A good week for spiders

Spiders portend good luck according to my dream-guide friend. I've had lots of luck finding and photographing spiders this week. Maybe that's because I read Gerald McDermott's Anansi the Spider to the extended-day children. When Anansi got in a predicament, his six children worked together, each using a special ability, to extricate their father. And, the moon ended up in the sky, which is good!

Spiders' special ability to spin webs probably inspired human inventions of spinning, weaving, knots, and nets. Spiders certainly inspired myths and legends. Every time I spy a dewy web sparkling in the sunlight I feel transported to Aladdin's cave of jewels.

Was Helen Augusta Blanchard, the inventor of the zigzag sewing machine (1873), inspired by spider webs? Alas, there are so many things it would be interesting to learn, and so little time. The zigzag pattern appeared in most of my lucky spider webs this week. The zigzag is called a Stabilimenta, but stabilization is not thought to be its purpose.



Thanks to the macro function on my little Canon camera, the designs on spiders' bodies have been revealed. Each spider seems like a design for a Persian rug or Navajo blanket. The markings are amazingly intricate whether the spider is the size of a pencil lead, or the size of my thumb.




Spider education in my childhood was limited. Nancy Drew's cases with black widow spiders in old attics fueled scary slumber party stories. Camp Fire Girl warnings about brown recluse "fiddle-back" spiders taught me to shake out any shoe that hadn't been worn for awhile and to be very wary of violins. Lazy summer evenings sprawled on the warm concrete driveway with the other neighborhood kids included building obstacles for Daddy-Long-Legs between hopscotch and jacks. We didn't learn anything about the beneficial spiders in nature.

I'm including a photo of the biggest spider I ever saw outside of a "bug zoo". It was among the cattails at the bottom of the Oak Point Preserve pond. Its leg span was the size of my hand. And instead of feeling arachnophobic, I was cheering this Argiope girl's capture of a large grasshopper for her lunch. I've known lots of red-blooded grown-up American males who were mighty scared of spiders. Me, I just get the heebie-jeebies from grasshoppers.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

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.

Wish List Revisited

You are blowing me away with your willingness to collect Primo Junk. I can't thank you enough. Your donations sustain my efforts, and often propel me in new directions.

Due to storage limitations it is time to update the recycling wish list. I'm imagining myself as some sort of public radio pledge drive moderator here. Thanks for your wonderful contributions of quilt batting and fiberfill. You will be receiving a pledge gift of an invisible travel coffee mug.

Donations of plastic Easter eggs have astounded me, and launched a project for constructing imaginary orchestra instruments. We are reading the new Manuelo the Playing Mantis , by Don Freeman ( though he's been dead for ages). Alas, I can't store any more eggs. This reminds me of a job long ago as an apartment building manager. Every week I had to vacuum the stairways. It took months to rid the carpet of Christmas pine needles and Easter plastic grass.

Prescription bottles are a component of every construction project. I don't know about you, but sometimes the labels are easy to peel off my Rx bottles, and other times impossible. The recycling fairies will understand if you discard the sticky-icky bottles. Save the lids, though. We love the lids!

I can always use the shoeboxes with a one-piece construction instead of a two-piece box and lid construction. We use them for creating inside/outside castles and haunted houses.

Buttons and sewing notions are always coveted. So are workbench and junk drawer hardware items. Keys. I want your keys!! The ones to the padlock from your junior high PE locker...The eyeglasses your broke when you were showing off about your unbreakable titanium frames? I want them! Buttons. Snaps. Zippers? You betcha.

Wire. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways....Different kinds and sizes of wire are used to develop fine motor twisting and threading skills.

NEW!! I can always use the styrofoam trays from grocery meats. I do need them to be the kind without creepy absorbing materials attached. Obviously, I need them to be washed.

I always, always, always need buttons, wine corks, and ugly neckties. With your support I may someday become a Primo Junk Diva!

Looking high and low

Still stunned by the reappearance of branches on the cotton ball trees. Did you know street signs have words on them? What a trippy marvel it is to get new glasses. Lucy in the sky without the blue, pointy, diamond frames! I may look like Dame Edna, but I can see like Albrecht Durer does San Francisco '68.

The storybook of the week is Diary of a Worm. So far we've launched into clay, papier mache, and cut paper projects from it. You've got to love "Worms In Black"...