Butterfly Gardening Blog

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.

I found these little white flowers growing along the side of my garden. I have no idea if they are native to this area or anything. If you recognize what they are, please let me know!

My small lilac is blooming now! Lilacs aren’t native to this area and don’t have any particular benefit for butterflies as far as I know. But I love them! They are so beautiful! I try to mostly grow native plants, but I have few exceptions - this is one.

Here is a close up of some of the flowers:

I found a few Black Swallowtail caterpillars some days ago - just didn’t have time to post the picture. It is on Yellow Pimpernel - I need to check the spelling on that. Don’t have time at the moment. It is a native host plant for Black Swallowtails - which isn’t easy to find. I’ll have to write more about that later. But for now I’m just very happy the plant was found and eggs were laid on it:

I got my Wordpress updated and the problems fixed! I added some plugins and generally fixed this blog up a bit too.

It’s been rainy and cold and cloudy here the past few days. And muddy. So I haven’t been out to the garden too much.

I have pictures of caterpillars taken a few days ago. Below is a Monarch baby from the eggs laid on Earth Day and shown here: First Monarch Sighting!

Unfortunately my digital camera doesn’t let me focus on small objects - it was just luck I was able to get this one in focus. Couldn’t get it at a different angle though.