Design

I was surprised when my fellow butterfly enthusiasts and Garden volunteers told me today about butterflies visiting oozing sap on an oak near the Caboose Parking area and showed me some remarkable photos. Wow. There were Red Admirals, and Commas, and others taking advantage of the fresh sap, perhaps as a consequence of Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers drilling into the bark. One of our garden horticulturists had alerted them to this, having just observed the masses of butterflies. Hopefully, I'll be able to post a few of their photos!

Our warm, early fall temperatures, at least by late morning, are wonderful for watching butterflies.  On the purple lantana near my office, there were pipevine swallowtails, monarchs, skippers of all sorts, sulphur butterflies, and fritillaries. Fabulous!

I'm so pleased with the new site of the butterfly garden at the South Carolina Botanical Garden (where I work), and all of the efforts that volunteers and staff made planting today, I can't really think of a 'personal' post today. Check out my post on our unofficial garden blog for more details.

I find work and home gardening and garden outreach intertwined often. But I'm totally enthused about our new Butterfly Garden site (an expansion of the Children's Garden) at the botanical garden where I work. We've had a Butterfly Garden for many years, but it was not a good site (on a hill, windy, and in poor soil). So relocating it in a sheltered site below established Children's Garden plantings (the Ethnobotany Garden, the Peter Rabbit Garden, and the Food for Thought Garden), makes a lot of sense. We'll be putting plants in the ground tomorrow, hooray! I'm totally thrilled about it. This was my post on our not-official garden blog.

The Western North Carolina Nature Center has a lovely small seasonal butterfly house that I hadn't visited before. Displaying native butterflies (monarchs, gulf fritillaries, painted ladies, buckeyes, sulfurs, giant swallowtails, and others), it's a simple, but very effective display. A hoop house, covered with black mesh, entering and exiting through double-screen doors is the basic set-up: inexpensive and nice. Raised beds support a variety of nectar plants and many other donated plants creating a nice border mix. This monarch butterfly benefited from a purple coneflower inflorescence. An outdoor butterfly garden bed completes the display. Great fun, indeed. We'll be breaking ground in a couple of weeks for a new Butterfly Garden installation at the Botanical Garden where I work. We're excited about adding lots of host plants for butterfly caterpillars in addition to the nectar plants!

Leaving work at lunchtime, I saw a couple of sulfur butterflies spiraling in a courtship pattern, and a third flying nearby. It was close to 70°F this afternoon, warm and sunny. Here's a cloudless sulfur taken by Gene Hanson in Arizona. He has a great site with beautiful butterfly images (he was gracious enough to let me use several for one of the Garden's butterfly garden signs). We have a number of sulfur species; they have great common names such as Clouded Sulphur, Little Yellow, and Cloudless Sulphur, and Southern Dogface. It may have been something like a Little Yellow that I saw, since they had dark-edged wings. But I didn't have time to really get a good look at their markings. Many sulfurs specialize on different legumes for their larval host plants, while a few focus on blueberries and willows.

I've seen lots of butterflies in our garden recently. Most are familiar visitors, and always welcome. But I've needed to remind myself recently of the differences between two of the 'regulars' -- tiger and black swallowtails. They belong to a mimicry group of butterflies that mimic pipevine swallowtails . Male tiger swallowtail Male tiger swallowtails are yellow with black stripes, but females are either yellow, with blue on the hindwing, or dark, also with blue spots on the hindwing. It's telling the dark females apart from some of the other dark swallowtails that's harder. Hmm, I see from my Kaufman guide that there's a good bit of variation in the tiger female's dark morph, just to complicate things. But distinguishing black swallowtails to dark tiger females is easy if you get a good look at the lower side of the wing and how it's banded with orange, and then get a good look at the upper wings (easier said than done). Check out a wonderf...

I've been watching tiger swallowtails do their spiral courtship dance near the phlox this morning. The black one is the female, the yellow the male. She'll lay her eggs on all sorts of host plants -- tulip poplar, ash, and black cherry, among others. It's great to see some butterflies now after such a poor season to date. The April freeze followed by drought must have really taken its toll on butterflies, since they've been conspicuously absent up until now. One of my first forays into gardening as an adult was gardening for butterflies. In spite of being a biologist, I had no idea of what caterpillars or butterflies ate, not much about their life cycles, and certainly little about their feeding preferences. My fellow students did pollination projects, and my best friend reared caterpillars in plastic bags as part of her research, but I was oblivious to the nuances. But, starting to learn about butterflies, their host plants, and caterpillars was fascinating, and ...