Rewilding My Lot

There are three aquatic plants in the pond that are now blooming or budding for the first time.

I thought that I had purchased two American White Waterlily (Nymphaea odorata) plants in November 2024, which would have blooms that are white or pink. However, the waterlily that is blooming now has a yellow flower, so I think that it must actually be Banana Waterlily aka Yellow Waterlily (Nymphaea mexicana). The flower only opens in the afternoons.

I will need to wait for blooms to identify the other waterlily.

Until I went shopping for pond plants I had no idea that there was an Aquatic Milkweed (Asclepias perennis), so I bought a couple. (This is not the same as Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), of which I had heard.) I don’t know if there will ever be Monarch caterpillars on these plants but if there are, I’ll be curious to know what they do when it’s time to pupate because normally the caterpillars would crawl off their host plant to a different location for that stage.

The Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) now has one bud.