As is their practice, the first Monarchs arrived near the El Rosario sanctuary on November 1 in 2022, just in time for the Day of the Dead festival that’s held each year to celebrate the end of the rainy season.

This winter, the area of oyamel forests that will be covered with Monarchs is going to be low – “probably one of the all-time low numbers – close to, if not below, 1 hectare (2.47 acres),” predicts ecologist Chip Taylor, founder of Monarch Watch, in a blog published last month.

Current numbers date back to 1993 – with the highest being 18.19 hectares in 1996-97, the lowest 0.67 in 2013-14. The butterflies of the eastern Monarch population are the ones that make their way north more than 4,000 kilometres – over several generations in the spring and early summer, and in one fell southward swoop in the fall.
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They come and they go. 

The heart soars when they arrive, orange beauties floating into the garden. What was just another day has turned magical. It really is spring. We share the news.

There’s a pang of regret when they depart. Also a flash of hope, as a Monarch butterfly soars southwards into the sky. A tiny determined insect’s 4,600-kilometre migration unites the continent. We have yet to decode the mystery of how it knows where to go and how to get there. It’s fitting that there are feasts when it arrives in Mexico.

But our feckless ways have made the Monarch’s seasonal journeys so perilous, its sojourns in our northern breeding grounds so challenging, and its long rest in the southern wintering grounds so unpredictable.

So it’s about time we stepped up.
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There’s a patch of gravel in heaven, and Keith Squires has arrived to make it bloom. The owner of the Country Squires Garden in Campbellville, a fourth-generation nurseryman who was in the business for 74 years, passed away on Thursday. He was 94.

I have such vivid memories of Keith Squires – his delight in the minute speck of green that signalled succcessful germination, his indignation when I had the temerity to drive over his watering hose, the ‘jingling’ of his empty pockets as he joked about the wealthy ‘greenhouse men,’ the hearty welcome for the swallows that returned to his barn to nest every year, his pleasure in a bunch of cuttings collected on a warm end-of-summer day….

Plants seemed to come to life in conversation with him. They have personality, preferences and aversions. We need to pay attention, they need to be understood. He loved them all. He was as excited about the Tree Peonies he’d just had shipped from Holland – developed, he reckoned, by some highly skilled plant specialist in China - as he was about the Viper’s Bugloss he’d grown from seed collected from a common European weed that's found along roadsides here, with a lovely blue flower, a “true blue,” he called it.
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