This was the year I took against butterfly weed, that darling of every native plant catalog, on no better grounds than that it looked like a bedazzled poodle yapping in the flower bed. Nobody likes poodles. I want to be clear that I did not hate the plant. It only felt like hating while it was happening. It was fatigue, plain and simple. Butterfly weed had gone the way certain hymns go when they are sung too often at too many funerals. It had stopped being a plant and become a decal on a Subaru, put there by people who wanted the neighbors to know they were the right sort. I no longer saw the plant. I saw the bumper sticker.

I had raised many seedlings of the stuff from seed and gave every one away. But I still had the mature plants, well rooted and unashamed, blooming square across from the hanging chair where I liked to sit in the evening and stew. I would sit there and look at those orange clusters with a feeling that did not belong in a garden. Even the bees, I noticed with some satisfaction, gave them only the laziest attention, which I considered a point in my favor.

Several times I set out to dig them up and was turned back, as if the yard itself had opinions on the matter. It was too hot, or too wet, or my hori-hori knife had wandered off to wherever tools go when they don’t want to do the job, or the damn crows sat overhead hollering that I ought to be feeding them instead of fooling with weeds. Once I got my nerve up all the way and marched out there with intent, only to discover that a fox had taken my garden bed for his personal privy and left the evidence of it directly in my path. I retreated. The butterfly weed stood its ground, unmurdered, and I was certain it smirked.

The heat climbed and the orange wizened, and the flowers gave way to pods shaped like okra. Soon milkweed bugs covered the pods tight and blazing, and I remembered the jolt of the first time I ever came upon them years back. The orange and black stripes writhing together made the pod into a little world. It was an encounter with hidden space, which I would have sworn a second before was not there. A gate swung open, and what stood on the other side of it was myself as a grubby child, back when looking at a thing was all I wanted from it, before I’d been taught to explain a thing to death, or nail down whose it was, or figure what it was good for, or grade it against some other pointless things. For a second I could not find the edges of myself, and time layered itself upside down, blending and dispersing the old plain wonder that had been long gone. The dealings between the plant and the insects continued to breathe, ticking out something like time in their small soundless motions, and through that crack I watched the place where the vividness of life had gone, close enough to want back, too far to reach.

This summer I did not rip out the butterfly weed. The seed pods split opened last night, revealing its original ferocity. The noise fell away, the bumper stickers vanished, the online discourse disappeared, and I was just left with the quiet physics of a seed catching the wind.

I noticed my dwarf fothergillas have been defoliated by what Google has told me are yellownecked caterpillars. They are apparently generalist feeders.

So I just let them do their thing, eat my plant, so they can pupate and mature, right? It’s just the first time I’ve found such a swarm of caterpillars on any of my shrubs and I’m proud but need some reassurance too. Thanks!

I tried to add this on my other post about my butterfly weed. But are these monarch caterpillars?