Mountain mint

It is wild how quickly the mountain mint I planted has taken over my garden. Not that I mind! 

It's native to Georgia, the deer don't eat it, pollinators love it. 

Our relator was like, "And we'll have to get some landscapers out to remove all this weedy overgrowth..."

And I was like, "Sure...weeeeeds..."

I don't want to seem like I'm attached to this house or what happens to it. I'm not. I don't really care what the future owners do with the yard. But I am also a little morally opposed to overly manicured lawns when we could be planting things that could do a little more for the ecosystem. 

So I have this huge swath of mountain mint on one of our terraces and I think it's great. It's absolutely teeming with pollinators. The kids joke about how bad it would be to fall into the mountain mint and make all the bees angry...but they're mostly content to sit nearby and watch the bees and things buzz around. 

Now, you might be asking, "Why on earth would you want this in your yard? Isn't this The Summer of Stings? Don't you feel responsible for drawing all these bees to your yard and endangering your children?"

Not at all!

These bees are friendly bees. They aren't remotely interested in the children. 

Plus, the children have been stung at three different locations: Zoë at one practice pool, Phoebe at the other practice pool...only Alexander was stung in our yard and he was most likely stung by a yellow jacket and yellow jackets... Well, yellow jackets are just jerks. 

Plus, they're not really pollinators. Though they do drink nectar they don't really collect much pollen. They're also hunters, they're pest control. They're not hanging around the mountain mint with all the buzzing bees. They're visiting other flowers and plucking aphids and things off plants and taking those back to their nests for their babies to prey on. 

And in their free time they just...angrily stab people in the back of the head sometimes...

Did I forget to share this picture of the yellow jacket Andrew found limping around the entry way soon after Alexander got stung (we had all left for the swim meet by then, but Andrew assumes it was the one that stung Alex...twice)?

There aren't any of those frequenting the mountain mint. Instead we have these busy little guys:

I think they might be mason bees? I'm not sure about that blacker bee at the top of this picture:

There are also some carpenter bees in there, enjoying some lunch.

I was happy to see that another gladiolus bloomed recently. The deer have been munching these as quickly as the blossoms open. Another plant had blossomed the other day and I thought, "I should take a picture!" but I forgot...and then when I woke up in the morning it had been chomped right down to the ground. They must be delicious.

And we were lucky to see a butterfly enjoying the butterfly bush (we can't all be native plants)... 

We haven't seen too many butterflies out this year (yet), nor fireflies, unfortunately (I was hoping for a really good, magical Firefly Summer...but it's been kind of a dud). I'm not sure why.