Butterfly Gardening Blog

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.

Those pictures in the last post are supposed to be showing up small, but aren’t and some how or another my title for the post isn’t showing either.

Maybe it has something to do with the upgrade I’m supposed to do.

I have some pictures of caterpillars, but they will have to wait until I get this sorted out.

Update: It seems to be ok now. It had something to do with how the pictures uploaded. I upgraded WP I don’t know if that is what fixed it or not.

I originally planted this plant, senecio obovatus (sp?) because I read it was the host plant for the Northern Metalmark. Then, I read that sightings of the Northern Metalmark in this area were probably mistakes. Apparently the the metalmark in this area is the Swamp Metalmark, which uses a plant I haven’t been able to find. I haven’t seen the butterfly around here either.

The plant though is really nice. It blooms early in the year with nice pretty little yellow flowers. After they die off the plant is very short and make a sort of ground covering. It can get a bit aggressive with spreading around though. I started this patch of it with just one little plant maybe 3-4 years ago. There’s supposed to be mostly liatris in that area. It will be interesting if it still comes up and blooms well this year or not.

Here are the flowers from a distance:

Here a little closer up:

Here a much closer up picture of the flowers:

My verbena is blooming now too:

Here’s a close up:

No, really. That is what they are called – their common name is ‘pussy toes‘. The flowers which are small white things, supposedly look like cat toes.

I believe I have two different species – I need to check into this. You can see from this picture – the flowers of one are taller than the other:

Here you can see the leaves of one is bigger than the other too:

Smaller leaves:

I prefer the ones with bigger leaves, since the American Lady makes nests in them, I figure that would give them more to work with.

We had hail here today! Below you can see it piled up along the wall on our deck:

It was too rainy here most of the day to even go outside – and muddy! Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer!