Generally, our neighborhood has stripped most of the native flowers from the yards and my neighbors seem to view perrenials as less than desirable. Evergreen is the color of my block.My backyard is an anomoly though. We have continued to build the perrenial gardens each season. Starting last fall, I had been adding host plants to our garden in an effort to offer the butterflies more opportunities to lay eggs and hang around.
So, amidst the lantanna and butterfly bushes, I have strategically planted host plants. So far, it has been pretty successful. They seem more temperamental than our other garden plants. I have no idea why, but the parsley and rue just seem to fail for no apparant reason. But we did manage to get a few plants to root and take up residence.
So, this year, we have a huge crop of black swallowtail caterpillars. Last year, a kind woman at Pike's had given us some rue plants with larvae on them. I quickly managed to kill the plants and the birds got the larvae. But we had determined that we could offer them a place to lay this year. So, we added several rue, parsley and fennil plants.The challenge will be keeping them alive. Despite their bright markings, the wrens seem to love to eat them. I am considering building a net structure to put over the plant to protect them, but I don't relish the way it will look.
We also identified another welcome guest that took up residence on our weeping locust. A silver wing skipper. We have seen a lot of these on the flowers, but didn't know they would lay on the tree. The caterpillar creates a little sleeping bag out of leaves to rest in during the day. We only found it because the leaves were all stuck together and it was at eye level. It's a big tree, so we assume there are more up there.
A less welcome guest turned up this weekend as well. We found these caterpillars on one of our eonymus shrubs near the gate. At first glance, they looked facinating. Very pretty and interesting looking. We hoped they would be to something decorative. We were wrong. Apparently, the saddle-back caterpillar is pretty well known for its sting. They needles are venomous and very very painful. There are entire discussion threads about how foul these stings are. Add insult to injury, the moth is just non-descript. We are still deciding if we need to do anything about these critters. They are out of the way, and the kids have been warned.All in all, this summer has been a boon for butterflies, moths and larvae. We recently added passion flower to our garden to offer something for the frittallaries. So far, no takers. But it was late in the season.
