In October I wrote about the most well-known pollinator—the honey bee--with the intention of writing about some of the other pollinators before the year was over.  So here goes:

Honey bees are credited with 39% of pollinations with bumble bees, butterflies, wasps, flies, hummingbirds, and bats, accounting for most of the rest of the job. I photographed some of these other pollinators and am going to get into the weeds about the whole pollination process.  (Warning—Parental discretion advised) 
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Most plants need to be cross-pollinated. The pollen from one flower’s stamen (the male part) ends up on the stigma (the female part) of another but same type of flower. The stigma sits at the very center of the flower at the end of a tube which runs down into the ovule. The ovule contains the eggs that will grow into seeds.  A pollinator is attracted by smell or color that promises them a sweet treat.  Pollen is the (usually yellow) powdery substance that contains protein, along with fat and other nutrients pollinators need while nectar contains sugars, vitamins, salts, oils, and additional nutrients that together offer a high energy food source.  Nectar is produced in plant glands called nectarines located inside the flower at the bottom. 

Pollinators have evolved over the years along with the plants they favor and are mutually beneficial to one another.  I was amazed at length of the proboscis on some of the butterflies, moths, and skippers I saw.   Here’s a cool story.  In 1863 Charles Darwin examined an orchid that grew in Madagascar. Since the nectar spur was longer than any known Madagascan insect’s proboscis, clever Mr. Darwin predicted that there must be a theretofore undiscovered pollinator with an 11-inch-long proboscis.  Forty years later in 1903, the Xanthopan morgannii moth was found with a proboscis three times its bottle length. 

Pollination is crucial to the reproduction of flowers but also necessary for the reproduction of countless fruit and vegetable crops including blueberries, pumpkin, apples, tomatoes, and chocolate.  If you like chocolate as much as I do, you might be interested to learn that midge flies (Forcipomyia) are the sole pollinators of the cocoa tree.  No midges—no chocolate (gasp).  The males do most of the pollinating while the female are off biting people and animals because, like their relative the mosquito, the mothers need blood in order to lay eggs.  Those nasty girls are notorious for ruining many a summer day especially the infamous Highland midge swarms in Scotland. According to her diary, Queen Victoria was half-devoured by these little ladies whilst at a picnic in Sutherland woodland in 1872.  I google 'midge swarms in Scotland' and found a ton of sites giving information on how to have a midge-free vacation in Scotland.  I read that midges are one of the reasons for the relatively low population of the Scottish Highlands, and help keep the wildernesses wild.  That’s impressive power for such tiny creatures.
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But back to the nice pollinators. Imagine zillions of these critters dedicating most of their lives to collecting nectar and pollen in minute amounts each time they visit a flower.  As a byproduct of their industry, we get to enjoy beautiful flowers and life sustaining food.  We truly live in an amazing world.  

Wishing you all a happy, healthy 2021  

​When I moved to Grantham full-time in the summer of 2011, we started going to the neighborhood social events. There we met Peggy and Rolf Hammer, who recommended two immediate activities to join - the water aerobics group and the Grantham Garden Club. Several of the swimmers were dedicated Garden Club members, and they assured me it was the way to meet people in Grantham. So that was how I joined a garden club, something I had never imagined doing!

I am the fourth of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and I grew up in Easton, PA, and Upper Saddle River, NJ. Instead of attending senior year in high school, I went on a year exchange to live with a family in Germany on the AFS program. When I returned, I went to Smith College because my brother was at Dartmouth. (Trivia: I never actually graduated from high school.) There I met my future husband, Jim, a friend of my brother's. I went back to Germany for my junior year, then got married six days after graduation.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life, but I knew I never wanted to be a mother or a teacher! I ended up doing both, having three children and teaching foreign students how to speak English (ESL).
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I grew up with casual gardening experience and continued that way in later life. I’m really more interested in trees and wildflowers than showy blooms. Also, we’ve always lived in the shade, which makes gardening more challenging. I love to mix in a few annuals with native perennials, and I plant small beds of annuals here and there around the edges of my yard, so I have color to see out every window all summer long.

Reflecting on how I became interested in gardening (flower gardening), I am reminded of my maternal grandmother and her gardens.  My mother, raised during the depression, was one of 12 children in a farm family in rural Michigan.  Home for me, was a suburb of Detroit, but as a young child I spent a great deal of time on the farm and even lived with my grandparents for periods of time.  As a kindergartner, I attended the one room country school with two of my youngest uncles.  My life there was right out of Little House on the Prairie.  My grandmother who churned her own butter, cooked on and baked bread daily in a wood stove oven, and had specific days for household chores like laundry using a hand ringer washer.  I even rode on a horse to school during the winter.  I loved it there and the life I experienced.
My grandparents grew almost everything they consumed, vegetables in the garden, wheat ground for flour, raised chickens both for eggs, and the meat, as well as pigs and a dairy herd which provided milk and beef at slaughter time.  I recall sides of beef and pork hanging in an unheated room in the house.  I remember when they first got indoor plumbing and could dispose of the use of chamber pots and the outhouse!
In addition to all this, my grandmother had an extensive flower garden that she tended, and there were always fresh flowers on the table in the summer.  I especially loved her gladiolas, canna lilies and zinnias.
I spent most of my adult life on Long Island where I raised my four children, but for some reason it never really felt like home.  I started creating flower beds at my house and later when I moved to a condo. 
Once I retired and moved to New Hampshire, I felt like I had come home.  The house I bought had few flower beds, but lots of large pine trees that were causing a variety of problems.  After securing permission to have many of them removed, I got to work.
The back “yard” rose in elevation and was a carpet of creeping juniper, which I hated.  I tried many ways to remove it unsuccessfully, and finally had to have it excavated and rolled up like carpeting, which was then dumped in my woods to decompose.  Tristin Gilson was fantastic in helping decide how to transform the area.  He terraced it, creating stone wall dividers, and steps going to the top, all using rocks that he would unearth on the property.  Then he brought in topsoil and I started planting.  I favor perennials and friends donated a lot of them to get me going, but the first few years needed a lot of annuals to fill in.
I have added what I refer to as my garden “junk”, an antique hand water pump, an old bicycle, antique watering cans and shutters.  My latest addition is an antique iron baby crib.  I have to resist overdoing it though.  Today, the perennials keep multiplying so I share with my two daughters as well as many friends.  The garden keeps evolving as it matures, and each season is a new wonder.

We made a vow, my older sister Madie and I when we were 10 & 14, that we would never ever ever EVER have a garden.  Why, you ask?  We lived on a 156-acre orchard in the Hudson Valley and we had 15 gardens!  My mother and dad were both gifted orchardists/gardeners, but both worked full time so Madie and I were left with the maintenance of the gardens.  They went from easy care shrubs at the bottom of the 100’ brick walk (that had to be weeded) to the dreaded perennial bed that was largely clay.  The garden on the top of the stone wall held chrysanthemums, while the one at its base held a mixture of annuals.  But the best garden was the rose garden with its magnificent soil and unique weeds.  There were 150 rose plants that lived in luxury.  Their bed had been dug with a back-hoe and created with large boulders at the base, smaller ones above, some gravel and then, finally, rich topsoil.  We drew straws sometimes to see who would work on which garden and the winner always got the rose garden because it was so easy to weed.  On Thanksgiving afternoon each year, the entire family, and any guests who were staying at the farm with us, put the rose garden to bed.  Each bush was cut back, covered with peatmoss with leaves on the top – bales of peatmoss that would, of course, be worked into the soil in the spring.  It was an EVENT.
Next to the rose garden was a huge bell on a 12-foot pole.  It was to be used to bring my dad in from the orchard in an emergency since this was well before any other sort of communication was possible.  Happily, it never was used for that purpose but was rung for celebrations!  That bell, on a much shorter pole, now sits in the middle of the “Circle Garden” to the south of our house in Eastman and has stepping-stones so that our granddaughter Maeve can ring it.
Needless to say, vows or not, my sister and I are both obsessive gardeners.  She has created gardens in Tucson, Syracuse, the Thousand Islands and Sarasota.  I started my first garden in front of our student apartment at Sachem Village when I was teaching in White River Junction and Russ was a graduate student at Dartmouth.  Spring bulbs and chrysanthemums were the mainstay and I was discouraged, when we returned 36 years later, to find that chrysanthemums are only annuals in zone 4.  I left behind a garden in Lancaster, PA, and more extensive ones in Albion, MI.  Taking an idea from Inverewe Gardens on the west coast of Scotland, we put in 8-foot posts with thick ropes draped between them in one garden.  Contrasting clematis and climbing roses wound up the poles and extended across the ropes.  They were gorgeous. 
Between us, Madie and I have produced another generation of gardeners.  Both of our daughters love to garden and have extensive gardens of their own – in NH and MI.