Fireflies in the Gardens by Tom Motley
Our May gardens’ enthusiastic production of lettuces, spinach, rainbow chard, and sweet peppers provide us with multiple choices to enhance every meal. The basil is young and sweet, perfect for pesto. Pineapple sage is not in bloom yet, of course, but the leaves have ample flavor to turn any pork tenderloin into a memorable experience. The chocolate mint adds intense and natural surprises to any cake or brownie. Florentine fennel and rocket arugula will remain micro-sized for a bit longer, but the flavor of each is superb right now.
Recently, as we sat through a splendid sunset in the gardens with friends, we also enjoyed a current bumper crop of fireflies, courtesy of tall grasses and plants. Most of us have vivid childhood memories of fireflies. I’ve been painting fireflies for many years now, and I’ve talked with lots of clients and gallery visitors about those memories. Everyone has a firefly story about these magical creatures that put smiles on the faces of young and old alike. Children collected them in fruit jars with holes punched in the tin lid or just held them gently in hand and watched their light through the gaps between small fingers. We called them lightening bugs when I was a kid.
A couple of generations almost missed out entirely on fireflies, due to the ecological damage caused by excessive spraying of DDT. Hummingbirds and butterflies didn’t fare too well with this chemical either. As a boy, in Beaumont, I recall tanker trucks going through town at night, fogging the darkness with the chemical to kill mosquitoes. Even at the drive-in theater, the truck would move up and down the rows of cars, laying the chemical fog over all. In the thick of the mist, families sat in their cars, munching popcorn and relishing cold drinks with their windows wide open. My young friends and I liked the smell of the stuff and would actually chase the trucks so we could make streaks and waves in the smoke with our bodies. It took a few years, but the DDT wound up killing off a lot more than mosquitoes.
Because so much of the DDT (banned in the US, for now) has finally leached out from the soil, fireflies have made a significant comeback over the last ten years. A reduced use of pesticides on any property will result in more thriving populations of fireflies, hummingbirds and butterflies to enjoy. Fireflies mate and lay their eggs in tall grasses, usually at fence lines or the less mowed edges of trim yards. Weed-whackers have obviously played a role in destruction of firefly habitat. If you can live with some taller grass at the edges of your place, you’ll benefit from fireflies at night. There are many native Texas grasses which make attractive additions to walkway borders and fence lines.
Fireflies are not flies, actually. They are beetles. They eat lots of insects, many of the types that humans don’t care for. In Collin and Dallas counties, most fireflies will be seen from late evening to ten or so this time of year. That lone straggler you see blinking his heart out till after midnight, sadly, couldn’t get a date. It’s all about attraction. Each species of firefly has its own blinking code between male and female. The light is created by a combination of oxygen, an enzyme and a chemical within the beetle’s body. Bioluminescence is the result. There’s even a clever species in which the female firefly knows the code-sequence sought by another species’ male aspirants. When they respond to her signals and fly in for an assignation, she eats them.
Population levels of fireflies in North Texas gardens vary considerably from year to year, most often the result of heavy spring rains. Repetitive or unusually high rainfall amounts in early May will wash eggs out of their normal niches, preventing new generations from hatching. The shining beetles are most dramatic of course against a dark wood. The blinking lights are now hidden, now revealed in an instant, against the dark silhouettes of tree trunks and branches. Some nights this time of year, we sit in the twilight with neighbors and all our assorted reclining dogs, watching the fireflies move from garden to field and back again, across star-filled black skies. Fireflies are like moving stars. Sometimes we’re not sure if we’ve just witnessed a splendid falling star or an eager, swift firefly at just the right distance to fool the eye.
There’s nothing like fireflies dancing in the dark, with the scent of live basil in the garden air.