Butterfly Gardening Blog

No, really. That is what they are called – their common name is ‘pussy toes‘. The flowers which are small white things, supposedly look like cat toes.

I believe I have two different species – I need to check into this. You can see from this picture – the flowers of one are taller than the other:

Here you can see the leaves of one is bigger than the other too:

Smaller leaves:

I prefer the ones with bigger leaves, since the American Lady makes nests in them, I figure that would give them more to work with.

We had hail here today! Below you can see it piled up along the wall on our deck:

It was too rainy here most of the day to even go outside – and muddy! Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer!

My Wild Violets are blooming beautifully now! They of course are host plants for fritillaries, like the Variegated Fritillary. I mostly have them growing between and along my stepping stones:

Here’s a picture from a distance where you can see them around the stepping stones:

We have been replacing our lawn with a native grass, meanwhile – since it hasn’t filled in all the way there are lots of violets growing there. And dandelions too – but they are also pretty.

I saw my first Monarch just a few minutes ago! I couldn’t get a picture of it, it wouldn’t sit still, but was definitely a female looking for a place to lay eggs.

So I went and took a look at what little milkweed is coming up so far. And guess what? I found eggs on my purple milkweed and whorled milkweed! Unfortunately, I just started pages on those 2 plants recently too, so I can’t give you much information about them yet.

Last year, I found the first Monarch eggs in my garden on the 24th – so its 2 days earlier this year! And on Earth Day too!

Here is a picture of the purple milkweed – its just barely sticking out of the ground. I can’t wait tilll it blooms – its my favorite milkweed flower! The eggs aren’t visible, they were on the other side.

On the whorled milkweed you might be able to make out the eggs if you click on the picture to see it bigger.

Happy Earth Day to everyone!

My butterfly garden is just starting to grow this year, but I do have a few pictures to share. None of butterflies though. I did see a sulfur today though – not sure what species and couple of days ago I saw a Red Admiral – earliest I think I’ve ever seen one!

Below is a Bird’s Foot Violet. I just started a regular page for this plant but don’t have much written on it – but its a native violet, and the flowers can be one of two different color patterns. This is the darker one.

Here is one of the other color pattern:

This is the area I have them planted in – I should get some more sometime:

I have more I could write today, but I was having some problems with the image upload and still need to fix this site in other ways, so I think I will stop for now.

I do plan to start writing here again this summer. I now not only have a digital camera, but also a computer that I can pretty easily get the photos on to. What I don’t have is a camera that can focus on really small things like eggs and first instar caterpillars though. Maybe someday.

If I can, I’ll start writing again on earthday – seems appropriate – which I think is this coming saturday.

Updated: I see that Earthday is actually Tuesday – I’ll resume posting here tomorrow then!