GARDENING : Cultivating Butterfly Harvest

Lantana, milkweed and passion flower: Cultivate them at your own risk. These plants are bound to entice butterflies into your yard, and if that happens, you’re in danger of being seduced.

Watch one monarch hatch from its jade-colored, gold-sprinkled case after feeding as a caterpillar in your garden, and you’re a lepidopterist in the making. Next thing you know, you’ll be altering your entire landscape to accommodate these ephemeral creatures.

You’ll replace your carefully cultivated dichondra with Bermuda grass to attract fiery skippers and plant willows to host Western tiger swallowtails and mourning cloaks. Then you’ll let a few corners go wild with nettles and chickweed to promote red admirals and encourage painted ladies.

You might even engineer a mud puddle for thirsty butterflies who like to congregate around favorite water holes on sunny afternoons like bar patrons during happy hour.

You’ve lost your garden and created a habitat.

You can see it happening to Janet Warter. The Huntington Beach gardener purchased one milkweed plant from Heard’s Country Gardens last year.

“I didn’t buy the plant to attract butterflies,” she says. “I bought it because milkweed is an Eastern wildflower, and I’m from Pennsylvania; I thought it would be a touch of home.”

But several monarch butterflies found Warter’s solitary plant almost immediately and laid eggs, which soon turned into voracious caterpillars. “I kept running back to Heard’s to buy more plants to keep them fed,” she says, “and now I’ve got a little grove of milkweed in my back yard.”

Warter has seen a number of migrating monarchs flitting through her garden this fall and already observed one caterpillar grow large enough to pupate, but she is anticipating a lot more action. “It’s still a little early,” she says. “November should be better.”

John W. Johnson, a veteran butterfly gardener, was not surprised to hear of Warter’s prompt success. Though Johnson and his wife live in a retirement home in Santa Barbara now, the garden at their former home in Corona del Mar used to be a veritable butterfly factory.

“As long as I lived there, I had milkweed plants growing,” Johnson says. “They’re a perennial and reseed themselves. Once you’ve got them, you’ve got them forever. I raised a winter generation of monarchs on those plants for 40 years.”

Getting Gulf fritillaria to your garden is even easier than tempting monarchs, Johnson says. “If you want to attract a large butterfly to your garden, plant a passion flower vine,” he says. “That will do it.”

The white-petaled, purple-crowned passiflora is such a magnet to the bright-orange, tropical butterflies that it is hard to keep the plant alive its first year.

Encouraged by her success in attracting monarchs with milkweed, Warter planted a passion vine last year. “The caterpillars ate it down to sticks,” she says. “But I’m trying again this year.”

If you put netting over the plant the first year or two to keep butterflies from laying eggs, or pick off the caterpillars by hand so the vine can get a head start, Gulf Fritillaries will not seriously harm the passiflora and will help keep this vigorous grower in line, Johnson says.

“By the end of the summer the caterpillars will pretty much have stripped the vines but they’ll recover by the end of winter and leaf out again in the spring,” he says. “There aren’t many Fritillaries around then so the plant will thrive until late summer when the butterfly population builds up. Then down goes the vine again.”

Visiting the Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Beach Central Park is a convincing demonstration that passiflora and Gulf fritillaria can coexist. The passion vine, which has become a bit of a pest there, engulfs some of the center’s trees. Yet in years when the Fritillary was particularly plentiful the same vines that now smother full-size trees were defoliated, according to park ranger Dave Winkler.

“It’s very prolific vine, especially in the wild,” he says. “I’m glad we’ve got the caterpillars to keep it in check. I wish we had more.”

If you like having butterflies around through their entire life span--from egg through caterpillar to chrysalis to adult on the wing--another plant to encourage, according to Johnson, is Soleirolia soleirolii.

Soleirolia, commonly known as baby’s tears, is a good ground cover, especially for damp patches, and it also attracts a handsome, black butterfly with scarlet bands called the red admiral.

“We had that moss growing along the north side of our house in Corona del Mar, and we were visited by red admirals the whole time we lived there,” Johnson says. “They’d hang their chrysalis on the wall, and we’d watch them emerge. There were always some around.”

Johnson’s garden also included fennel, food for the larvae of the black and yellow anise swallowtail, and snapdragons, host to a buff-colored butterfly with multicolored eyespots called the buckeye.

Not all caterpillars are as conspicuous and damaging as the larvae of the Gulf fritillaria, says Larry Shaw, vector specialist with the Orange County vector control district. The larvae of the marine blue, for instance, which feed on the Plumbago auriculata bush, are so small, he says, that you wouldn’t notice them unless you searched form them.

“The same thing with the grey hairstreak, which feeds on mallow and hibiscus,” Shaw says. “They have no real impact on the plant. You probably won’t even see them.”

Gardeners needn’t worry about caterpillars damaging the rest of their plants, he says. “Butterflies are very specific when it comes to larval plants. Each species has only one or two host plants it will lay eggs on.”

But if the idea of caterpillars still makes you nervous, cultivate nectar plants for adult butterflies that do no damage.

“Nectaring sources are probably even more important (for increasing butterfly population) than larval food plants,” Shaw says. “You don’t see many flowering shrubs in new housing developments like you do in the older communities of Santa Ana and Orange. They’re planting a lot of low-maintenance foliage plants that don’t flower.”

No flowers, no nectar, no butterflies.

What’s the best nectar source for butterflies in this area? Shaw and Johnson agree with Larry Orsak, author of “The Butterflies of Orange County,” and Julian Donahue, curator of lepidoptery at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles: lantana.

“It’s just about the best nectar source around,” Johnson says. “Its small flowers are attractive to butterflies like skippers who have short tongues, but big butterflies, like monarch and swallowtails, come and sit on them, too. And you’ll get the big sphinx moths in the evening. They all like it.”

Plant a type of lantana as close to the original wild plant as possible, Donahue advises. “Many nursery versions have cultivated out the rough leaves and strong odor of the original,” he says, “but they don’t produce the nectar the butterflies like either.”

Marigolds are another good nectar plant, Donahue says. “Pick the ones the butterflies land on when you go to the nursery,” he says. “That’s what I do.”

Red valerian (Centranthus ruber ) is another good plant, Johnson says.

Shirley Kerrins, a Huntington Beach-based residential landscape architect and consultant for the herb gardens at the Huntington Beach Library in San Marino, recommends English lavender.

“There were so many butterflies on the lavender this year, it was almost amusing,” Kerrins says. “You’d walk into the herb garden and be surrounded by them. It was like they were coming out of a bubble machine.”

Sages, mints, rosemary, asters, sweet alyssum, phlox, day lilies, petunias, nasturtiums, morning glories--the list of good nectar plants commonly available in nurseries is wide and varied.

Why not help propagate some diminishing California native plants at the same time you’re encouraging butterflies, Shaw suggests. The small butterfly garden he planted at the vector control district headquarters, for instance, contains wild lilac (Ceanothus) , wild buckwheat (Eriogonum) and woolly blue curls (Trichostema lanatum) . Native plants are available from nursery specialists, like Tree of Life in San Juan Capistrano, and are frequently offered at arboretum plant sales, Shaw says.

The easiest way to get started with a butterfly garden, Donahue says, is to walk around the neighborhood and vacant lots. “See what butterflies are around and what they’re feeding on. Then plant the same things,” he says. “Start there and improve on it.”