The Aster chilensis is blooming, and it’s the biggest insect party of the year. The plants are covered with skippers, with frequent visits by mason bees and other creatures.
Despite its Latin name implying South American origins, it’s a California native – but from the Southern part. It’s common name, California aster, makes its origins clear. This is our first year with these plants, so we’ll see if they can handle our Northern California winters. They’re about four feet tall, until they flop over onto adjacent vegetation, in this case Deschampsia caespitosa, a native California grass.
The plants, when out of bloom, are gangly, spindly things that haven’t got much presence. They’ve almost been yanked out as weeds until we realized what they were, since they somewhat resemble a weed when they’re out of bloom.
The flowers aren’t exactly a riot of color, either. Kind of a nondescript pale blue, so pale as to look more whitish than anything else. The reason I noticed that they were in flower was the hovering, zooming skipper butterflies over the plants. Sometimes, just about every flower on the plant harbored a skipper, and this plant has a lot of flowers. So, the color comes from the butterflies, bees and flies that visit the plant more than the flowers themselves. Overall, a great deal and much more animated than simple flowers.
Seems like this is a pretty good example of regenerative design. Three small aster plants have five or six species of butterflies (I didn’t get decent photos of the other two – another species of skipper and a buckeye), two or three species of bees, drone flies and whatever might show up later. That’s just the herbivores. There are also jumping spiders, preying on the skippers, and probably mantises as well.
Imagine that this had been a patch of lawn, instead. The herbivore would be a lawn mower, probably with a two stroke engine capable of spewing out more smog than the average small car. There would be no butterflies, bees, spiders or grasshoppers. Just controlled, mowed, sterile and perhaps toxic lawn. But the fun thing isn’t imagining this as lawn – it’s imagining lawn transformed into regenerative green spaces. Think of all the life that would appear, and all the noise and pollution that wouldn’t.