Yes I planted a butterfly garden in my yard.  Am I entirely pleased that I did so?  Not right at this moment!

Cover image above: from an 1917 book titled “Butterflies Worth Knowing.”

Big Butterfly Flitting Through the Yard

I saw a giant black and yellow butterfly flitting through my yard and I was so happy to see that my butterfly garden was indeed drawing them in.  So I grabbed my butterfly book and tried to identify it, but the beautiful creature never sat still!  It wasn’t easy.  I got as far as some sort of black swallowtail.  I wrote that note in my garden journal.

If this was a movie there would be ominous music playing in the background.

So let me tell you the rest of the story.

Pampered Darling Citrus Tree

I have a dwarf Meyer lemon tree that I got as a little tiny six-inch-tall newly grafted baby tree. Over a decade later it is now over three feet tall! Proud plant mama here.

It is one of the few plants I take special care of, fertilizing right on schedule, covering in winter when chill is expected, and just generally fussing over. I get seven to ten lemons per year, and relish every one.

Now, imagine my dismay when I found my lovely little tree covered with caterpillars! Ugly hungry caterpillars. Caterpillars that looked like bird droppings!

I Know Better

Well, duh!  I have an extensive butterfly garden, filled with nectar plants almost from A to Z. (See end of this article for a list.)  If I am attracting and feeding masses of butterflies, I am going to have to expect a little hanky-panky might go on.  And after some hanky-panky, the lady butterfly will need a place to “give birth” or in other words, to lay her eggs.

And then there will be baby butterflies.  We call them caterpillars, and they are just like baby humans.  They eat, they poop, and they grow.  And just like some baby humans, these particular caterpillars have a face only a mother could love.

Which Caterpillars Are They?

Caterpillars are easier to identify that their mamas because they move a whole lot slower. My butterfly book tells me that these particular caterpillars are the larvae of the giant swallowtail butterfly (Papilio cresphontes). The book mentions that the caterpillar resembles bird droppings to deter predators.

They have more ways than looking ugly to deter predators. They have chemical defenses too! When bothered, the caterpillar will exert (stick out) an osmeterium out of their head end. The osmeterium are ‘horns’ they poof out of a special sac just behind their head. Red to orange in color, this apparatus is coated with a oil that releases a retchingly obnoxious odor. Yuck!

Let me warn you to NOT get that oil on your hands.  It took turpentine to get rid of that oil.  Soap and water was not enough.

Butterfly Babies

The giant swallowtail is a large and lovely butterfly, so the good news is that my butterfly garden is a success. The bad news is that my butterfly garden is a success. Now I have damage to a beloved tree, the work of those not so lovely butterfly babies.

A Conundrum

What to do about these troublesome babies? Spray is out of the question because I have native bees and praying mantis in the garden and don’t want to kill any good bugs. I could pick each caterpillar off the tree with my long cactus weeding forceps (tweezers), and drop them into a bucket of soapy water to drown them. This seems morally very wrong because I invited them, well their parents anyway, in for dinner. A true moral dilemma.

The solution to this dilemma? It took a little effort on my part, but in the true spirit of compromise I did it anyway.

How to Deal With Butterfly Babies

First I set up a nursery for the caterpillars out of a giant cardboard box that I cut holes out of and covered with window screen material. I put lots of newspaper on the bottom of the box because everything poops. I filled the box with citrus trimmings from an obliging neighbors citrus tree.

Then I took the previously mentioned long handled cactus forceps and plucked all nine caterpillars off my little lemon tree and relocated the caterpillars to the nursery I made for them.  I added fresh citrus leaves every few days, and eventually all the ugly little babies formed a chrysalis.  Now I am planning to release some giant swallowtail butterflies back into nature.

But I think I shall drive them to the other side of town first.

Butterfly Plant Book

Here is a short list of some of the more popular southwestern plants for butterfly gardens. For a more complete list, plus how to grow these plants see my book Butterfly Gardening in Southern Arizona, Revised Edition. Published by locally by Tierra del Sol – whose mission statement is “Helping people live in harmony with their environment.” 

All the profits from the sale of the book go to their Horticulture Therapy programs.

 

 

 

Butterfly Plant List (partial)

Linked ones are underlined
  Ageratum corymbosum – butterfly mist 
  Aristolochia watsonii – Watson's dutchman's pipe 
  Baccharis sarothroides – desert broom 
  Baileya multiradiata – desert marigold 
  Celtis pallida – desert hackberry 
  Chilopsis linearis – desert willow 
  Dalea candida – white prairie clover 
  Dalea greggii – trailing indigo 
  Encelia farinosa – brittlebush 
  Ericameria laricifolia – turpentine bush 
  Fallugia paradoxa – Apache plume 
  Gossypium thurberi – desert wild cotton 
  Ipomea arborescens – morning glory tree
  Justicia californica – chuperosa 
  Lupinus species – lupine
  Mimosa dysocarpa – velvetpod mimosa
  Mirabilis longiflora – white four o'clock 
  Oenothera caespitosa – tufted evening primrose 
  Parkinsonia species – palo verde tree
  Passiflora foetida – desert passionflower
  Ratibida columnifera – Mexican hat, prairie coneflower
  Sarcostemma cyanchoides – climbing milkweed 
  Senna covesii – desert senna 
  Verbena tenuisecta – thin leaf verbena 
  Wedelia texana – Devil River daisy 
  Yucca species – yucca 
     and finally 
  Zinnia acerosa – desert zinnia

Legal

© Article copyright Jacqueline A. Soule. All rights reserved. You must ask permission to republish an entire blog post or article. Okay to use a short excerpt but you must give proper credit. You must also include a link to the original post on my site. No stealing photos.