Nothing Bugs These Gardens
A circle of children crouched around naturalist Sandra Huwe as she held a leaf-filled glass jar--the makeshift display case for a solitary butterfly egg the size of a grain of sand.
In another jar, a black and orange caterpillar snacked on a plant and in a third, a chrysalis dangled from a leaf.
The children, third-graders at Harold Ambuehl Elementary School in San Juan Capistrano, were planting a butterfly garden Thursday morning. Huwe’s specimens, culled from her native-plants garden in Orange, gave them a taste of what to hope for: a garden full of bugs and butterflies native to Southern California.
In a joint venture by a nature conservancy and the Capistrano Unified School District, seven schools are creating on-campus gardens of indigenous plants meant to attract butterflies that have been disappearing from the landscape.
The project requires much more than digging and planting.
Over the next five years, the students will use those bug gardens to research wildlife habitats and entomology. They will record their data and compare information over the Internet to determine which school has created the most successful home for vanishing butterflies.
The other schools involved are: Arroyo Vista, Truman Benedict, Moulton, John Malcom and Wagon Wheel elementary schools and Dana Hills High School. Malcom Elementary is an Environmental Science Academy and already has developed a large indoor garden.
This week, students laid out a grid in the dirt, dug holes for plants and filled them with water to prepare for the plants. In the process they unearthed worms, millipedes and cutworms--stopping to exclaim and admire each insect.
Tania Hickman, 8, spent much of the morning rapt over a cutworm--which will turn into a moth, not a butterfly--that she unearthed with a hand spade.
“Just pick it up with your finger,” urged classmate Trenten Merrill, 8. Tania, who states firmly that she is not afraid of insects, declined. Trenten took the bug.
“Feel him; he’s really soft,” he said. “I like bugs--I look for them almost every day.”
Laura Cohen of the Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy, a wildlife preserve in South County, guided children and teachers through the weeding, digging and planting process.
The hope is that even before butterflies realize a new food source awaits them, other bugs relying on native plants will take up residence, Cohen said.
“It’s kind of a change in thinking; we’re planting plants that are there to be eaten by insects,” she said.
So they planted lupine to attract painted ladies, everlasting for the buckeye butterfly and deerweed for the acmon blue, Cohen said.
In the long run, Huwe hopes the care and attention lavished will engender in the children a love for all nature.
‘This will get in their hearts and stay there forever,’ she said. “Then they take it home and then they take it out into the world, wherever they go.”
