Mr. Carey's Garden

My milkweed plant fell over and could not get up. It was time for a bigger pot. Staring out the window at the milkweed, I gradually noticed a very fuzzy black caterpillar doing a lovely, slow dance on the underside of a canna leaf. Not a woollybear, no middle band of fuzzy brown. No leafroller this one; no, those marching band holes were made before. A caterpillar so lovely as this does not need to take orderly synchronized bites. It can get by on looks alone.

QUESTION:
Can you suggest something to control the caterpillars that cause the leaves to roll on cannas? I am an organic gardener and need something environmentally friendly.

ANSWER:
The leafroller caterpillar secretes a sticky substance which glues the leaf roll, preventing it from opening. The caterpillar happily feeds away inside, protected from the frustrated gardener.

The solution is to make slits in the rolled leaf, then spray with an insecticide such as Orthene, or, for organic gardeners, with a product that contains the biological control Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). Bt is a bacteria which can be used to control insects such as mosquitoes, caterpillars, cutworms and leafrollers.

That unappealing leafroller will become a large brown skipper butterfly with a 2" wingspan and white spots on its upper and lower wings.

I've finished repotting the milkweed on the patio before I think to get the camera. Was the caterpillar camera-shy? Or was it a bird's mid-afternoon tea and cookies? I can't find it, even though I'm crouching down in the myrtle and peering up from underneath the canna leaves. It danced its number, but did not come out for a curtain call.



I see things in a different light... Bright sun bleaches and blurs the fence boards seen through the shadowed rows of leaf portholes. My eyes bug out, and it seems as if Roswell aliens are shining their laser eyes at me.



"I see things in a different light," Mr. Carey tells his neighbors in Jane Cutler's book about snails in a garden. Mr. Carey's Garden reminds readers to notice the other inhabitants of our little patio gardens and our larger world.



"Tiny of body but brave of heart, we will finish what we start!" How splendid are the courageous doodlebugs of William Joyce's, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs. How dashing his Leaf Men in costumes part Errol Flynn and part cocoon couture. This book has been made into a musical, but it really needs to be a modern dance, I tell my choreographer sister. I can tie-dye the leotards.


That groovy black caterpillar will probably be a leopard moth someday. It may star in the screen adaptation of Robert Bly's poem, "A Caterpillar on the Desk" from The Morning Glory, published by Harper & Row, and featured by The Writer's Almanac last Tuesday.

Common Name: Great leopard moth
Scientific Name: Hypercompe scribonia (Stoll)
Order: Lepidoptera
Description: The great leopard moth, Hypercompe scribonia (Stoll) (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae), with a 3-inch wingspan, is white with black open-circular spots on the forewings and a metallic blue abdomen with orange markings. Caterpillars grow to about 2 inches. The caterpillars are fuzzy black caterpillars with the underlying body color of red to orange.

Life Cycle: Caterpillars can be abundant in the spring time. They can sometimes be seen crossing roads so commonly that motorists notice them. The adult moths are common under lights at night later in the season to mid summer. There may be a second generation later in the year.

Habitat and Food Source(s): Caterpillars feed on a variety of broad leaved plants that seem to be mostly weeds.

Pest Status, Damage: They are not considered pests except a bit in pastures. They are abundant enough for many people to notice them.

For additional information, contact your local Texas Cooperative Extension agent or search for other state Extension offices.

These are some of my other favorite garden books for teaching art:

*Because this is one of my favorite poems, fond as I am of both caterpillars and postage stamps, I am going to reprint it here. The original link to The Writer's Almanac is no longer viable. Air mail stamps haven't been ten cents for a very long time, either:

"A Caterpillar on the Desk" by Robert Bly from The Morning Glory. © Harper & Row.

A Caterpillar on the Desk

Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily-or perhaps summer's insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.