Seeing Butterflies Everywhere

Season 4, Episode 31 - June 8, 2022

The idea for this episode was mostly Dee’s. She thought it would be good to talk about what it takes to attract butterflies to your garden and how to provide appropriate hospitality once they are there.

Then Carol mentioned a book she saw at a local bookstore and checked out from her library, The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World's Favorite Insect, by Wendy Williams (Amazon link if you prefer that over Bookshop).

We were off and running as they say. Dee was off looking for quotes about butterflies, and Carol was running around adding information to the show notes, trying to keep up.

Here are some of our tips for making butterflies feel at home in your garden:

• Don’t use pesticides, especially insecticides.

• Accept imperfection. Caterpillars become butterflies but before that, they are caterpillars who munch, munch, munch on your plants. They have to eat and they have such terrible table manners. They leave half-eaten leaves on plants and sometimes frass everywhere. Just accept it and move on.

• Be a bit untidy. Don’t clean sweep the garden in the fall. Leave plant debris for overwintering insects, including some butterflies.

• Plant some MILKWEED! That’s the big thing to grow these days for Eastern Monarchs and other insects. There are over 200 species of milkweeds; find one for your garden. Monarchs lay their eggs only on milkweed, and by eating the milkweed, the caterpillars become poisonous which protects them.

• Monarchs and other butterflies don’t live on milkweed alone so plant other native plants (and even some non-natives) like asters, coneflowers, zinnias, and butterfly bush, Buddleia. Carol got some new Buddleias from Darwin Perennials to trial in her garden: pink, cranberry, and blue in their Chrysalis™ series. She planted the first two in her pink garden and the blue one out front by the bird feeders. That blue one is going to be put to the test because under a bird feeder is often a poor location for plants in general, due to all the seed debris that falls there. We’ll see how they do!

We aren’t sure how goji berries figured into our butterfly topic, but we started talking about different berries a few weeks ago and Dee suggested we talk about goji berries this week. After reading more about them, and hearing Dee’s experience with trying them several years ago— because they were going to be the new “it” berry—we both agree, “no go to goji.” We don’t recommend you plant them in your garden!

Our dirt was good news about Eastern Monarchs, which seem to have increased a bit in numbers based on the count done at their winter home in Mexico.

Dee’s rabbit hole was straight from the book we featured, The Language of Butterflies, and took her to websites about Maria Sibylla Merian, including The Maria Sibylla Merian Society and Merianin.de.

If you check those sites out and start thinking about the color blue in butterflies and nature in general, check out one of Dee's newsletter articles: Color me blue.

Carol is still thinking about making a picnic table for her squirrels and is again, or still, reading the Aunt Dimity mystery series. As of this writing, she’s on the 10th book. If you’re interested in reading along with Carol, start with the first book, Aunt Dimity's Death, by Nancy Atherton. It really is best to read them in order. The books are charming, quick reads. Perfect for summer.

And then there was that tease from Carol, how she is on the edge about something and will talk about it in next week’s episode.

In other news, both Dee and Carol have been writing “how to grow” articles for Family Handyman. We should include links here, but that “seems like a lot of work.” How about you just go to their website and look at all the great gardening info they are featuring?

Finally, if you’d like to support our podcast, you can use this affiliate link to Botanical Interest Seeds. If you buy something from them after using this link, we earn a small commission at no cost to you. The book links above are also affiliate links.

As always, we love hearing from our listeners. Email us anytime at TheGardenangelists@gmail.com.

For more info on Carol and her books, visit her website.  Visit her blog May Dreams Gardens.
For more info on Dee and her book, visit her website.  Visit her blog Red Dirt Ramblings.

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