time and in route to pick me up.

But I digress.   The Swallowtail that prompted this blog entry (a male, easily gendered by its less colorful "eyes") seemed to be focused on the female holly plant sited on the northeast corner of the house, and the inconspicuous white blooms of the holly.  I didn't read anything about holly being a host plant, but both roses and magnolias are larval hosts for the species and there are plenty of those about.  Other host plants include lilacs and Cottonwood trees and those species are each in my yard as well. 

I was saddened that this specimen seems to have a damaged or missing left "tail", and I hope that won't hinder its search for a mate or its long-term survival.   For what little I know of Swallowtails, this male might also be just out of its chrysalis and maybe it just needs to unfold the left tail, temporarily rather than permanently deformed.  Either way, I wish the little guy luck and happy mate-hunting.  As there are either two or three generations of Tiger Swallowtails in a season, depending on the latitude, the Swallowtails I see in September could be his grandchildren.

The White House, from Lafayette Park, 04/11/2025, 6:41 p.m.

Hawk and I

ProfessorRoush set out this morning to face a dreaded chore;  bush-hogging the pastures nearest the house (on this side of the draw where it's semi-safe to drive a tractor).  I only do it once yearly for the primary purpose of mowing down noxious weeds on the prairie; foremost among which are the thistles, with the Wavy-Leaf Thistle, Cirsium undulatum, most common here (upper right).  I grew up mowing bull thistles on the home farm in Indiana and, as I've mentioned before, my maternal grandfather always said to mow them on June 21st to control them.   I'm a little late this year, but years of observation has convinced me that the purpose of the date is to mow them near bloom and before these biennials set seed and I'm still within that window.

I dread the annual pasture-mowing for a number of reasons.  First, I don't trust my inherited tractor on the Flint Hills; it's top-heavy and too powerful for its weight, with a tendency to want to jump as you let off the clutch.  I'm extra-darned careful with it and don't trust it for an instant.  Second, it's normally hot and miserable out there this time of year and mowing takes a full afternoon.  Third, I don't want to mow because it alters the prairie ecology, cutting down forbs before they bloom (particularly stealing milkweeds from the migrating monarchs).  But its a necessity to control the sumac and thistles.

This year, however, I had a close observer the whole time, watching the every move of the loud green machine and tired primate riding it.  Watching me, literally, like a hawk.  To be specific, watching me like a red-tailed hawk, hoping, I'm sure, that I would flush out dinner in the form of a nice prairie mouse or rabbit.

I first spotted it atop my barn gate about 1/2 hour after I started mowing.  Since I always have an iPhone handy, I stopped and opened the camera app, only to be immediately disappointed as I zoomed in and it began to fly away ( 2nd photo, left).

Thankfully, it came back, again and again, first on the same gate as seen in the 3rd paragraph (I'll leave you to decipher the meaning of the Greek language "Molon Labe" sign), then on a fence post (4th paragraph, on the left), and then on a native Mulberry tree (here, right), always nearby as I went round and round the pasture.  I apologize for the pictures; I wish they were clearer, but alas, the iPhone was all I had available, placed at full zoom, and held as still as I could on a vibrating, roaring tractor.  And the stark, full sunlight in a cloudless July prairie sky also isn't good "photo-quality" lighting.

I could only pray to see it catch something, and so Hawk and I were both excited as it swooped down on something in the tall grass next to a just mowed area (5th paragraph, right).  I hadn't seen anything bounding into the tall grass, so I was hoping to see Hawk rise up with a snake, but Hawk, clearly disgusted by a miss, looked back at me as if it was blaming me for its lack of success.  I'm sorry, Hawk.

While still on the ground, it did give me this last profile shot, however, the best glimpse yet of the red-tail feathers of its name.  And then it took off again, returning to its vigil, a sweeping shadow passing back and forth over me for the duration of my mowing, hunting prey, I surmise, in each pass.  Hawks will be hawks and I appreciate my moments spent with this one.

2021 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour

ProfessorRoush seems to have slipped comfortably back into his continuing role as the unofficial photographer of the Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden tour, albeit with a break during the skipped tour last year due to the pandemic cancellation of the Tour.  I won't comment here on the folly of canceling a GARDEN tour in a time when more of the population would have attended then ever, but that's all rain clouds and opportunities missed. 

Most importantly, I had planned to share in this blog what I thought were the 6 best photos from this year's tour, however, as usual, I'm failing miserably.   It's fairly easy, among 609 photos taken in 4 hours today, for me to weed out all the pictures with identifiable people in them since I shouldn't/can't post people without permission.  And my best intentions to catch a bee in the act of nefarious nectar collection went awry several times today; it was cloudy for most of the tour and the camera shutter speed just wasn't up to catching them as a still life.

It is more difficult than I anticipated to choose the best from the 50 or so daylily pictures and the various vignettes of gnomes and garden ornaments and from the delightful plant arrangements that were everywhere.  Ego aside, many of the pictures are quite good, despite the overcast and early start to the day.  My goal of  posting six photos became a battle to narrow down from 50, and then from 20, until I settled on these 8.   Well, on these 9 if you count the last wanna-be.  Who, anyway, could resist this bronze heron sculpture at the K-State Gardens in the middle of the created wetlands? 

Every photo here is unedited, just as I took them.  Normally I would have cropped them for the blog, maybe removing some of the blurred green space at the top of the picture of the fancy echinacea at the left, and perhaps reducing their size, but I thought you'd like them in all their vivid detail.  Point and click if you want to see them larger.  I apologize, in advance, for the multi-megabyte nature of this blog entry, but most these days don't have the limitations we used to have on download speed, do they?  I hope not.

Trains seemed to be the "thing" for the day and model railroads were laid out at two of the 6 gardens on the tour.  ProfessorRoush perhaps didn't fully appreciate their contribution to the garden, but the many children on the tour certainly enjoyed them.   I just kept thinking, "Okay, that's cute, but after a few times around the track, what would I do with it then?"   To each, their own tracks, I suppose.

With the garden tour a few weeks later in the year than normal, the daylilies were blooming everywhere.   I thought the prettiest daylily photograph that I took was of the pair shown at the top of this blog, but for a single entry, this yellow and purple-eyed daylily was too perfect to ignore.  

There was plenty of wildlife in the gardens today, with one garden featuring a box turtle enclosure with a half-dozen unfortunately photo-shy turtles.  I couldn't share the picture of one owner calling to her turtle, and a soundless still photo wouldn't do the moment justice anyway, but I can share these two sister felines who were intently hunting and torturing a vole in a garden.   Their actions seemed to dismay the garden owner, but then, cats will be cats, won't they?

I loved this quiet pathway fork, lit by the Japanese Maple on one side and shadowed by the 'Forest Pansy' redbud that hung above it all.  I was quite captivated by the light coming through the multi-colored leaves of 'Forest Pansy' and so the tour will cost me in real monetary terms since I'll have to seek one out now.  This was a hard area to catch without people walking through it, but thankfully, if you can identify the legs of the two ladies taking the fork on the right, then you're far more observant, or intimately knowledgeable of these ladies, than I am.

I'll close with this almost-picture of the Monarch butterfly on milkweed.   When the Monarch landed within reach of my lens, fluttering it's wings as it settled for a snack, I was adamantly sure I was about to get the perfect photo for the day, the crowning jewel of my efforts.  For a brief instant, I was still, waiting for this beauty to open its wings so I could capture that instant of miracle, of life and ecology in a single picture.  And then a nearby bumblebee came in like a Stuka dive bomber and the butterfly was gone, beyond my reach,
before my reflexes could trigger the shutter.   Such are the disappointments that come hand-in-hand with these many glorious photos.  Maybe next year.  Or the year after.

Lavender Days and Rabbit Plagues

Yesterday was Garden Day in ProfessorRoush's world; a full hot day in the sun to relish the feel of sweat and sore muscles and honest labor.  I cleaned the garage and weeded and watered and mowed and trimmed and mulched and took a break to help a friend load some estate sale dressers and just generally spuddled around from morning to supper.  I stayed hydrated and didn't mind the heat at all.   And yes, "spuddled" is a word, my new favorite word, an obsolete southwest English word according to Wiktionary, that means "to make a lot of fuss about trivial things, as if they were important."   Removing that extra-long holly branch from the path, throwing away old baling strings that I saved for when I needed them (which is never), and combining partial bottles of Grass-B-Gone spray, all of those and more were spuddling at its best.  

I did take time to admire my short row of lavender however, a 10 foot row of several varieties that thrive in the full sun of a raised limestone-edged bed.  They take absolutely no care or thought from me; every winter they stand stiff and brittle, dead from tip to bottom, and then all those dead stems come alive in June and produce luscious light blue flowers with that awesome scent of savory sugar clear through the heat of July.  The bees are flocking to the lavender (photo at left) in masses these days, feasting on the tiny bits of pollen clinging to each flower.  The iron chicken that stands among them finally looks like it belongs, a hen among a lavender forest.

This morning, I was quickly reminded how lucky I am to have a garden at all, a triumph in the face of furry pestilence that seems more prevalent this year.  I knew that there were rabbits about, an occasional admiration for the tiny bunny living in the front garden or a glimpse of the far-off larger bunny in the grass near the lower garden, but I had not realized the sheer numbers of the horde that has descended here.  Looking out the window at breakfast, I spied this lone brave lagomorph in the freshly cut lawn, but after watching a few moments longer, I realized this bunny wasn't a bachelor, but a trio, all within a few feet.  Can you spot them?

In the photo at the left, I've blown them up and added arrows to help you find the half-hidden one behind the iris at the bottom and the long ears of the one hidden in the prairie grass above.   None of these three are the baby bunny that I know lives in the front.   And now I'm wondering what kind of idiot ProfessorRoush is, because it probably is not one, but several baby bunnies in front too.   What exactly am I running, a garden or a feeding farm for rodents?

Thankfully, the rabbits don't bother the lavender, and, truthfully, I seldom recognize any bunny damage beyond some nibbling on the first few daylily shoots that venture out in Spring.  They may be out there plotting to kill off my favorite baby roses, but it's more likely that I benefit from all rabbit manure than they damage something important.  I won't begrudge them their short brutal and timid lives, because I know the coyotes and snakes will clean up the garden before winter.  It's a simple fact of gardening life; where there is a garden, there are rabbits, and where there are rabbits, there are predators, be them wild or man.  Or wild professors.

Cardinals in Bloom

I took these out the kitchen window this morning at 7:15 a.m.   I know it's unusual for ProfessorRoush to shut up and lose the commentary, but this real set of lovebirds can speak for themselves.  There's nothing like an image of a male and female cardinal pair in a blooming redbud tree to start a day right.

I See You!

See, this is why ProfessorRoush can't have a nice, simple garden filled with perfect plants and idyllic moments.   Aside from minor problems like runaway fire, punishing winds, late snows, early freezes, deep winter cold, and searing summer sun, it is things like these that try my soul.  Do you see it?   Click on the picture to enlarge it and look again!

At roughly 6:45 a.m. this morning, after the lovely Bella had been outside, explored the premises, and "watered" the yard, and after I had eaten my morning cereal, I looked out the back window to assess the morning and saw this lovely rabbit still-frozen among the daylilies.  It must have seen me step up to the window because it didn't move in the minute it took me to retrieve my phone and compose the shot, nor did it move until after I stepped away.  Well, presumably it moved after I stepped away.  Maybe it's still sitting there for all I know.

This is probably the same lagomorph, or a member of a tribe of furry-pawed thumpers, that eat the first daylilies that come up each year, nipping anything green to the ground until the shear mass of spring foliage overwhelms their gluttony and stomach capacities.  And likely the same creature that nipped off the first sprouts of my beloved 'Yellow Dream' Orienpet lilies in front last week.  Nothing, it seems, is sacred from these monsters, except perhaps the sprouting peonies.  I don't know what it is about peonies, but the fauna in my garden, deer, rabbits and mice all, leave the peonies alone.  I would be grateful, but the invading horde probably is executing a demoralization campaign, allowing my hopes to raise and then be inevitably crushed by a late-May storm that flattens the peonies and my dreams in a single night.  Do other gardeners believe the native fauna and climate are both conspiring against them, or is it just paranoid little-old-me? 

I would arm myself with a suitably-scoped assault device or perhaps a Sherman tank and take these out, but speaking of weather collusion, there are bigger battles and disappointments on my horizon.  Currently, my lilacs and redbuds are blooming at full glory and beauty and the forecast two days away is for a low of 27ºF and snow.   

Sigh.


 

The Arrival

I turned the corner last night, July 5, 2019, and there, right there on the top of virginally white 'Blanc Double de Coubert' in full-on public display, fornicating, yes FORNICATING, in flagrante delicto, caught red-handed (or, in this case, green-bodied) in naked embrace, were the first of the Japanese Beetles to invade my garden this year.  Immodest, immoral, deplorable and disgusting Japanese Beetles!

All right, all right.  My indignation is false, my outrage is fake, although this Japanese Beetle sightings is most certainly not "fake news."  I've actually been expecting them, waiting and watchful, forewarned and forearmed.  In point of fact, while I'm spilling the beans, these weren't the first Japanese Beetles that I saw yesterday evening.  I had already found one a few moments earlier on 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup', cornered it, captured it, and crushed it under my sole.  On the first day, the total casualty count for the Japanese Beetle army at my hands was 6; the pair above on 'Blanc', the pair below on 'Applejack', the single stag male on 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup' and another single male on a second 'Applejack'. 

They are right on time, these horrible hordes.  Based on a search of my blog, from the very first time I spotted one in my garden, 7/7/2013, to the beginning of last year's seasonal foray on 7/1/2018, they've never been earlier than July 1st, nor later than July 7th, with the exception of the fabled beetle-less summer of 2016.  My blog is full of beetles, and I noticed tonight that if you click on the search box at the right and type in "beetles", I've accumulated almost a dozen musings on these hard-bodied trespassers.  Go ahead, I promise it is an entertaining side-path through the blog.

Sore from recent marathon weedings of the garden, nursing what I suspect is my first ever episode of trochanteric bursitis, and in no mood to trifle with more garden interlopers after the earlier spring invasion of rose slugs, I've chosen the nuclear option this year.  Full-on, no-prisoners-taken, garden-wide thermonuclear war in my garden, insecticide at 50 paces, and may the human win.  My sole concession to the less onerous garden critters was to spray as early in the morning as possible so as to spare as many bumblebees as I could, but I'm in no mood this year to stand on the ethical high ground and spend every night and morning searching the garden by hand to interrupt and dispatch Japanese beetle couples in the process of making more Japanese beetles.  So this year, I'll spare myself the bursa-inflaming activity and spare you the daily body count, and I will simply report any spotted survivors here later.  To my fellow gardeners, ye of beetle-inflicted pain, the skirmishes have begun again.  Good hunting, my friends.

Timeous Turtle Trek

"Arf, Arf, Arf;" the neighbors dog, Huck, was barking incessantly last night as I traipsed around the garden, trimming dead canes off a rose here, transplanting a rose or two there, and watering seedling, just-purchased roses.  Eventually, Bella and I sought him out, curious as to what he had found on the prairie, 20 feet off of my neighbor's driveway.  I was betting snake, but as it turned out, I was quite wrong.  The dog had found a large turtle, probably a quarter mile west and above our pond, heading straight as an arrow towards my neighbors pond, across the blacktop driveway and another quarter mile down the next draw.




This seemingly ancient creature is a
Snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, identified by its long tail and ridged shell.  Yesterday evening, that turtle's tail was as expressive as any dog's, flipping angrily whenever Huck got too close.  Hunkered down for the photo here, he just wanted to be left alone on his journey, presumably in search of more abundant food or agreeable mate or both.  As always, when I run across such creatures, I do a little reading, and found out from Wiki that the folklore about snapping turtles biting off fingers and toes is just a myth, with no confirmed cases.  Although they can certainly apply a painful bite, and while you shouldn't pick one up by the shell because their necks can stretch completely around their armor, they actually have less bite force than a human.  They often live 20-25 years, with a maximum reported age of 38 years, so I wonder what the chances are of this being the same just-hatched turtle that my daughter found during a 2014 burn?  Probably not a likely coincidence but it's fun to think about it.

Up until the turtle, it was a peaceful evening in the garden.  I had spent some time admiring the first blooms of some dark red Asiatic lilies (photo at the top) that I planted as summertime filler among the viburnum bed.  There used to be other colors and varieties planted in the bed, but the only long term survivors seem to be deep red.  Not that I'm complaining, because I swoon over that dark rich color against the green of rose and viburnum foliage.


I have and encourage other fillers in these beds, but I count on serendipity and Mother Gaia to supply the most important.  Everywhere that the Butterfly Milkweed,  Asclepias tuberosa, (left, above) decides to show up as a "weed," I let it remain in all its orange glory.  In a similar fashion, I'll allow any Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) (right) to grow unmolested in any bed.  The fantastic fragrance of these wildflowers, especially the Common Milkweed, are an early gift to me, and their value as a food source for caterpillars and butterflies make them all keepers in my gentle garden.

Turtles and milkweed were the sendoff last night for me to seek satisfied slumber with dreams of butterflies and blooms.

Prairie Moon Rising

ProfessorRoush was forced into the mundane chores of garden these past two days on the prairie.  Rapidly growing grass and weeds meant that I spent most of Saturday's 'free time' mowing the lawn and trimming, and most of Sunday's "free time" weeding and planting.  I planted 22 garden pepper plants and 17 tomatoes.  And I also replaced the watermelon and cantaloupe that I planted and previously mentioned in the Showing the Crazy blog entry.  Not surprisingly, the first two didn't make it.  This time I planted 'Sugar Baby' watermelon, 'Ambrosia' and 'Athena' cantaloupes. 

Remember the song "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedance Clearwater Revival?  Lyrics that include "I hear hurricanes a-blowing.  I know the end is coming soon.  I hear the rivers over flowing...There's a bad moon on the rise."  Well, my 'Prairie Moon' peony is rising (upper left), and it's not a bad moon, even though the rain around here has the ground saturated and some folk in town have water in basements again.  'Prairie Moon' is just a beauty, pure white blooms as big as your outstretched hand and healthy bright green smooth foliage.  What's that you say?  The foliage isn't smooth?  Yeah, that's a volunteer hollyhock in front of the peony that I didn't have the heart to root out.  As long as it doesn't smother 'Prairie Moon', I'll let the hollyhock bloom and then grub it out later.   

Speaking of tomato planting, I had the bright idea to plant Mrs. ProfessorRoush's favorite grape-sized tomatoes in the large pots on the back (south) patio this year.   They'll get major sun there if they can stand the heat.  I was hand-digging a hole in the potting soil and the little gray tree frog pictured at the left about gave me a heart-attack, sitting as still as a postage stamp on the edge of the pot.  I almost put my hand right on him!   Here they come again, those sneaky peeping frogs, watching my every move.  Creeps me out, I tell you.

Bella is in the garden with me most days right now, protecting me and making sure the Texas Longhorns don't cross the barbed wire fence.  There is something that just feels right about longhorns on the prairie, isn't there?  Well, may not right to Bella, who seems a little disturbed by these big dumb things in her pasture.

Skinking around

My fears were misplaced but not entirely misdirected.  Last Saturday, ProfessorRoush set out to move 26-or-so landscaping concrete blocks that surround his trees and protect them from too-close-string-trimmers and fire-bug neighbors.  Specifically, the blocks of interest were around a Black Gum tree that HAD been damaged by a prairie fire and around a Sugar Maple that was snapped in half during a storm last year, and I wanted to move them to be around two still-living trees which were without even that inadequate means of protection.  Knowing that the blocks had been in place for several years and had likely become the adopted home of a prairie snake or two, I was carefully flipping them over one-by-one, constantly poised to take flight in the event of a slithering serpent.

By approximately block #13 or so, I had become complacent, having encountered only some ant nests and the occasional beetle.  Just as I relaxed, of course, lifting block #15 casually and with no trepidation at all, the slinking skink pictured at the top came flying past my pant legs, causing me to fling the block isideways while briskly backpedaling from the area. 

This is, of course, a Northern Prairie Skink, Eumeces septentrionalis.  I identified it from the from the marvelous text, Amphibians and Reptiles in Kansas, by Joseph T. Collins.  I've seen them here before, but not in the numbers that I encountered last Saturday when I found that blocks #15-26 covered a colony of a minimum five adult skinks, some of which just tried to burrow deeper as I disturbed their chilly environs (as you can see by the tail visible in the picture at right.  They are carnivorous reptiles, not amphibians as I originally thought them to be, eating insects and spiders and small lizards as their normal diet. Despite my initial panic when they appear, I always go out of my way to leave them as undisturbed as possible so they can continue to compete in their ecological niche.  After all, a skink in the stones beats a snake in the grass anytime, in my opinion.   God knows, I've got enough of the latter around.     

My Amphibians and Reptiles in Kansas is the 1993 third edition, published through funds from the Chickadee Checkoff, a special contribution we can make on our Kansas tax returns that is directed to natural resources in the state.  The text may be authored by Mr. Collins of the Natural History Museum in Lawrence, Kansas, but the wonderful color photographs, a change in the 3rd edition from the previous black and white editions, were contributed by Suzanne L. Collins, she likely an enlisted and long-suffering spouse much like the delightful Mrs. ProfessorRoush is for me.  Where, I ask you, would science sometimes be without a more-or-less-willing spouse content to carry a camera and go through heck and back alongside the focused fool leading the expeditions?

The Eight Ex-Beetles

ProfessorRoush is NOT, of course, referring to a mythical reunion of Paul, Ringo, George, and any ex-band members who may exist, because if I was, I would have spelled the noun of the title as "Beatles."  Instead, I'm obviously referring to to the barely-visible rear end of the demonic chitinous lout on the lower right side of the white flower here (and not the other long-snouted insect to the left).  Do you see the hiney of the Japanese Beetle in the lower left of the flower?  Look closer.  Click on it to blow up the photo if you need to.  See the bristling patches of white hair along the edges of its abdomen?




I was simultaneously amused and alarmed eight days ago, when, as I visited a local commercial horticultural facility, I overheard a gardening couple asking a store clerk what they could buy to kill Japanese Beetles.  Thus alerted that the blankety-blank beetle season was upon us, I vowed to be ever-diligent over the next few days, and, sure enough, on July 1st I found the first Japanese Beetles of 2018 on 'Snow Pavement', 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup', 'Polareis', and, of course, 'Blanc Double de Coubert'.  The first two victims can be seen at the left, taken moments before I squished them into beetle pulp.  In fact, I found and squished eight beetles on that first evening.  The Ex-Beetles of my garden.





In another more typical picture of the damage that Japanese Beetles can cause to a beautiful bloom, I give you the traumatized bloom of 'Earth Song' that I discovered this morning, seen in the photo at right complete with the Japanese Beetle hiding in the center of the flower (please ignore the Melyrid at the bottom.  I see the latter insects all the time and they don't hurt the flowers).  By the morning of the second day of the 2018 invasion, my total kill is now 14 squished beetles.  Unfortunately, it should have been 15 squished beetles (one male escaped this morning by leaping off the edging brick before I could lower my foot in his direction).

With a little research however, I just tonight discovered that, despite my vaunted prowess as a Japanese Beetle Terminator (Hasta la vista, beetles!), I'm winning a small tactical skirmish, but losing the strategic war.  As if Rose Rosette Disease and Japanese Beetles don't cause enough damage in my garden, the long-nosed brown insect to the left in the first picture above is NOT a harmless flower beetle.  The Internet informs me that it is a Rose Curculio Weevil (Merhynchites bicolor), another flower-eater and civilization destroyer sent to my garden by the demons of hell.  I should be just as diligent handpicking these little snouted monsters as I am the Japanese Beetles, and yet I knew not of their existence prior to this.  It seems to not be enough that I have one beetle enemy, the crunchy critters  have now enlisted allies.  Saints preserve my roses!