By KAREN MADORIN
Gardeners often garden in the same spot every year. Despite familiarity, new challenges often present themselves.
Somewhere over years tilling soil and nurturing vegetables, I discovered swallowtail butterflies have a symbiotic relationship with fennel which offers front row seating to watch yellow, green, cream, and black swallowtail caterpillars munch tender fronds. Once those caterpillars morph into winged creatures, an aerial ballet of pirouetting swallow- tails floating on summer breezes adds further entertainment to hours spent in the garden. To encourage this, I plant fennel annually to guarantee the show continues.
That is until this year. Where’s the fennel? Normally, I add pots of fennel along with rosemary, basil, and thyme when I visit local greenhouses to buy tomato and pepper plants. This year, I found everything but fennel. Off to find the person in charge. She looked high and low for this fern-like herb, saying, “We had it last year.”
I know. I bought some. That initiated a multi-greenhouse search for this swallowtail delectable.
After visiting local greenhouses, we traveled further from home to a lovely greenhouse filled with dazzling flowers, vegetables, shrubs, trees, rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, lavender, and more several counties away. No fennel.
That led to a search of garden departments at Walmart, Tractor Supply, Bomgaar’s and Home Depot. Certain I’d find this desire of swallowtail caterpillar gastronomic systems at Big Box stores, I sadly struck out 4, 5, 6, and 7 more times. Even though it’s late to start herbs from seed, I headed to aisles filled with magical packets of summer delight. Guess what? No fennel.
Heading home to google reasons for a lack of fennel, I found sources claiming it’s a supply and demand issue. However, I discovered no definitive answer for who’s monopolizing this herb rural cooks rarely use.
Scores of recipes using licorice-flavored fennel bulbs, stems, leaves, and seeds in seafood, meat, and Italian dishes filled internet feeds. Chefs somewhere but not here concoct fennel soups; pork, fish, and lamb seasoned with fennel; sauteed, grilled, roasted, baked, fried, and pickled fennel; and fennel salads.
Herbalists claim its good for heart and digestive health, but I know no one self-treating with fennel products. On-line, I can buy processed seeds for cooking. Unfortunately, those won’t work in my garden.
In a world experiencing a variety of shortages, who imagined fennel would join the ever-growing list. In conversations with nursery staff and online searches, I never discovered the reason why places I normally find fennel plants don’t have them nor did the internet offer any extraordinary rationale like a fennel flu pandemic. One clerk grinned and attributed the lack to conspiracy theories.
On the positive side, I have a dill bed. While, in my experience, swallowtails prefer frothy fennel leaves, dill will substitute to fuel caterpillar life cycles. Their preference for faint licorice scents of fennel to quirky notes of dill can’t be helped this gardening season.
Hopefully, the huge swallowtails flitting around our yard will find that dill bed and lay eggs. Soon they’ll smell it on warm days even if they don’t see it. Once their eggs hatch, they can sip nectar from flowers planted around the yard while their offspring reduce the dill one chomp at a time. In the meantime, I’ll continue seeking a fennel source for next spring.
Karen Madorin is a retired teacher, writer, photographer, outdoors lover, and sixth-generation Kansan.