Gardening for butterflies a rewarding hobby

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Butterflies are beautiful to behold. With delightful markings and

vibrant colors, a butterfly wafting gently over a bed of flowers is a

springtime treat for the eyes.

Of course, if you get beyond the poetry of the visual image and

concentrate on the butterfly’s behavior, you’ll realize that it is

probably just looking for a place to lay its eggs. That’s the

downside of butterflies. The eggs hatch into caterpillars, and

caterpillars eat plants. It takes some education and restraint to

avoid squashing every caterpillar you see gorging on your precious

garden plants. But unless they’re allowed to complete their life

cycle, they can’t mature into beautiful butterflies.

The life cycle of a butterfly is a bit more complicated than that

of a dog or horse. With mammals, embryonic development occurs in the

womb, and what you see when the animal is born is a critter that is

fairly recognizable as a dog or horse. Insects are more complicated.

After mating, the female butterfly lays a cluster of tiny eggs on a

food plant. The eggs hatch into little worm-like larvae.

Larvae do nothing but eat, which does not endear them to

gardeners. Soon, their skin grows too tight for their body, so they

shed it in a process called molting. Larvae may shed several times

before they’re ready for the pupal stage.

After the last molt, when they have become plump and juicy from

scarfing up all the delectable plants in sight, caterpillars pupate.

Those that are going to become butterflies secrete sticky substances

that harden to make chrysalises.

Most caterpillars that are going to become moths spin cocoons out

of silk. However, some moths, like the sphinx moth, simply burrow

into the ground, where their skin becomes hardened.

The pupal stage of butterflies and moths was originally thought to

be a resting stage, but that’s not accurate. Actually, the pupa is

far from resting. During the pupal stage, complex biochemical

reactions remodel tissues and transform the ugly worm-like

caterpillar into the beautiful winged insect we call a butterfly.

It’s hard to love a caterpillar. They can be hairy, thorny or

covered with branched spines. Many are downright nasty-looking. And

let’s face it, they eat their weight in foliage every day. Some

gardeners attack caterpillars with blasts of “shock and awe”

pesticides designed to wipe them off the face of the Earth. We don’t

object to lethal measures for infestations of pest caterpillars such

as cabbage looper moths or tomato hornworms. But even for those

villains, we prefer mechanical controls such as hand-picking.

Instead of using lethal weapons, some gardeners like to attract

butterflies by planting things that caterpillars like to eat or that

adult butterflies use for nectar. That’s what we try to do.

Our backyard “lawn” is planted almost entirely in herbs such as

parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Butterflies like it and we can use

our “lawn” in cooking, after picking off any caterpillars of course.

Some species of swallowtail butterflies lay their eggs on parsley,

while some prefer citrus trees. We have both of these food plants, as

well as some California native plants, and have had anise

swallowtails, giant swallowtails, western swallowtails and other

beautiful butterflies in our backyard.

With about 11,000 species of butterflies and moths in North

America, we’re not about to try to identify all those in Huntington

Beach in this column. For the most part, we’re content to put

butterflies into broad categories such as whites, sulphers,

swallowtails and skippers. We can recognize a few of the more

dramatically marked butterflies such as monarchs, painted ladies and

mourning cloaks, but don’t ask us to identify individual species of

checkerspots and metalmarks or tell a California sister from a

Lorquin’s admiral.

A really fun way to get started gardening for butterflies is to

attend the Friends of Shipley Nature Center butterfly event and sale

of California native plants from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday in

Central Park, outside the nature center entrance. The Friends will

have about 40 species of plants available for sale. These plants were

especially selected for their attractiveness to butterflies and

hummingbirds. Butterfly experts will be available to talk about

butterflies and will have examples of butterfly eggs and chrysalises.

We suggest that you get a butterfly guide, such as “Western

Butterflies” in the Peterson Field Guide Series, and learn about

these beauty queens of the insect world. Come to Shipley Nature

Center on Saturday, buy some hard-to-find California native plants

and get started gardening for butterflies in your own yard. You won’t

regret it.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].