Janustory - Day 19

Today's installment: The blue butterflies have been following me and I’m beginning to worry they may have it in for me. #janustory #wordcount19

Butterflies. So elusive and so seductive. We have a few native blue butterflies, but if you think they'll hold still for picture, forget it. Sometimes, you can sneak up on a monarch. Instead of blue butterflies, we have a butterfly on blue salvia. Enjoy!

Janustory - Day 11

Today's installment: The blue butterflied do not seem to appreciate my rasping storytelling. #janustory #wordcount11

Capturing butterflies is an exercise in patience. Monarchs are particularly skittish. So when you get a good shot, you share it!

Butterflies: Jewels on the Wing

These two Eastern tiger swallowtails are feasting on echinacea, our native coneflower.

It's been a bad year for butterflies. We just haven't seen nearly as many. There's several reasons from heavy herbicide use by farmers to freezes along the migration path to loss of winter habitat in Mexico.  Only in August have we started to see more of our common butterflies like monarchs, red admirals, red spotted purples, skippers and others. At work, we had our first butterfly, bee and bird festival last weekend. We had a great time, but more fun was staff raising butterflies from eggs. You really don't appreciate the miracle of nature until you see a caterpillar split into a chrysalis.

Butterflies are easy to attract with a little planning and a sunny protected site. First, be open to damage. Caterpillars need to eat plants and they can be quite voracious, so lay off the herbicides and pesticides. Also, caterpillars are very particular about their food sources. Monarchs only eat plants in the milkweed family. Swallowtails like parsely, fennel, and dill. Of course butterfly bush will attract butterflies, but our native plants often provide more nutrients. Some pollinators emerge only when their favorite native nectar and pollen source is blooming.

Add a butterfly muddle.  Take a shallow dish or saucer, fill it with sand and top it off with some small flat rocks. Add water and keep it moist and maybe sprinkle some salt from time to time. Butterflies can't handle the water tension of a birdbath and love a little extra salt. You can also add some pieces of fruit, but by and large, butterflies are attracted to feces.  Well, someone has to.

The Morton Arboretum has a terrific list of plants for nectar and larvae. Check out the Xerces Society for lots of information and to become more involved in butterfly and polllinator conservation. For identification, try Butterflies and Moths of North America.  You can also report sitings and keep track of what's been seen in your area.

Native Treasures: Common Milkweed

We live in the Prairie State, yet only a small percentage of the original 22 million acres of tallgrass prairie still exist.  The plants of the prairie and savannah are tough, tolerant species that thrive on our weather extremes with minimal fuss and very little watering.  They may not be as showy as an Asiatic lily or a tropical canna, but lots of work is being done to improve cultivars for home gardens.  One example is the many new kinds of echinacea or coneflower on the market including Tomato Soup and Sunset, Sunrise, or Twilight.  I like to use native and native cultivars when I can as the prairie is such a unique ecosystem.  If you get a chance, take a stroll through the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum in July when the grass is highest and think about how our pioneer ancestors looked out across this sea of grass from their front porches.

One native plant I cultivate is common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca).  Most of the time it grows about knee height, however, in my rich soil this baby tops out around six feet.  I'm trying to get them to stay in the back border, but as most plants do, they have minds of their own. In summer they have heavy clusters of fragrant pale pink star-shaped flowers that attract a multitude of insects, especially monarch butterflies.  This is one of the monarch's host plants, although many butterflies like it.  Milkweed develops woody stems so they don't flop over and provide vertical interest in the garden.  Their milky sap can be poisonous and is one of the chief defenses of the monarch butteflies.  They taste nasty.  As kids, we learned quickly that the sap can glue your fingers together if you let it dry. 

My favorite things about milkweeds are their unique flower structure and their fabulous pods.  If I didn't let them seed, I would have a much tamer landscape, but I am fascinated by the many variable shapes and textures milkweed leaves, stems, and seed pods develop as they dry and split.  In a fresh snow, they are a collage of textures and colors.  Common milkweed is just one species, there are several out there in different sizes and colors, even the swamp milkweed that loves to be damp.

One of the many monarch butterflies having a snack.  See the star-shaped flowers and how delicate they are?

This is the native Asclepias variegata from the Smoky Mountains.  It was very short and growing in quite a bit of shade.

Click on this to get the full impact of the textures of asclepias in snow. Reminds me of fiber collage.