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Updated: May 10, 2025
She edged down to the trickling stream below. She was miserably conscious of a pastoral scene all gone to mildew cows beneath willows by the creek, milkweeds dripping, dried mullein weed stalks no longer dry. The bank of the stream was so slippery that she shot down two feet, and nearly went sprawling.
You did not overestimate the originality of the Cortrights' seaside garden, and even after your intimate description, it contained several surprises in the shape of masses of the milkweeds that flourish in sandy soil, especially the dull pink, and the orange, about which the brick-red monarch butterflies were hovering in great flocks.
Here are two bees, a fly, and a beetle, each hanging dead by its legs from a flower, an extreme sacrificial penalty, which is singularly frequent, but which was certainly not exacted nor contemplated in the design of the flower. A careful search among almost any good-sized cluster of milkweeds will show us many such prisoners.
The botanist wrote immediately to his anxious correspondent, informing him, and suggesting as a remedy the discovery and destruction of the mischievous plants, which must be thriving somewhere in his neighborhood. A subsequent letter conveyed the thanks of the bee-keeper, stating that the milkweeds a whole field of them had been found and destroyed, and the trouble had immediately ceased.
Graceful, stingless Sphexes and Ichneumon-flies emulate their bustle, without their weapons. Delicate lady-birds come and go to the milkweeds, spotted almost as regularly as if Nature had decided to number the species, like policemen or hack-drivers, from one to twenty. Elegant little Lepturae fly with them, so gay and airy, they hardly seem like beetles.
I have repeatedly found honey-bees dead beneath the plants, and my cabinet shows a specimen of a large bumblebee which had succumbed to its pollen burden, its feet, and even the hairs upon its body, being fringed deep with the tiny clubs one of the many specimens which I have discovered as the "grist in the mill" of that wise spider which usually spreads his catch-all beneath the milkweeds.
Growing near it on this rise of the road are lavender-flowered bergamot, blue and gold spiderwort, milkweeds in a purple glory, black-eyed Susans basking in the sun, cone-flowers with brown disks and purple petals, like gypsy maidens with gaudy summer shawls.
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