She's beautiful. She must have set up shop in a rose bush or hedge. There are lots of thorns on those branches. I have a pair visiting my feeders daily now but I have not been able to locate their nest. The past three years I have seen them nesting in the front yard dominant pine, but I can't see the exact spot from the ground and have not seen the female traveling to that tree at all. The male has taken up his tradtional territorial roost overlooking the feeder. That will last until I see more birds show up and then I will set additional feeders throughout the yard. Then the male usually travels alot trying to cover all feeders (unsuccessfully) rather than roosting over the snigle one I have out presently.

Yes....both the Tomato and Tobacco Hornworms become big Sphinx Moths AKA Hawk Moths AKA Hummingbird Moths. Both are evening and early morning visitors to many flowering plants. Fortunately I've never had either one visit my Solanaceae crops. Here however we do have another Sphinx Moth Hyles lineata and the host plants for these larvae are mainly Wild Grapes, Portulaca and Primrose but damage is never serious. These guys are very frequent visitors to my yard early morning and evenings....literally dozens at a time! Favorite nectar plants that they visit in the yard are: Nicotiana, Catmint, Petunia, Salvia officinalis, Monarda and Datura. Last year I learned they also liked the 4 O'clocks and Saponaria officinalis. This pic was taken in the 2004 season....they probably like the Nicotiana alata the best. That year these Nicotiana topped out at 5' tall...so there was plenty of blooms to go around LOL! Sorry the camera phone at the time was crap

Sorry to hear about your petunias...the same thing happened to my petunias first year I tried growing them...petunias seem to be major groundhog candy. Now I plant them in hanging baskets far up above groundhog-level, and can finally grow petunias again. Sounds like your drain pipe is a perfect pre-dug tunnel for groundhogs. Our local groundhog family also seems to scurry into a drainpipe that must end lead to an area not encased by the pipe somewhere below ground. The groundhogs in our yard had three or four babies this spring, and they've all been eating everything in sight! Arrghh! I sympathize. But I have a lot of Monarda/Beebalm from planting it over the years and the groundhogs in our yard don't seem to eat it. In general they seem to avoid anything minty like various kinds of salvia or sage, mountain mint, etc. The groundhogs in our yard also don't seem to eat heuchera or hosta, lilies, sedum, or peonies. Luckily I winter-sowed lots of Monarda for my first year winter-sowing...next year I plan to winter-sow more salvia and other minty stuff!

Linda, dropping dirt is exactly what I do ha. I work for a propogating nursery and we have huge compost piles outside which we are generously allowed to use. I take two big plastic boxes left over from when we moved here and fill them every day with the compost (mostly dirt but lots of interesting stuff comes up in it). I take it home and drop it on the sand until I have the size or shape garden I want. I plant it and eventually I border it with dropped cement. I've made about seven gardens of different sizes doing this. Seriously I could drop the dirt and water it and all kinds of goodies would pop up (along with weeds). I've had datura, viola, spiderwort, hyssop and of course petunias come up in it. Adele