I found out recently that our town has an official monarch waystation tucked away on the back side of our town hall. Curious, I had to go check it out. Not only is it on the back side of the building, it is also tucked away behind three rows of city trucks. One would need to know it is there or be an intrepid suburban explorer to discover its location. From the parking lot, it isn’t much to write home about as you only see a small bit of the actual garden space, but duck between and under the mirrors of the city trucks, step over the curb and brave the steep slope to the back side of the garden and – Well, now I am rethinking my entire garden philosophy.
I have been a chaos gardener since before the ones that coined the term were even born. “Plant in drifts of three,” landscape designers will tell you. Plant in drifts of one, I would counter. A drift of one – ie: a single plant here, a single plant there – is a statement plant. But when you have a garden full of singularly planted statement plants, chaos ensues. And I absolutely love the randomness that follows.
That said, I also know that a good pollinator garden has large masses of a single plant, thus preserving the pollinators’ energy as they flutter from one flower to the next. But knowing that and actually doing that gardening that way are two very different things, especially when one is trying to grow their own food and space is at a premium. However! After braving said obstacles previously mentioned, I may now be a convert to “drifts of three (and then some!) and let it grow wild and feed a plethora of monarchs” because… Just look at how magnificent this is!
Well, a picture is worth a thousand words – except in this case, as it fails to show the full extent of monarchs visiting the Gregg’s mistflower planted at this official waystation. But look at all of those blooms! My companion and I estimated there to be no less than three dozen monarchs present, with many fluttering high above, some tucked way down in the flowers and others on neighboring plants. It was truly a glorious sight to see!
In the wayback time machine inside my brain, I could recall a similar scene. Ah, yes. The second of November, 2016. Thankfully, I have a few photographs on my phone to document the day, easy to find because I knew they were taken during the monarch’s annual migration south, but what year? Almost exactly ten years ago!
A friend and her husband had bought an older house in an old neighborhood in our town and she would sometimes ask me to come over and identify a plant or two that had popped up on their large property. Along the front yard, under a split rail fence, was a large patch of Gregg’s mistflower, similar in size to the one now planted at our town’s monarch waystation. That day in 2016, my friend text me to say that I had to drop everything and come over at once to see all of the monarchs. Looking at those photos today, I count 17 monarchs in one picture alone, nectaring on the mistflower and know that – like the photos above – it didn’t capture nearly all of the butterflies present.
Why didn’t that earlier experience convert me to planting a large swath of mistflower? (Or late boneset, shown above.) I am not sure, though I was in a very different place at the time. I had just come off of a really bad breakup. With roses. Not a guy. After losing more than 100 antique roses to rose rosette disease, after shedding blood, sweat and tears to cut them back to dig them up, I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to garden ever ever! again. In the back of my mind, I always knew I would want to garden again. But how? What would I want to garden and tend to? As fate would have it, I started having health issues around that same time. I was unable to garden for a few seasons, which gave me plenty of time to figure out my “next” garden. Alas. It also gave the weeds and junk trees plenty of time to grow and take over. My next garden would be an edible garden. I would garden for my health, to feed my soul and my cells. Bit by bit, I reclaimed my garden and redesigned and reworked the entire property. I knew I wanted to focus on native plants to lure in the pollinators, but I still wasn’t sold on that whole “drifts of three, pollinators need a wide expanse of the same plant” thing. But now? Maybe so. Time will tell.
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We ‘ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young…
~ William Wordsworth
Photographs taken October 18, 2026, at the monarch waystation in Flower Mound, Texas.
