Butterfly Gardening Blog

My monarda has been blooming – starting to fade now but I took these pictures a few days ago. It is a nectar source, not a host plant. I wanted it in part to have something that would bloom early in the season. I don’t really see many butterflies in my garden this time of year yet, but its good to have something for them if they do stop by.

a close up:

My pipevine* is blooming! I still get excited by that because it took like 2-3 years at least for mine to bloom. Pipevine gets its name because the blooms look a bit like a pipe. And it is of course the host plant for the Pipevine Swallowtail. While I see many adult Pipevine Swallowtails in the summer I have yet to find any eggs on my vines.

Here are a couple pictures of the flowers from slightly different angles:

*(My pipevine page is a bit dated now, by the way. I need to find the time to update a lot on this site.)

Every year we have lots of preying mantis’s around our garden. Usually in the spring I see a bunch of babies shortly after they hatch. A few times they’ve been right by our front door and we’ve actually had to be careful not to step on them or to let them walk into the house.

I was a little concerned this year because I hadn’t seen any yet. But today – I saw some!

Only three and they looked a little bigger than they usually are when I first see them. So I’m guessing that these are a few days old – and most of them has dispersed already – hence only seeing 3 of them or they could be a different species. Last year we saw at least one that was much larger that ones we usually see here.

I’m no expert on preying mantis species, but I was under the impression that the large ones where I live were all Chinese preying mantis (sorry don’t know scientific name). But clearly we’ve seen more than one type of large one.

At any rate, here are a couple picture of our new babies (you may need to click on the image for it to be big enough to see it clearly):

The weather was great here today and I spent most of my time outside working on my garden. I had a few things to get in the ground, some trimming, weeding. A lot to keep me busy.

I have a lot more blooming now – but I’m way too tired to even get any pictures on here today.

My lilac is really peaking with its blooms now. I have a bad sense of smell, but even I can smell the flowers from a few feet away.

I didn’t even see one adult butterfly today though. Some caterpillars though – I’ve got monarchs and black swallowtails out there.

I found these little white flowers growing along the side of my garden. I have no idea if they are native to this area or anything. If you recognize what they are, please let me know!

My small lilac is blooming now! Lilacs aren’t native to this area and don’t have any particular benefit for butterflies as far as I know. But I love them! They are so beautiful! I try to mostly grow native plants, but I have few exceptions – this is one.

Here is a close up of some of the flowers:

I found a few Black Swallowtail caterpillars some days ago – just didn’t have time to post the picture. It is on Yellow Pimpernel – I need to check the spelling on that. Don’t have time at the moment. It is a native host plant for Black Swallowtails – which isn’t easy to find. I’ll have to write more about that later. But for now I’m just very happy the plant was found and eggs were laid on it:

I got my WordPress updated and the problems fixed! I added some plugins and generally fixed this blog up a bit too.

It’s been rainy and cold and cloudy here the past few days. And muddy. So I haven’t been out to the garden too much.

I have pictures of caterpillars taken a few days ago. Below is a Monarch baby from the eggs laid on Earth Day and shown here: First Monarch Sighting!

Unfortunately my digital camera doesn’t let me focus on small objects – it was just luck I was able to get this one in focus. Couldn’t get it at a different angle though.

Those pictures in the last post are supposed to be showing up small, but aren’t and some how or another my title for the post isn’t showing either.

Maybe it has something to do with the upgrade I’m supposed to do.

I have some pictures of caterpillars, but they will have to wait until I get this sorted out.

Update: It seems to be ok now. It had something to do with how the pictures uploaded. I upgraded WP I don’t know if that is what fixed it or not.

I originally planted this plant, senecio obovatus (sp?) because I read it was the host plant for the Northern Metalmark. Then, I read that sightings of the Northern Metalmark in this area were probably mistakes. Apparently the the metalmark in this area is the Swamp Metalmark, which uses a plant I haven’t been able to find. I haven’t seen the butterfly around here either.

The plant though is really nice. It blooms early in the year with nice pretty little yellow flowers. After they die off the plant is very short and make a sort of ground covering. It can get a bit aggressive with spreading around though. I started this patch of it with just one little plant maybe 3-4 years ago. There’s supposed to be mostly liatris in that area. It will be interesting if it still comes up and blooms well this year or not.

Here are the flowers from a distance:

Here a little closer up:

Here a much closer up picture of the flowers: