NIGHT FLYERS
You may have been too distracted by heat waves, summer chores or garden watering to notice, but National Moth Week is upon us. The celebration, a New Jersey-based initiative, takes place this year from July twentieth through twenty-eighth and aims to raise awareness of moths and the role they play in biodiversity.
Most of us, if we think of moths at all, brand them as the voracious pests whose larvae eat our winter clothing, defoliate our forests and generally make nuisances of themselves. Butterflies, their day-flying relatives, are the sex symbols of the insect world, getting lots of good press and almost universal adoration. Their bodies are slim and elegant and their wings are often colorful. Moths wear the equivalent of hair shirts over their thick bodies and languish in dark disrepute, even though some, like the large hawkmoths, actually fly by day.
But we gardeners do not follow the common horde. It’s time for us to publicize the truth about moths and laud their role in one of the most critical environmental functions—pollination.
If you leave the comfort of air conditioning and go outside on a summer evening, you might see large, handsome hummingbird moths swooping towards sweetly scented flowering tobacco or Nicotiana sylvestris, a plant everyone should have. Standing three to five feet tall, it bears white flowers with five petals apiece, joined at the bases to form very long flower tubes. The nicotiana’s intense, sweet fragrance attracts the moths and the flower tubes are perfectly adapted for the moths’ probosces or hollow tongues. The moths are in business to get the nectar at the flowers’ bases, but in the process, they also carry pollen from flower to flower.
Moonflowers or Ipomoea alba are night blooming relatives of common morning glory. They clamber up supports with no help from anyone, scent the night air and attract night flying moths. If you interplant them with morning glories you will have arches, columns or trellises covered in trumpet flowers both day and night. The moths will come, lured by the sweet scent.
Back in the 1930’s James Agee wrote a poem called “Sure on This Shining Night” that includes the wonderful line, “High summer holds the earth.” Now, with high summer holding us all, the white-flowered Madonna lilies (Lilium candidum) are blooming in some places, exuding fragrance. They are beloved of moths as well. Many bulb catalogs sell either the species or hybrids, which come in various colors. If you want moths, though, stick with the species, as the white flowers help attract them.
Many of us grow mandevilla vines for summer color, but they may also lure moth pollinators. I suspect that moths are most attracted to white deplademia– Mandevilla boliviensis—which looks very similar to the more common Mandevilla x amabile that is readily available to home gardeners. Still, if you are in the garden at night and have any kind of mandevilla vine, stand quietly for awhile. You never know when a big, beautiful moth might swoop in.
You can, if you are so disposed, attract moths by growing the beautiful but deadly angel’s trumpet or Datura inoxia. The large white trumpets can grow up to seven inches long and four inches wide. The flowers are ephemeral, unfurling in the evening and lasting only until morning, but while they are in bloom, they scent the air with an overwhelmingly sweet perfume. Angel’s trumpet is well worth growing, for the scent and the moth-attracting qualities, but people with children should probably avoid them, as all the plant parts contain highly toxic alkaloids.
Fortunately, just about anyone can grow annual petunias, which are also moth magnets. I am not sure if Million Bells and the other calibrachoa type petunia relatives are as attractive as the older grandiflora type petunias. I suspect that plant breeding surges forward much quicker than moth adaptation. To be on the safe side, install lots of white-flowered petunias among your annuals.
Moths are also drawn to heliotrope, night-blooming jasmine, cleome, four o’clocks and yucca. If you have the room and the inclination, you might want to emulate Vita Sackville West and create a “white garden” or garden area with a full compliment of night blooming species. It’s a great avenue for inspiration as well as a flight path for moths. Work schedules and hot days make it hard to appreciate our gardens in high summer. A white garden, full of night bloomers might make it easier to leave the air conditioning behind for awhile and reconnect with the outdoors in the relative cool and quiet of the evening.