Native plants for a Cape Cod garden

It’s hard to believe I haven’t posted anything since 5/25, I guess spending as much time as possible outside this season has been keeping me busy. A couple recent incidents have given me the need to once again become the amateur naturalist sleuth and seek out solutions to buggy business. As you may know, I love bugs but do not like them too close. This is a thorny problem since I do not particularly like destroying harmless bugs. I have had to make some recent exceptions, which I will get to in my next blog posting. The matter at hand in today’s post is the remarkable spider that danced across my beach blanket yesterday. The beach I go to has a beautiful natural landscape; with this undeveloped, protected marshland come some not-so-beautiful critters such as no-see-ums and greenhead flies. The greenheads in particular tend to give me welts larger than a half dollar which take several weeks to heal, but the beach is worth it.

Yesterday I encountered a new beach resident, an enormous spider bigger than any I have ever seen in New England. On the way home from the beach I had the entire staff at a local restaurant trying to identify it online – but no amount of Googling has come up with a species that quite matches its appearance. I intend to keep trying though. There is a species of “beach spider” called Arctosa  – but Artcosa is a “wolf” spider and this spider had a rounder shape and shorter legs which did not mimic the body’s pattern as wolf spiders’ legs do. It was about as long and fat as a woman’s thumb and it could run and jump very fast. It did not appear agressive when we tried to get close to examine it; I have seen other spiders pose in a threatening position when cornered – kind of like a dog standing on its hind legs. It also did not have visibly large “fangs”. Like many other creatures I have seen crawling on the beach, it was completely camouflaged on the sand with its light color. I will definitely be a little bit spooked next time I go to the beach. One thing I had appreciated about New England was the fact that our bugs are smaller than say, Florida or Costa Rica. This beach spider was definitely more “tropical sized”.