Today's garden critters

I don't often try to photograph insects. For flowers and garden shots, I tend to use a tripod, and so I'm rather tied to shooting with it - kind of like my security blanket.

But to get the butterflies, you need to shoot handheld. The trouble is that my longest zoom lens doesn't have image stabilization so camera shake is a problem. I suppose if I practiced more shooting handheld, I'd get better at it.

Yesterday, spurred on by Eve, who comments here faithfully, I gave it a shot and managed to capture these characters.

American painted lady

Monarch butterfly
Hummingbird moth - quite a challenge,
never in one place for more than a couple of seconds
In the evening, using my tripod again, I found this praying mantis,
(it's probably a katydid, see comments)
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Kudos from Nature's Garden magazine

Out of curiosity I bought the premier issue of a new magazine from Better Homes and Gardens called Nature's Garden.

As I leafed through it last night, I came to "The Green Pages," a section at the end they call a round-up of "eco-friendly resources for the green-of-heart" and there under web resources was this:

www.countrygardener.blogspot.com
This delightful, well-written blog from Yvonne Cunnington, a gardener in southern Ontario's USDA Zone 5, conveys her desire to work with nature, not against it, because "Nature tends to win anyway," she writes. Gorgeous photographs of her garden accompany each entry.

I had no idea: the mention certainly made my day!

The theme of the first issue is creating a backyard haven for birds and butterflies. There's a story about different butterflies and their life cycles, which I found interesting as we get a lot of butterflies here, but aside from monarchs, I didn't know all that much about them.

There are instructions for building a bluebird house, which I'd like to try, as well as a story on how to create a backyard pond that's wildlife friendly. All in all, the magazine looks like a welcome addition to BHG's stable of gardening books.