Replanting time

The Flight Encounter, inner sanctum of the BioWorks Butterfly Garden @MOSI was replanted about a week ago.

Penta
Firebush
Lantana
Phlox
Gaura
Milkweed
Cherry tree
Camphor tree
Tangerine tree
Sweet bay tree
Plantain
Anise hyssop
Salvia
Pipevine
Passionvine
...and more.

Hurray for summer!

Grow already!

I found a few dozen Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) eggs about a week and a half ago and collected them. The caterpillars are possibly the slowest growing larvae I have ever witnessed.

Come on guys! Some of them hatched on Friday of last week and this is one of the larger ones in the take shown next to a standard pencil eraser for size comparison.

Note all the tiny holes in the leaves... and itty bitty dots of frass (poop) decorating the leaf.

Frank Lloyd Wright Ginkgo and a garden for dinosaurs

Richard T. Bowers Historic Tree Grove at MOSI, Tampa
The Historic Tree Grove at MOSI offers a unique timeline of America's history as it was viewed by silent witnesses, trees. Our 17 trees planted in the grove in 1996 are all seedlings of trees that witnessed amazing historic events or were associated with famous historical people. Imagine the sycamore that grew from seeds that went to the moon, a pine that watched a battle of the American Civil War, the sweet gum that saw the flight of the first airplane. What wonders those trees witnessed and those same trees still live long after the events of history have passed. We can still lay our hands on their bark, sit beneath their boughs and take a few minutes out to learn and converse about great deeds and fantastic people which shaped our world.

Frank Lloyd Wright: an architect who embraced nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a master builder, a rebel and a worshipper of nature. Wright introduced the word 'organic' into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan, "form follows function" became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to "form and function are one," using nature as the best example of this integration.

One of Wright's best known examples of architecture is the house known as Falling Water. 50 Miles outside of Pittsburgh, the house sits astride Bear Creek and a waterfall pours out beneath its concrete cantilevered porches. This home was designed and built for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. and in part helped to inspire Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Gingko stood in front of his Forest Avenue home in Oak Park, Illinois , until it succumbed to a storm in 1992. Cuttings are taken from second-generation offspring of the original tree.

The Ginkgo Biloba: A tree from another age.

The Ginkgo Biloba tree is truly a living fossil. Unique in nature, this species survives as the sole remaining member of a larger family of trees now known only in the fossil record. Other species related to the Ginkgo are not known to have survived past the Pliocene epoch which extended from 5.332 million to 1.806 million years before present.


The leaves of this tree have a lovely fan shape and dichotomous venation which means that two veins enter at the base of the leaf and repeatedly fork into progressively smaller pairs. It is also known as the Maidenhair tree for its resemblance to the Maidenhair fern. Ginkgo are deciduous and lose their leaves in the winter and they can flourish in temperate places.

A Jurassic Garden


What exactly is a Jurassic garden, you may ask? Well, our interpretation was to create a garden of plants that are from those epochs where the Ginkgo and other ancient plants flourished on the earth and many of our well known plants had not yet even developed. Perhaps, it is a garden that herbivorous dinosaurs would have looked upon and thought: Mmmmmm. Yum.

Planted on Arbor Day through a grant from Fiskars Project Orange Thumb, so far our Jurassic Garden contains:

• Ginkgo Biloba
• Horsetail reed (Equisetum hyemale) pictured on the right.
• Coontie (Zamia floridana)
• Cardboard Palm ((Zamia furfuracea)

Once these plants establish a bit more I hope to add some more cycads, which are another type of fossil plant and other primitive plants like Peacock Fern (Selaginella willdenovii) which is super cool but requires shade to grow.

Queens

Queen butterfly (Danaus gilippus) larvae are just so lovely but are often mistaken for Monarch butterfly larvae.

The Queen butterfly is native to both North and South America and is a member of the Nymphalidae or brush-foot family. The adult butterfly only appears to have 4 legs as the last 2 insect legs are very small and are located near the butterfly's head.

As a member of the Danaid species, the Queen, much like the monarch, hosts on Milkweed (Asclepias spp.)plants. So basically, this is the other caterpillar you might find eating your milkweed. The third set of tubercles (fleshy antenna looking projections) helps to distinguish it from the monarch caterpillar.

As adults, these delightful butterflies are clever mimics utilizing Mullarian mimicry to reinforce the distasteful qualities of the Monarch and Viceroy butterfly, gaining all three species more protection from predators.

To make a moon garden:

First, you start with a moon tree.

Richard T. Bowers Historic Tree Grove at MOSI, Tampa
The Historic Tree Grove at MOSI offers a unique timeline of America's history as it was viewed by silent witnesses, trees. Our 17 trees planted in the grove in 1996 are all seedlings of trees that witnessed amazing historic events or were associated with famous historical people. Imagine the sycamore that grew from seeds that went to the moon, a pine that watched a battle of the American Civil War, the sweet gum that saw the flight of the first airplane. What wonders those trees witnessed and those same trees still live long after the events of history have passed. We can still lay our hands on their bark, sit beneath their boughs and take a few minutes out to learn and converse about great deeds and fantastic people which shaped our world.

One of my favorites tree in the grove is the Moon Sycamore and here is the story of a remarkable tree, a special astronaut and a companion planting of beautiful moonlight loving plants.

Stuart Roosa and the Moon Trees
From January 31 to February 9th of 1971, Stuart A. Roosa was the pilot of the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon. While Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell descended to the Lunar surface, Roosa remained in a solo orbit around the moon for 33 hours. Each of the astronauts on the mission was allowed a personal preference pack. Alan Shepard took golf balls which he smacked about the lunar surface with a geology tool as a driver. Stuart Roosa, the former smoke jumper, took a package of tree seeds: namely Redwood, loblolly pine, sycamore, Douglas fir and sweetgum.

The tree seeds were picked by the US Forest Service genetics institutes and were selected by Stan Krugman, director of Forest Service genetics research in 1971. Stuart Roosa told NASA "I picked redwoods because they were well known, and the others because they would grow well in many parts of the United States". The seeds were germinated by the Forest Service with an excellent success rate and the moon trees were planted all around the country at girl scout camps, public libraries, universities and even at the White House.

Stuart Roosa remained an astronaut until his retirement from the Air Force as a Colonel in 1976. When he passed away in 1996, Roosa was buried in section 7A of the Arlington National Cemetery and a second generation Moon Sycamore was planted just up the hill from his grave in 2005.

Our Moon Sycamore, like the one planted at Arlington, is a second generation tree now known as a half-moon tree.

A garden to love the moonlight:

There are many ways in which a person can plant a moon garden. We designed a garden filled with plants with white, silver, and blue flowers and foliage that will best reflect moonlight and seem to almost glow at night. The moon garden was planted beneath the Moon Sycamore at MOSI on Earth Day, April 22nd 2009.

The plants that were chosen for this planting are:

• African Iris (Dietes vegeta) for its lovely white iris blooms.


• White trailing lantana (Lantana montevidensis) for its trailing arms laden with bunches of white blossoms.


• Plumbago (Plumbago auriculata) for its beautiful blue blooms.


• Dichondra "silver falls" (Dichondra) for its trailing silver foliage


• White Alyssum (Alyssum maritium) for its honey fragrant white flowers that look like clumps of snow when in bloom.


• White Angelonia (Angelonia angustifolia) for its white flowers that are reminiscent of tiny snapdragons.


• Calocephalus (Calocephalus brownii) for its stark bone white foliage that looks like coral structures.


• Dusty Miller (Senecio cineraria) for its dusty silver white leaves.


• White Petunia (petunia hybrida) for its showy white trumpet-shaped blooms

By day, this garden is shaded and receives only dappled sunlight, thus plants had to be chosen that would love the well drained soil, hot Florida conditions, and the mostly shaded light conditions. 12 volunteers and several MOSI staff members helped to plant this lovely garden on Earth Day thanks to our Project Orange Thumb Grant from Fiskars. We couldn't be happier!

Thanks again to Fiskars Project Orange Thumb for making our nine thematic gardens happen so we could provide a more garden-centric interpretation of these very amazing trees in the Historic Tree Grove at MOSI!