On Monday, Labor Day, I decided that I was using Leu Gardens as a crutch. Who couldn't take great close ups in a carefully tended botanical garden at the height of the Florida growing season? Well, apparantly I couldn't. Still, I decided I needed to practice my new "art" some place more challenging, some place where potentially beautiful shots weren't so easy to find. So I headed to the Greenwood Urban Wetland.
The wetland always reminds me of a hand juicer. A mountain of land sits in the middle of a deep trough that catches storm runoff. Sidewalks along the edge and bridges to the middle make it a great place to walk, picnic, or practice tai chi. Instead of treating the runoff with chemicals, the city allows cypress trees and aquatic plants to break down poisons washed off the busy roads nearby. A pump carries the water to the highest point in the park so that it can flow down over man-made waterfalls, oxygenating the liquid and filling the air with soothing splashes. The grass is maintained five-feet from the water's edge; wildflowers pepper the area that mowers can't molest. Unlike the carefully tended and labeled varieties at Leu Gardens, these flowers are splotchy, raggedy, insect-eaten things, lovely in their own way.
Sunday was windy, so many of the photos I took were blurry. I prefer portrait mode which requires a still subject and camera steadiness; unfortunately, because I have "hand shake"—a condition the manual warns about—and my subjects kept swaying in the wind, there were challenges.
Even so, I had a delightful time. I had hoped to find dragonflies in the aquatic plants [In my head, I could see the great photos I would take of them], but except for one willing subject, the dragonflies just buzzed around the open fields, refusing to land or even hover in one place long enough for me to get a shot.
The wetland was, however, overrun with white peacock butterflies flitting among the wild flowers. These little guys were so intent on feeding that they held still long enough for me to focus. In the past, I would have only noticed that they were white, but in my attempts to capture them with the camera, I have realized the beautiful stained-glass quality to their wings. With pale eyes in ghostly faces, they look creepy and sinister, two adjectives I don't normally associate with butterflies. If you had to cast a butterfly as Dracula in a movie, you would definitely want a white peacock.
Bwha-ha-ha-ha ...
I've come to suck your nectar!
Peacockula strikes again!
The really interesting thing about this trip was that the urban wetland butterflies were just as ragged as the wildflowers. Some of them had so much of one wing missing that I couldn't understand how they still flew. At Leu Gardens, I always find nearly perfect specimens on well tended plants; at the wetland, however, the white peacocks lead a much harder life than their "uptown" cousins do.
Snobby uptown white peacock at Leu Gardens
