I've been seeing butterflies in the yard just as frequently this fall as in the summer. Most common are the Cabbage White Butterfly (Pieris rapae). It's tricky to get a non-blurry photo of these hyperactive little pollinators, but I managed a decent shot this Saturday as one landed briefly on the nasturtium leaves. My next goal is to capture a butterfly, flowers, and a cat in the same scene.

I decided to show a bit of “before and after” photography for this post. It's fun to look through a sequence of images of the same plant as it grows. One notable one is the shooting star hydrangea (H. macrophylla-Lacecap). Once a tiny plant that lived on my kitchen windowsill, it's definitely becoming a tall bush. I will repot it soon (as mentioned recently) but in the meantime I gave it a taller bamboo stake to lean on. The buds of white flowers have opened nicely.

I'm continuing with the cleanup of dead leaves and trimming of fast-growing plants that I started tackling a week ago. I suppose it wouldn't be such a project if I kept on top of basic maintenance with greater regularity. But now a hanging fuchsia, which had gotten cluttered with unsightly brown leaves, is again looking presentable, and my unruly geraniums are tidy as well. These may continue to bloom throughout the fall and even winter, if the weather's similar to recent years; I hope to eventually see the fuchsia with its former profusion of flowers.