Garden Rehab

This lovely garden huntress is the Orchard Orb Weaver or Orchard Spider ( Leucauge  venusta ).  Over the summer she spun her web from our deck to the nearby by tree. By the look of her, she was very well fed.   Spiders consume an astonishing number of insects every year. According to  S piders of Toronto: A Guide to their Remarkable World :* Spiders are estimated to eat about 200 kg of insects per hectare per year. In a city the size of Toronto, this amounts to an astonishing 12 million kg of insects per year – equivalent to the body weight of over 150,000 average-sized people every year! Research shows that just two of the spider species living at Highland Creek in Scarborough eat 2 of every 100 insects that develop in the creek. This includes large numbers of mosquitoes. Multiply this estimate by the 40 or so other spider species likely to live around the creek, and suddenly the impact of spiders is clear. Spiders have a similar effect in garden...

Wood-poppy  ( Stylophorum diphyllum ) Butterfly Milkweed ( Asclepias tuberosa ) Spotted Joe-Pye Weed ( Eupatorium maculatum ) Black-eyed Susan ( Rudbeckia hirta ) Virginia Spiderwort ( Tradescantia virginiana ) Cardinal Flower ( Lobelia cardinalis )

Beardtongue ( Penstemon digitalis ) is one of the best native flower species surprises this year. It produced a tall stalk of lovely white flowers. It would look better planted in a mass, and that will definitely be in my plans for next year.  Foxglove Beardtongue ( Penstemon digitalis) When we were in NYC we noted that the city is using Beardtongue in their plantings and it looked fantastic planted in big clumps with other native plant species. Beardtongue - New York City (can you see Lady Liberty?) Great inspiration both for our garden and to encourage the City of Toronto to use more native species in its flower beds. For more on Beardtongue, the Evergreen Native Plant Database  has great information about its ecological role and where it will grow.