Projo Garden Blog

As my family was having dessert on the porch at my parents’ house a couple of weeks ago, a hummingbird nipped down, dipped into the Bishop of Llandaff dahlias and the bee balm and whisked off. Just long enough for us to say “Look! A hummingbird!” before it zipped off over the hawthorne and into the neighbor’s yard.

It’s only the second time in my life I’ve seen one (the first was at Leaming’s Run, when I used to work nearby), despite the fact that my mom’s house is described around town as “the house with the garden.”

It reminded us of a strange imposter we’d encountered a couple of summers before, and why we love my brother.

Mom and I were touring the garden and found a strange – thing – buzzing between the flowers in one of the front beds. Even from a foot or two away, we couldn’t figure out what it was, hovering silently over the flowers, sucking nectar.

My brain just refused to make sense of the fat, furry little thing. It sort of looked and acted like a hummingbird. But it had antennae. And it sort of looked like a lobster ...

(Now don’t talk like that. My college was on the “Stone Cold Sober” list.)

So we got my brother.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a hawk moth.” he said, like we’d pointed out a pigeon or something. He’s not particularly interested in the garden, but he does know a lot about bugs.

Unlike the hummingbird, the moth was content to let us watch it buzz silently around, sipping nectar through its flexible proboscis.

Now that I've read up on them, it turns out there are many varieties, lumped together under the common name of "hummingbird moths". Turns out the Web is full of conversations that went pretty much like my family's -- except those unfortunates don't have my brother. They have sites like whatsthatbug.com. (There's a hummingbird moth third from the top. The pictures make them look creepy, but, in nature, they're actually kind of cute, I think.)

The other surprise came when I learned that hummingbird moths come from hornworms -- as in tomato hornworms, those enormous, revolting, lumpy, ravenous creatures that defoliate your plants. (Different worms make different moths, so I'm not sure if the tomato hornworm made the kind I saw.)

Makes you think, doesn't it? Kill all the hornworms, and you'd kill all the hummingbird moths, without ever realizing what you were doing.

Integrated Pest Management is a strategy for keeping pests from destroying your garden, without killing everything in the process. The number of insects that help us, entertain us or want nothing to do with us far outnumbers those that eat our crops, sting us or eat our houses.

So, if I see a hornworm, I guess I might just have to let it live.

Besides, anything that destroys tomatoes as a child and grows up to like flowers is a friend of mine.

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