Tag: Porter Weed

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Guava Skipper

My second time to see this colorful butterfly was almost two weeks ago (yeah, I’m writing posts way ahead again, but will do it live daily on my trip in July). It was after breakfast, walking in my garden, when I found him. The Guava Skipper, Phocides polybius (Wikipedia link) is found from South Texas through Mexico and all of Central America down to Argentina. My only other time to see one was at Xandari Resort Alajuela for my birthday in 2019. Those photos plus these here can be seen in my Guava Skipper Gallery.

The one at Xandari was bluer than this one which is darker or close to black. And it is interesting that most of my butterfly photos at home show them on a Porterweed flower even though I have many other flowers. An obvious preference for butterflies and hummingbirds! 🙂 And by the way, they are called “Guava” because they lay their eggs on a Guava Plant, which is somewhere between a shrub and a small tropical tree. 🙂

Guava Skipper, Atenas, Costa Rica

Now here’s six shots in a slideshow for a change . . .

Continue reading “Guava Skipper”
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My New Toy: Macro Lens

Not the expensive one, just a simple Canon 100mm zoom, 1:28, Image Stabilizer (for hand-held) and auto focus. Here’s a few flowers with it and MY VERY FIRST HIBISCUS in my garden! I only recently got the plant which is slow-growing, but here’s the first bloom!

 

Hibiscus
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

 

Once de Abril  (haven’t found an English name yet)
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

 

Heliconia
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

 

Plumbago
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

 

Red Ginger
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

 

Porter Weed
My Garden, Roca Verde, Atenas, Costa Rica

I think I did okay on close-ups of flowers before with a telephoto lens from a distance, but this is suppose to be better! It has the capability of a 1:1 ratio if I get close enough. Insects will be more difficult because they scare off, so I’ll probably continue with my 300 mm for them. Though, note the little tiny ant on the Porter Weed above.  🙂 And it is so nice having flowers blooming year around!

My Flora & Forests photo gallery

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Zooming In On Blossoms

Plumbago

I think most of my photos have been of the total garden or yard and not each blossom. So here are some close-ups of a sort, zoomed in on with my Canon Rebel and 75-300 zoom lens. Enjoy!

Flame Vine  or Triquitraque
My large Heliconia
There are so many varieties that
I hesitate to identify the species

This large Heliconia has seeds in it that birds eat or they grow to new plants

There are 6 varieties of this small
yellow Heliconia growing in wild
and cultivated. I have two . . .
This is my other small yellow Heliconia
Then this small red Heliconia that is finally blooming again. None open yet.

The almost constantly blooming Red Ginger
here with a fully open bloom and . . .

A Red Ginger bud just opening and growing sideways
I cut all of mine back and so they are just now starting to fill with blooms again.
One of the many colors of Lantanas I have as a border.
They are coming back strong after I cut them to the ground 2 months ago.

Porter Weed for Hummingbirds
I have pink and purple.

A special Costa Rican variety of Petunia that blooms heavy each morning
and then all blooms drop off in the afternoon to none, nada! Every day!
It is kind of like the Morning Glories my landlord has growing on his fence.
They too bloom every morning only. 

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.    ~William Wordsworth

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Changing Garden

 I did what I thought was pretty radical pruning of the overgrown giant Porter Weeds and some of the Overgrown Red Ginger. But my “TuttiFruti,” which had been my most colorful plant, was apparently dying. So the gardeners cut it to the ground which I would have had trouble doing, though we had been pruning it some. They also sprayed for a leaf-eating insect. If it does not come back healthy, we will pull it and plant something different on my border. But we will probably have nothing blooming along the border when Reagan visits in just 4 weeks. Sorry Reagan! Though plants fool you here and some grow really fast!

The colorful border (inset photo) was dying, maybe insects for which he sprayed, but it is cut to ground now,
hoping for a beautiful renewal or revival. If not, I’ll get a different border. But waiting is hard!  🙂

Even without the border and the heavy pruning, the garden looks okay.
The Red Ginger and Purple Petunias will always bloom, even when cut.
And also the Plumbago, though it blooms on new growth, so cutting it back diminishes blooms briefly.
And though not seen above, I am getting new blooms on my Heliconias as seen in below photos. 

The tall plant in the back of garden photo above is where
this large Heliconia sports 4 blooms right now!
This is the biggest of the four.
This smaller Heliconia by my kitchen window also has several blooms.
The other plants like it have red and orange blooms but are dormant now.
I cut back the two big Porterweeds the hummingbirds love, BUT
I still have one smaller plant blooming and attracting hummers!
Though the hummingbirds are mainly in the Yellow Bell Trees now.
And very few butterflies are around this time of year.
May-July was the most butterflies last year.
The TriqueTraque or Orange Trumpet Vine has not done well, but now that I started feeding it fertilizer I’m seeing it grow a little and getting a few flowers, so there is still hope that it will cover that big massive concrete wall in time! That’s my goal!




The Maraca blooms at the
base of a very tall plant.

Also once my Planta Maraca or Shampoo Ginger gets established, I expect to regularly have more blooms, which is more exotic to me than the heliconias! And every time we trim the Blumbago it shoots out new growth with lots of blooms, so everything will have its ups and downs but as I wanted, something is blooming year-aroung, all the time! And it is fun to watch it change, though I have learned (what I really already knew), that maintaining a garden this big and a yard with lots of flowers is a lot of work, even with a hired gardener a couple of times a month! And for any reader living here, my most constant and prolific bloomers have been the Red Ginger and Purple Petunias. And I still don’t have all the Spanish names for these flowers and that sometimes that changes depending on who I talk to or which website I check!  🙂

PURA VIDA!
EDITORIAL CORRECTION: Yesterdays post was of an unusual bug in my bathroom, I tried to call it a stick or matchstick insect, but Kevin & Charles both correctly noticed that it is/was a spider: 

It’s a spider – 8 legs
Insects have 6 legs                        THANKS KEVIN!

AND LATER: A note from Charles Parker with the same 8-leg, 6-leg story! Did I know that? 🙂