Butterfly Gardening Blog

Snapdragons – Antirrhinum majus – are not native to this area but they are a host plant for the buckeye butterfly. I haven’t been able to locate a source for any host plants for this butterfly that are native. Mine have been blooming for a little while now. They start blooming pretty early in the summer and sometimes keep blooming for a long time. I started some new plants from seed this year too and I am hoping that they will bloom later this summer.

Once – I think 2 years ago I actually found a buckeye caterpillar on my plants. If there have been more I missed them. Now don’t quote me on this, I’m a bit rusty with some of my butterfly knowledge – but I believe buckeyes are partial migrators and don’t get up here for a while usually, at least not in large numbers.

My favorite snapdragon flowers are the bright, nearly solid yellow ones and the read dark red ones:

For years I had been wanting to get my yard certified as a backyard habitat by the National Wildlife Federation, but I just never got around to it until this year. Now I even I have my sign put up in the garden! I just love this program – at some point I will have to write about it more here.

I think the purple milkweed flowers are the prettiest of the flowers of milkweeds! They bloom kind of early in the year – in fact mine are about done blooming how. Their leaves are thicker unlike the swamp milkweed but the monarchs still seem to like them.

This picture was taken a few days ago:

I mentioned Purple Cone Flowers – Echinacea purpurea – in my last post. Those are starting to bloom now too. I have many more of them, they are great nectar sources for butterflies that are around early in the summer. And then later when they go to see gold finches love to eat the seeds. Of course, I’ve also seen them pull the petals off the flowers too!

This is a picture of the first Purple Cone Flower I had bloom this year:

I really don’t see many Great Spangled Fritillaries around my garden. And when I do they are usually gone so fast I can’t get a good picture. Today I saw one nectaring on a butterfly bush and managed to get a couple half way decent pictures – but not great – before it flew off across the street.

This is the first year my Echinacea paradoxa (yellow coneflower) has bloomed. They are a rather small plant- at least mine is, not so much in height but they don’t spread out very much. They only seem to have one flower on the plant, unlike the Purple Cone Flower – Echinacea purpurea. I started the ones I have now from seed and am trying to start more. I think I could find room for a few more in my garden. Gold finches love to eat the seeds from purple coneflowers, I am curious if they will be interested in these seeds too.

Malva is, I’m pretty certain, closely related to hollyhock. It is supposed to be a host plant for the Painted Lady butterfly, although I have not seen any on it yet. This is a variety which I had bought the seeds for quite a while back but never any luck with them before, but this year one of my plants is blooming very nicely!

Here is a close up of the flowers:

Here is the plant from a little distance: