{"id":859,"date":"2013-07-22T04:03:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T12:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=859"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:05","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:05","slug":"night-flyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/night-flyers\/","title":{"rendered":"Night Flyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

NIGHT FLYERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>You may have been too distracted by heat waves, summer chores or garden watering to notice, but National Moth Week is upon us.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But we gardeners do not follow the common horde.\u00a0 It\u2019s time for us to publicize the truth about moths and laud their role in one of the most critical environmental functions\u2014pollination.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s intense, sweet fragrance attracts the moths and the flower tubes are perfectly adapted for the moths\u2019 probosces or hollow tongues.\u00a0 The moths are in business to get the nectar at the flowers\u2019 bases, but in the process, they also carry pollen from flower to flower.<\/p>\n

Moonflowers or Ipomoea alba are night blooming relatives of common morning glory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The moths will come, lured by the sweet scent.<\/p>\n

Back in the 1930\u2019s James Agee wrote a poem called \u201cSure on This Shining Night\u201d that includes the wonderful line, \u201cHigh summer holds the earth.\u201d\u00a0 Now, with high summer holding us all, the white-flowered Madonna lilies (Lilium candidum) are blooming in some places, exuding fragrance.\u00a0 They are beloved of moths as well.\u00a0 Many bulb catalogs sell either the species or hybrids, which come in various colors.\u00a0 If you want moths, though, stick with the species, as the white flowers help attract them.<\/p>\n

Many of us grow mandevilla vines for summer color, but they may also lure moth pollinators.\u00a0 I suspect that moths are most attracted to white deplademia– Mandevilla boliviensis\u2014which looks very similar to the more common Mandevilla x amabile that is readily available to home gardeners. \u00a0Still, if you are in the garden at night and have any kind of mandevilla vine, stand quietly for awhile.\u00a0 You never know when a big, beautiful moth might swoop in.<\/p>\n

You can, if you are so disposed, attract moths by growing the beautiful but deadly angel\u2019s trumpet or Datura inoxia.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Angel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I suspect that plant breeding surges forward much quicker than moth adaptation.\u00a0 To be on the safe side, install lots of white-flowered petunias among your annuals.<\/p>\n

Moths are also drawn to heliotrope, night-blooming jasmine, cleome, four o\u2019clocks and yucca.\u00a0 If you have the room and the inclination, you might want to emulate Vita Sackville West and create a \u201cwhite garden\u201d or garden area with a full compliment of night blooming species.\u00a0 It\u2019s a great avenue for inspiration as well as a flight path for moths.\u00a0 Work schedules and hot days make it hard to appreciate our gardens in high summer.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NIGHT FLYERS \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You may have been too distracted by heat waves, summer chores or garden watering to notice, but National Moth Week is upon us.\u00a0 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. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[604,607,608,603,606,605,344,227],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-summer","tag-datura","tag-hawkmoths","tag-hummingbird-moths","tag-moths","tag-nicotiana","tag-petunias","tag-pollinator-friendly-plants","tag-pollinators"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}