I’ve been watching a stand of dogfennel, Eupatorium capillifolium; yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis; white beggarticks, Bidens alba; and giant ironweed, Vernonia gigantea. The giant ironweed is 12 feet tall and everything else is more than 6 feet.
One of the things that makes an English garden beautiful is the varying heights of the flowers. To grasp the picture, your eyes have to move — in and out, up and down.
This stand of flowering plants along the Yellow River is stunning — far more beautiful than any lawn. You could spend a long time looking at the colors: the magenta of the ironweed, the school-bus yellow of the crownbeard, the stark white of the beggarticks and all those shades of green. You could compare the feathery texture of the dogfennel with the girders of the ironweed.
On this visit in mid-September, the stand was a wasp-loud glade.
There were honeybees and bumblebees, but most of the fliers were blue-winged wasps, Scolia dubia. The wings are so black they’re blue. The thorax and top of the abdomen are black. The bottom of the abdomen is brown with two yellow spots.
Blue-winged wasps prey on June bugs and Japanese beetles. You can see the wasps flying low over lawns. The female wasp, sensing a grub, will tunnel into the soil, paralyze the grub with a sting and then lay an egg on the helpless host. The wasp larva eats the grub as it grows.
These wasps are also pollinators, going for both pollen (protein) and nectar (carbs). An extension agent in neighboring Fulton County, quoting research from Penn State, says the wasps especially love goldenrod. (That observation is intriguing, but I’m irrationally dubious. So I’ve become an inspector of goldenrods.)
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