This was one of those nice surprises that you invite by making a garden. This monarch butterfly was far too interested in drinking nectar from a sunflower this morning to be bothered by me getting in close with my phone. The combination of sunflower and monarch butterfly was a highlight of the morning.
The sunflower is a self-sown straggler in my cucumber bed, doing just fine in the cooler, shorter Autumn days. I’m not one to weed out plants just to have uniform beds, and I think this justifies that approach. A couple of beds away is a plot of Gai Lan (chinese broccoli) which I let go to flower rather than pulling out to make way for the next crop, and it is providing a feast for the bees, native and honey, as well as making a pretty entrance to the garden with its mass of yellow.
The monarch I was just lucky with. Some people round here sow or allow milkweed, which feeds the caterpillars, but I haven’t seen any milkweed on this property, so it must just have stopped for a drink.