How I Saved Butterfly Bend

If this were a fairy tale, it would begin like this:

The monster galumphed its way along the stream, devouring everything in its path. I charged the beast waving my arms and yelling in my super-hero voice,

“Fie, begone, destroyer of beauty!”

The Monster panicked and clawed its way up the bank!

Heroic, right? Now, would you like the truth? I did wave and cry out at the monster mower, but I was on my knees, pleading. “Please, please, don’t kill my baby butterflies!”

“Let me see,” the kid yelled and hopped down from the cab.

Not as much macho, perhaps, but it worked. The machine operator, a young man in his early twenties, shut off the engine, lowered a window and shouted, “Huh?”

“Do you have to level everything,” I yelled, “the butterfly garden, too?”

Sarasota is on low ground. If we get a direct hit from a hurricane, the storm surge averages 17 feet above high tide. But our house is only twenty-six feet above sea level. That’s why drainage ditches were dug and are mucked out periodically.

“Cool,” he said when I walked him around both halves of the garden. “Put some markers around what you want to save. Everything looks different from the ditch.” And most of the garden is still there, all the way to the tree line.

WhenSusan and I moved to Sarasota, I set butterfly-attracting plants around our villa. Over time, they outgrew their space, and I transplanted them to a nearby drainage ditch. The bank was overgrown, and I stuck plants wherever I could find an open spot. I soon got hooked on turning it into a real garden and cleared a large area to have a beautiful meadow of wildflowers.

The rabbits made short work of all the tender green shoots.

I tried bigger plants with woody trunks. And milkweed, which monarchs and queens love, and rabbits don’t. I also built pathways to give the garden some shape and jokingly called it Butterfly Bend.

Water has been an issue. All young plants must be kept moist until their roots take hold. The problem: For half the year, Florida might as well be a desert, with no rain, which is why it’s such a great tourist destination. So, where you don’t have a ready water supply, it’s best to do your planting in the rainy season, which is midsummer through fall.

Unfortunately, this year we had one big rainstorm, Hurricane Ian. I had to improvise an irrigation system: gallon jugs. If the garden gets bigger and the weather pattern doesn’t return to normal, I’ll have to get more jugs.

There is another problem. How long will I be able to scamper up and down the twenty-five degree incline of the creek bank?

But have no fear. There may be a magic potion to keep my legs pumping.

After I quit the Copacabana, I got a waiter’s job at the Sayat Nova,  an Armenian restaurant in Greenwich Village named after their most famous poet. The owner’s great-grandfather came in for dinner at least once a week. He was 105 years old, a retired steel worker who worked at Rockefeller Center in the early 1930s. He said he was supposed to be in this famous picture taken at 30 Rock, 800 feet in the air, with the rest of the Armenian crew, but he’d called in sick that day. If the owner’s mother heard him tell this tale, she’d come busting out of the kitchen shouting Unlun! Unlun! (Lies! Lies! in Armenian) and shake whatever she had in her hand at him, usually a big knife or a serving spoon. It turned out Mama was right. This picture is of a bunch of Irishmen. 

Still, the old guy was able to climb stairs and get around without a cane. He said the secret to a long life was yogurt. “When I was young—last year—I could run up a hill like a billy goat!” And he’d laugh until he had a coughing fit. So, every morning I have a dollop of Oikes yogurt on my high fiber cereal. Along with two Metamucil gummies.

Next time the Monster comes to call, I want to be better prepared. Perhaps posts with hemp rope threaded through screw-eyes on top would be an inexpensive fence around the whole place. Yeah, with signs saying, “Baby Butterflies Onboard!”

Anyway, it was a wonderful feeling to see the back of the monster mower. The birds—a great white heron, four wood storks, and two rosette spoonbills—were happy, too.

Patrick/Grandpa/Whatever