Butterflies are free!

11/28/2005
Butterflies are free!

Scritch...scrabble, scrabble! I laid my book down on my chest. A faint, but bizarre noise was coming from the direction of my desk. The year was 1962, and I was flopped on my bed with a pile of library books beside me. I was alone in my room, happily reading. Outside my window, it was spring. I resumed reading.

Scritch! I laid my book down and walked over toward my desk. Among a collection of favorite stones, fossils, and other treasures, something was moving. A huge, incredibly fat, fuzzy worm! No wait--were those little stubs wings? What sort of alien had landed on my desk?

Then I noticed the white cocoon, lying on its side with a gaping hole in its end. The previous fall, I had found a glistening white cocoon in a birch tree. It was exactly the color of egg whites beaten with sugar into a thick and glossy meringue. Woven into its surface were a few of the birches leaves, like a motif in a piece of exotic Japanese kimono silk. I carefully snapped the twig to which it was attached and brought it inside, placing it among my favorite treasures which I kept arranged around the foot of my desklamp. Over the winter, it became part of my personal landscape, and I largely forgot about it. Until now.

My cocoon had hatched, and before my wondering eyes, the huge, cumbersome larva-like body it had contained began to transform itself from an ugly duckling into a swan. Clasping its legs onto the stem of an African violet leaf, it began fanning its little stubs of wings. I gasped as I witnessed something miraculous: the ugly beast slowly pumped the juices of its ungainly body into its crumpled wings, which began to expand and ripple with iridescent colors. Within 15 minutes, my gaze held a mammoth moth of royal colors. Its wings, shaded with soft chestnut brown and umber, and banded with gold and persimmon, were each marked with a giant eye-spot. While the giant moth continued fanning its wings to dry and strengthen them, I rushed off to find a giant jar, into which I put some birch twigs and grasses. I sprinkled a few drops of water on the grass. Then I gently guided my royal moth inside, to be held captive for a few hours while the family admired him.

That evening, I set him free, but not before I was able to identify him as a Polyphemus moth in my pocket guide to butterflies and moths. The guidebook even showed a drawing of the birchleaf cocoon, exactly like the one that had so enchanted me. And that unforgettable day was the only time in my life I ever saw the Polyphemus moth.



But nevertheless, my childhood was full of butterflies. I grew up on 5 acres in rural Indiana. My mother, being a member of the local garden club, grew some flowers. We had a pond out front. But the rest of our property, and the hundreds of acres surrounding ours, were in woodland and pasture. Our gravel country roads were bordered by lots of wild rose, sumac, raspberry, silky dogwood, and plenty of weeds.

Today, take a walk through any suburban neighborhood in late summer. Count yourself lucky if you see even one butterfly. Our children may have every imaginable luxury--from the best schools to the latest X-Box--but the majority of them are growing up without experiencing the magic of butterflies in their environments. If you ask yourself where all the butterflies have gone, the answer is simple. They've gone the way of woods, wild meadows, and weeds. Butterflies are a sign of a diverse natural environment in equilibrium. No butterflies? Look around. How much diversity do you see in the suburban landscape?



It's not difficult to find plenty of articles and even books on "butterfly gardening." But most of them don't go deep enough. Certainly, it's gratifying to attract butterflies to your garden by incorporating nectar plants that are attractive to them. Nectar plants bear flowers with many small parts, which are adapted to receiving the butterfly's proboscis--the long, threadlike tongue it uses for feeding. The colors most attractive to butterflies are yellow or violet, or shades thereof, for those are the colors best perceived by the butterfly eye. A very partial list of such flowers would include everything in the daisy family (Compositae)(whose centers consist of many tiny 'tube florets' highly attractive to butterflies), and including asters, goldenrods, scabiosas, coneflowers ; butterfly weeds (Asclepias spp.); everything in the mint family; abelias; buddleias; Vitex spp....The list, while not endless, is very long.

However, the succeed at making butterflies a permanent presence in your environment, you need to think not only of providing attractive nectar plants for the adult butterflies. You must also supply food plants for the butterfly larvae. Ah, yes, this is the less glamorous side of butterfly gardening: feeding the Hungry Caterpillar. Doing this is difficult for many gardeners to accept at first blush, as it seems perilously close to encouraging the enemy--the sort of hungry marauding 'worms' we're used to fighting with pesticides.



But you can relax. The caterpillars responsible for wiping out our broccoli plants and others are invariably the larvae of introduced butterflies and moths, and NOT those of our native species. Remember what I said a few paragraphs back: plentiful butterflies are a sign of a diverse environment in equilibrium. This means that you’ll likely never notice any damage to your plants from native butterfly larvae, given in the first place that you have provided them with what they like to—and must--eat. For many butterfly species, the larvae depend on only a single species of plant for food—or at most, a handful of closely related species. A good example is the spicebush swallowtail butterfly, so named because its larvae require native spicebush (Lindera benzoin) to feed.



One of the simplest and most comprehensive gestures you can make to provide both food for some and nectar for many butterflies is to have a varied and vibrant herb garden. Many of the umbelliferousherbs, such as dill and parsley, provide food for butterflies in the swallowtail group. And the blossoms of oreganos, marjorams, mints, agastaches, hyssop, lavender, and thymes are intensely attractive as nectar plants for many different species.

But if you really want to get into encouraging butterflies back into your environment, you’ll need to make a serious effort to include a wider range of food plants. One way to do this is simply to adopt maximum diversity as your guiding principle in landscape and garden design. Just plant as many different species of plants as possible, including a maximum number of natives (plants indigenous to your area). It may be hit ormiss, but you will inevitably see an increase in both the number of species and in the absolute numbers of butterflies in your garden.

The second method is much more studied and requires more time and research. It also would make an outstanding formal or informal project for a child or young person. Find a serious book on the butterflies of your state or region, and make a list of the food plants of the species you would like to encourage. You might concentrate on species known to be in decline. Then set about obtaining and planting those species in your garden.

Of course it goes without saying (I hope) that if you want to invite butterflies back into your garden, you'd best curtail or eliminate pesticide use. Even Bacillus thuringiensis (BT), approved for organic gardens, is in fact targeted directly at butterfly larvae indiscriminate of species. If you use it, make sure to only use it on plants where you're sure no indigenous larvae are present.

Once you take the positive step of diversifying your garden, you'll be amazed at how quickly the butterfly population rebounds. It's one of the best ways to "think globally, act locally." And just maybe, one of your or the neighbor's children might have the magical experience of finding a chrysalid one day.

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Products of Interest:
Average to dry soils--Small scabious
Average soils--Clary sage
Average to dry soils--Hyssop
Average soils--Fragrant dill