It's not the last day or even the last week, but it is fairly coming to the end of April after the first blush of pinkening magnolias and the chromium yellow of the forsythia, just after the crocuses, then the pink blossoming, and yaller daffodils, purple hyacinths and wind flowers. My second son's magnolia, his because he used to climb it and sit in the crook of the first branching boughs, catches my eye every time I look out the kitchen window as if a new coat of snow has blanketed the trees, and by the time I get used to looking past to the green buds, I can see the pink and white of various trees in neighborhood yards: chokecherry, apple, plum, and the Japanese pears out in front of our house.
The pawpaw is even bedecked with the dark purple of its zebra butterfly attractants. When we first read about this home-grown 'exotic local' in the local University School of Agriculture Extension office, we found mention of its very few pests, exclusively the zebra butterfly. This seemed an ideal situation in our yard as a prior decision to use lawn pesticides had made the fruit inedible to us with our super-sensitivities--not inedible to the ravens that decimated the crop of apple-pears the first year. Once the pawpaws became firmly ensconced in their present location currently, even after 4-5 years their trunks are still surrounded by chicken wire because the rabbits gnawed them badly the beginning of their first winter which unfortunately does nothing about the moles which seem to somehow have caused the death of rhododendrons--no flowers, brown buds, and limp stems and branches--and, furrows which could only be made by an active mole family, only to be plagued by another unmentioned pest. The pawpaws survived as small grafted plants shipped to us in coffee-can sized plastic containers as they find it difficult to transplant. Five trees survived the first year, only to attacked by relentless Japanese beetles. This thought of the Japanese beetle campaign my husband will have to wage all summer is daunting. He has to be out with the beetle smasher as soon as the sun rises, even climbing on a ladder to reach the tallest branches, in order to result in those delicious fragments of a mid-eastern summer close to the heartland. I mean there's pawpaws in Happy Hollow Park growing as wild as one would ever please. Looking forward to better times when we're all getting better!
