Night-scented Garden & Wildlife Gardening Tips

Night-scented Garden  & Wildlife Gardening Tips



‘Here’s looking at you kid!’ Last word in last post was the Elephant Hawkmoth sleeping out the daylight on a post. It’s true beauty and prowess is at night - here it is head on! Those compound eyes are now on the lookout for night flower nectar.

It hovers in a whirr of wings, body motionless, projecting its long tongue into night-flowers which are adapted to attract such night pollinators. The flower’s allure is pale or white petals, intensifying by reflecting light by night and their scent comes on as evening falls.


Honeysuckle is one such flower, wild or cultivated, easy to grow 


. Its petals are swept back and the Elephant Hawkmoth’s feet never touch as its extra long tongue delves deep down that tube.


Like all night-flying moths, it sniffs out the nectar with sensitive antennae, feather-like and visible in photo 1 and in the Black Arches moth 

More Wildlife Gardening Tips: Besides Honeysuckles, other night-scented, long-tubed flowers for night-flyers through the summer are Nicotiana affinis


 reflecting pure white in the darkness. By day in sunny weather these flowers hang down showing greenish outer petal surfaces, but perk up again scented and bright at nightfall. Evening Primrose

 by night, again it closes in the brightest light of day), Sweet Rocket (Dame’s Violet

 a May flower that sometimes flowers a second time), White Campion – all good for borders.


Evening Primrose and White Campion are wild and thrive in mini-meadows or in odd corners by shrubs. Summer-flowering Jasmine, white


or pink, also beloved by bees, are easy climbers, but need a bit of space... they are perfect for a romantic pergola.

The moths that come to these flowers rejoice in evocative names like Rosy Footman


Riband Wave
 Small Phoenix

Mother of Pearl, Brussels Lace, Willow Beauty, Scorched Carpet, Uncertain, Common Rustic, Ruby Tiger, Kitten, and there’s a Dingy Footman and a Muslin one as well! Sadly, moth numbers are now declining drastically.

Gone are the days when one’s car headlights picked out a myriad of pale flutterings ahead, and having arrived at one’s destination the windscreen was covered in dead moths.

As with any creature, they are part of the big jigsaw of survival which affects other creatures as well – bats in particular feed on them in vast numbers. More about these in the next post. Birds and dragonflies also eat them given the opportunity.

Enjoy a night-scented garden and help the plight of our moths by growing night-flowering plants listed above... and their caterpillar food plants. (See previous post for some hawkmoth caterpillar food plants.)

Photo credits: 1 Bob Drower; Others Nicolette Scourse

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Which Bird Feeder? and Swans

Image
Wildlife Garden Tips Which Bird Feeder? and Swans As winter gets colder (and wetter) bird food ‘sharers’ and the ‘wide boys’ get hungrier Attempts to give the little birds a share leads to feeder defences becoming an escalating battle of wits, expense and ingenuity! As a special Christmas gift, I have just indulged myself with two new Red Barn feeders - one for seed and one for fat balls  I felt I deserved it, having for some years improvised with an old broken feeder for balls ... replaced wire access, hung it upside down in order to support balls, clad it in wire netting for extra protection, and battled with bits of bent wire to refill it! The solid base designs (5) will catch dropped food and the sturdily constructed cage simply lifts off for refilling and cleaning. It is quite a lot cheaper than the Squirrel buster design which works on a sliding collar principle – creatures over a certain weight close the access (one can adjust the critical weight). Above shows a Red Barn nut...
Read more

Roses and Wildlife Gardening

Image
  30 June 2025  Roses and Wildlife Gardening Summer, roses, warm scented days ‘... are such stuff as dreams are made on...’ or gardener’s dreams certainly! Carefully placed in grand designs, climbers and ramblers sprawling over cottage gardens, allotment flowers for cutting – roses are the all-time favourites.  Vibrant bright red,  (  ‘Parkdirektor Riggers’),  delicate apple-scented pink  (  ‘Albertine’), profuse bunches of bright pink ( 3 ‘ Dorothy Perkins’) – all gardener’s favourites standing the test of time from 1957, 1921 and early 1900’s. Wildlife Gardening Tips : But are they any good for a wildlife garden? Photo says ‘definitely yes’ – quote White-tailed Bumble Bee! Families of Bluetits would also vote ‘yes’. Frequently I see them working their way steadily along this ‘Dorothy Perkins’ stem and other roses, picking tiny creatures from amongst the leaves... presumably greenfly, as a visiting professional gardener marvelled at the fa...
Read more

RiverFestival

Image
New life emerges > RiverFes The season of new life emerging and in the making! Fresh female Red Mason Bees have emerged from my bee hotels, mated and laid eggs provisioning them with food for next year’s newborns, closing off each ‘nursery’ with a neat door of pollen and mud In a  thicket by the river there are more eggs in waiting - five speckled blue eggs lie cradled in a carefully structured masterpiece of woven stems and dead strands Elsewhere, more eggs have hatched - the still of the water is rippled by a passing family of Canada Geese Between egg and adult, many types of insects pass through several stages: here  a Bush Cricket in miniature clambers laboriously over Veggiemesh. It is extremely miniature... Bush Crickets change form and shed hard outer skins 5-6 times before becoming adults. In another part of the garden, underneath a Hop leaf  an unknown inert creature, somewhere between caterpillar and dormant pupa, is hidden. It will soon emerge with win...
Read more