If you haven’t already, make a trip to the Roston Native Butterfly House at Nathanial Greene Park and Botanical Gardens for a delightful experience and friendly, free knowledge shared by docents about the genus Lepidoptera-butterflies, moths and skippers. It opens May 10 from 10:00 a.m. to dusk every day, as long as there are volunteers signed up, through the end of September. Every week the population of butterflies changes, you can look at caterpillars up close, see them eclose from their chrysalis and get to watch them pump their blood into their expanding wings, which takes about an hour before they can take flight. Butterflies signify a healthy ecosystem. It’s a wonderful way to broaden your knowledge and measure the health of your own ecosystem in your yard.
Most gardeners appreciate Lepidoptera both for their beauty and plant pollination. We attract them with a broad selection of flower nectar stations, a shallow dish of water and slices of fruit set out on hanging dishes. Yet gardeners and most people dislike the larval stage, not having any real comprehension of caterpillar lives beyond plucking them off our tomato plants or seeing a wooly caterpillar marching across a patio. Many people erroneously believe, as I once did, that caterpillars will eat anything they can in the plant world, especially the plants we work so hard to grow. However, most species of Lepidoptera have evolved to coexist on a select few or perhaps only one host plant. The caterpillar stage of Zebra Swallowtail needs the Pawpaw tree; the Tiger Swallowtail seeks out Tulip Poplar trees; Black Swallowtails favor Rue in your herb garden and my favorite, the Great Spangled Fritillary, needs the violets growing in your lawn and under shrubbery.
Whether you think it a process of Darwin’s theory of natural selection or divine intelligence or a combination of both, this pairing of species to selective host plants results in a balanced system that prevents us from being suffocated under a mile high pile of rotting leaves, and keeps any one particular species from overtaking all others. The number of violets will be reduced by the population of fritillary caterpillars and the number of those caterpillars will be constrained by the availability of violets, and so on.
If you wish to attract beautiful butterflies to your garden, you need to supply the following: (1) nectar plants to feed the adult butterflies, (2) a landscape that is lush,.75 layered and textured to attract mating pairs and, most of all, (3) the host plants to lay their eggs on that provide the food for the hatching caterpillars. If you want Monarch butterflies, plant the assorted native milkweeds for your area. It is no surprise that native butterflies, moths and skippers evolved with native plants, so the more natives you have in your garden, the more our native pollinators will thrive. Plus native plants are adapted to our soils, climate and weather. They are generally perennials, so come back year after year, allowing you to add to your garden rather than keep replacing it each spring.
In turn, this will attract birds of all kinds, as caterpillars are an ideal food source for rearing baby birds. Hungry baby birds will keep your caterpillar population in check so that you aren’t left with no leaves at all on your trees, shrubs and favorite plants. So, stop putting out birdseed from last frost to first frost and watch your garden thrive in natural balance. That’s the best reason not to use pesticides or herbicides. You and your pocketbook (ha! Bishop Diane, I still use the term!) will be glad you did.
