Gardening for butterflies a rewarding hobby
VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY
Butterflies are beautiful to behold. With delightful markings and
vibrant colors, a butterfly wafting gently over a bed of flowers is a
springtime treat for the eyes.
Of course, if you get beyond the poetry of the visual image and
concentrate on the butterfly’s behavior, you’ll realize that it is
probably just looking for a place to lay its eggs. That’s the
downside of butterflies. The eggs hatch into caterpillars, and
caterpillars eat plants. It takes some education and restraint to
avoid squashing every caterpillar you see gorging on your precious
garden plants. But unless they’re allowed to complete their life
cycle, they can’t mature into beautiful butterflies.
The life cycle of a butterfly is a bit more complicated than that
of a dog or horse. With mammals, embryonic development occurs in the
womb, and what you see when the animal is born is a critter that is
fairly recognizable as a dog or horse. Insects are more complicated.
After mating, the female butterfly lays a cluster of tiny eggs on a
food plant. The eggs hatch into little worm-like larvae.
Larvae do nothing but eat, which does not endear them to
gardeners. Soon, their skin grows too tight for their body, so they
shed it in a process called molting. Larvae may shed several times
before they’re ready for the pupal stage.
After the last molt, when they have become plump and juicy from
scarfing up all the delectable plants in sight, caterpillars pupate.
Those that are going to become butterflies secrete sticky substances
that harden to make chrysalises.
Most caterpillars that are going to become moths spin cocoons out
of silk. However, some moths, like the sphinx moth, simply burrow
into the ground, where their skin becomes hardened.
The pupal stage of butterflies and moths was originally thought to
be a resting stage, but that’s not accurate. Actually, the pupa is
far from resting. During the pupal stage, complex biochemical
reactions remodel tissues and transform the ugly worm-like
caterpillar into the beautiful winged insect we call a butterfly.
It’s hard to love a caterpillar. They can be hairy, thorny or
covered with branched spines. Many are downright nasty-looking. And
let’s face it, they eat their weight in foliage every day. Some
gardeners attack caterpillars with blasts of “shock and awe”
pesticides designed to wipe them off the face of the Earth. We don’t
object to lethal measures for infestations of pest caterpillars such
as cabbage looper moths or tomato hornworms. But even for those
villains, we prefer mechanical controls such as hand-picking.
Instead of using lethal weapons, some gardeners like to attract
butterflies by planting things that caterpillars like to eat or that
adult butterflies use for nectar. That’s what we try to do.
Our backyard “lawn” is planted almost entirely in herbs such as
parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Butterflies like it and we can use
our “lawn” in cooking, after picking off any caterpillars of course.
Some species of swallowtail butterflies lay their eggs on parsley,
while some prefer citrus trees. We have both of these food plants, as
well as some California native plants, and have had anise
swallowtails, giant swallowtails, western swallowtails and other
beautiful butterflies in our backyard.
With about 11,000 species of butterflies and moths in North
America, we’re not about to try to identify all those in Huntington
Beach in this column. For the most part, we’re content to put
butterflies into broad categories such as whites, sulphers,
swallowtails and skippers. We can recognize a few of the more
dramatically marked butterflies such as monarchs, painted ladies and
mourning cloaks, but don’t ask us to identify individual species of
checkerspots and metalmarks or tell a California sister from a
Lorquin’s admiral.
A really fun way to get started gardening for butterflies is to
attend the Friends of Shipley Nature Center butterfly event and sale
of California native plants from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday in
Central Park, outside the nature center entrance. The Friends will
have about 40 species of plants available for sale. These plants were
especially selected for their attractiveness to butterflies and
hummingbirds. Butterfly experts will be available to talk about
butterflies and will have examples of butterfly eggs and chrysalises.
We suggest that you get a butterfly guide, such as “Western
Butterflies” in the Peterson Field Guide Series, and learn about
these beauty queens of the insect world. Come to Shipley Nature
Center on Saturday, buy some hard-to-find California native plants
and get started gardening for butterflies in your own yard. You won’t
regret it.
* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and
environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.
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