GARDENING : Family Housing for Butterflies
A successful butterfly garden must include plants that meet their needs during all four stages of their life cycle--egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and adult.
“Plants are important to butterflies during each stage of their life cycle. A garden designed with this in mind attracts the largest number and greatest variety of butterfly visitors,” states a report from Callaway Gardens of Georgia on how to create a butterfly garden. Rule No. 1 is “locate the garden in a sunny area (since) butterflies and most butterfly-attracting plants require bright sunshine.”
Next, choose plants with nectar-producing flowers, preferably those with single flowers, and try for continuous bloom throughout the growing season.
“Butterflies visit plants in search of nectar, a sugary fluid, to eat. Many native butterflies seem to prefer purple, yellow, orange and red-colored blossoms. Clusters of short, tubular flowers or flat-topped blossoms provide the ideal shapes for butterflies to easily land and feed,” according to the Callaway experts.
Single-flower nectar is easier for them to extract than that of double-type flowers, which have more petals per flower.
Sure-fire hits for nectar sources are:
Shrubs: azaleas, butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii), glossy abelia (Abelia grandiflora) and bush and trailing lantanas ( L. camara and L. montevidensis ).
Annuals: cosmos, French marigold (Tagetes patula), heliotrope, impatiens, tithonia, zinnia, moss verbena (Verbena tenuisecta) and Egyptian star-cluster (Pentas lanceolata).
Perennials: New England aster ( A. novae-angliae ), coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), pineapple sage (Salvia rutilans), eupatorium, Phlox subulata, vervain (Verbena bonariensis) and verbena ( V. canadensis ).
Butterflies also need host plants, which provide food for caterpillars and lure the females into the garden to lay eggs.
“After mating, female butterflies search for a specific kind of host plant on which to lay eggs.
“For example, monarchs lay eggs on milkweed, black swallowtails on parsley and Eastern tiger swallowtails on tulip tree or wild cherry,” reports Callaway Gardens, in Pine Mountain, Ga.
Also recommended are damp areas or shallow puddles, so the butterflies can drink and extract salts from moist soil, and flat stones, which allow them to perch, spread their wings and bask in the sun.
Concerned about damage from the caterpillars, which emerge in a few days from the eggs and begin to eat?
“Caterpillars are selective eaters and only feed on specific kinds of plants,” Callaway says. “If the desired plants aren’t available, the caterpillars will starve rather than eat another type of vegetation. Usually female butterflies lay eggs on or near the plants their caterpillars prefer to eat. Most butterfly caterpillars feed on native plants and are not considered agricultural or ornamental pests.”
When the caterpillars are fully grown, they shed their skin for a final time and change into chrysalides, which develop into the body of an adult butterfly.
The chrysalides often are found attached to plant stems.
One caution: Most garden pesticides are toxic to butterflies, so “use predatory insects, insecticidal soap or hand-remove the pests if problems occur.”
For further reading, Callaway Gardens suggests “Butterflies and Moths” by R.T. Mitchell and H.S. Zim (Golden Press, 1987); “The Audubon Society Handbook for Butterfly Watchers” by R. M. Pyle (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), and “The Butterfly Book” by Donald and Lillian Stokes and Ernest Williams (Little, Brown and Company, 1991).
