A sumptuous butterfly ball

There are plenty of Painted Ladies (Vanessa cardui) but no Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) in the west side story of a butterfly ballroom.

I think I also spy some Southern Dogfaces (Zerene cesonia) dancing amongst the Painted Ladies.

At ground level the real jewels of the season returned today. While watering the zinnias and cosmos on the west side, I discover the first saffron crocus flowers. The debutantes I’ve been waiting for! They came back!

From the kitchen sink window, it looks like a jungle out there. Though tall sunflowers are mostly done for the season, this planting does a good job of screening me from the neighbours when I’m pottering about pondering garden mysteries or kitchen alchemy.

It seems that I built a splendid gilded and bejeweled ballroom, seeded it with kings, queens, princes and empresses. (Queen Lime zinnia - disappointingly puny, Empress Zinnia, Orange King zinnia, Purple Prince zinnia…**)

And they came.

The uncaged cadmium yellow brilliance of the wild romp of Canary Bird zinnia flowers is what’s singing to these winged revellers today when I pause to take the camera out. Maybe that’s because the Canary Bird seed had an exceptional germination rate. The other zinnia seed variety which was very successful for me this year is the Will Rogers cadmium red. Will is blooming brilliantly right now on the edges of the no milagro cornfield and has been making up the bulk of my farmers market bouquets.

Yes I am a sometime flower seller, after all, finding those fading footprints decades after my father’s first economic ventures in cut flowers and poultry, specifically guinea fowl. He was young and untethered. Peanut farming in equatorial east Africa was calling but destiny had another path for him. The ghost of a stillborn east African origin story haunts sometimes.

Elsewhere a ubiquity of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) have splendid splashy fun in the sprinkler as I water the garlic planting around the front birdbath. The little birds love watering days.

I am resolved to plant milkweed to support the right (the only true) kind of monarchy in the pollinator palace which has been given into my care.

** To understand my seed choices for this year’s summer pollinator attractor garden, it is a fanciful and playful melding of my belief in the magic and power of words and the pseudoscience of the doctrine of signatures which holds that a plant, fruit or animal has a physical trait which indicates the ailment it would treat, what its medicine is. It is allied to the notion in homeopathy and vaccine theory (which is not pseudoscience ) that like cures like. A little of what ails you will make you well.