Butterfly Gardening Blog

There are a couple areas in the back yard where the honeysuckle has taken over – I need to cut it down and replace it with some good natives. Both are shaded areas so would be good for host plants like Spicebush, hop trees and pawpaw.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve posted here.

A lot has happened since my last posts. Most relevant – I’ve gotten divorced and moved. So I no longer have the garden I had before. I have to start all over. It’s been going pretty slow too.

Last year I got a few plants started, nothing special. Some fennel for Black Swallowtails, a swamp milkweed, black-eyed susan. I had a baptisia too, but the deer got it! Didn’t have that problem at the other house.

A few days ago I happened to be outside and saw a Black swallowtail lay some eggs too! Still don’t have a decent camera to be able to photograph first instar caterpillars though.

Well, 2009 was a bad butterfly year for my garden. Very bad.

I hope this year will be better!

I hate to say it, but it hasn’t been a very good year for my butterfly garden so far. The last couple of years I had monarch eggs on my milkweed as it was barely coming up out of the ground. This year I haven’t seen any at all yet.

I do have some caterpillars though, some
Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes). I kept looking for them and couldn’t see them for some reason though, but they are there.

I found some duskywing eggs on my baptisia a while back, I haven’t noticed any caterpillars though.

And yesterday I found one Giant Swallowtail egg on my prickly ash, but that is all so far.

I’ve got some other flowers blooming now – my yellow coneflower (Echinacea paradoxa) and my purple milkweed!

Too bad they weren’t planted next to each other, I think they would look great blooming next to each other! Hmmm, I think I have some more Echinacea paradoxa seeds somewhere .. and a little space next to one of my purple milkweed – maybe next year!

My monarda, sometimes called bee balm, is blooming now! I don’t have a lot of plants that bloom very early in the spring/summer – but this is one of them.

Today I saw a turkey vulture right behind our house, by the creek. It was huge! Didn’t seem too afraid of me either.

I was able to get one decent picture of it:

I contacted the Fenton Garden Club recently and asked them about joining. They invited me to their next meeting which was scheduled to be at Shaw Nature Reserve, today. So I went and had a great time!

I just wish I would have thought to take more pictures than I did!

All the pictures can be clicked on to see a bigger version.

The guide we had for the tour was James, who was extremely knowledgeable about the wildlife at Shaw. He was also very patient with all my (and everyone else’s) questions!

This first picture is of Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja coccinea). I believe that is the right scientific name, correct me if I’m wrong. It was growing in one of the prairie areas.

This next picture was taken as we were walking into the wildflower garden. In it you can see a beautiful pink dogwood, some yellow senecio flowers and the pale purple flowers of phlox divaricata

Here is a picture of mostly phlox, I think phlox divaricata, with a little bit of rose verbena (Glandularia canadensis) in front:

I have a habit of taking pictures of signs so that I can read the information on them later. They had a good one about bees. I wish I could identify more of the bee and bee-like species around my garden.

This sign mostly caught my attention because of the little frog on it – it was so cute:

I learned something new about honey bees from this part:

There was also a very informative sign about tall grass prairies. I couldn’t get all the text in one picture though, so you will have to read part of it in the second picture:

Around that time it was getting late and we had to leave.

Thank you garden club members for letting me tag along!

If you want to see more pictures of Shaw, I wrote a few posts last year from when I visited:

Shaw Nature Reserve Part 1 – Butterflies
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 2 – Prairie
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 3 – More butterflies
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 4 – Serpentine wall
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 5 – Prairie flowers
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 6 – Frog
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 7 – Wetland
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 8 – More prairie flowers
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 9 – Dodder (Cuscuta)
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 10 – Milkweed bugs!
Shaw Nature Reserve Part 11 – As we were leaving …

We went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens for Chinese Days again this year. I’m not usually at the garden this time of year so there were different things blooming than what I am used to seeing there. Mostly tulips.

In the morning our arbor/trellis/whatever-you-call-it blew over in the morning and my husband had to set it back up before we could leave:

Here’s some pictures of the tulips:

Here’s the entrance to the Chinese garden. This a traditional entrance to a Chinese garden, a moon gate, and is circular to symbolize perfection.

And the sign at the entrance:

This is the beautiful pond area in the Chinese garden. Both the bridge and the overlook were carved in China from white marble:

Here is the parade just as it was finishing up:

I found some baby preying mantis that had just hatched today! I was able to only get a few quick pictures of them before they all started running away. ( you might need to click on the image to see them more clearly)

Here’s the egg sack they came from: