Butterfly Gardening Blog

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:

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.