Sap-visiting butterflies

I was surprised when my fellow butterfly enthusiasts and Garden volunteers told me today about butterflies visiting oozing sap on an oak near the Caboose Parking area and showed me some remarkable photos. Wow.

There were Red Admirals, and Commas, and others taking advantage of the fresh sap, perhaps as a consequence of Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers drilling into the bark.

One of our garden horticulturists had alerted them to this, having just observed the masses of butterflies.

Hopefully, I'll be able to post a few of their photos!

Butterflies and more butterflies

Our warm, early fall temperatures, at least by late morning, are wonderful for watching butterflies.  On the purple lantana near my office, there were pipevine swallowtails, monarchs, skippers of all sorts, sulphur butterflies, and fritillaries.

Fabulous!

A Mourning Cloak sighting

On the warmest day of late winter so far, I saw two butterflies. One was orange, and I didn't get a good look at it.

The other was a mourning cloak, one of our few butterflies that overwinter as adults, emerging on warm days like this one.

This is an image of a pinned Mourning Cloak from MonarchWatch, an excellent organization that monitors monarch migrations and abundance.

The overwintering adults mate in spring, on warm afternoons like this one.

Some great photos and more information about butterflies are on Randy Emmitt's site -- here's a link to the mourning cloak page, but check out his other photos while you're there.

More butterfly gardening

I'm so pleased with the new site of the butterfly garden at the South Carolina Botanical Garden (where I work), and all of the efforts that volunteers and staff made planting today, I can't really think of a 'personal' post today. Check out my post on our unofficial garden blog for more details.

A new butterfly garden

I find work and home gardening and garden outreach intertwined often. But I'm totally enthused about our new Butterfly Garden site (an expansion of the Children's Garden) at the botanical garden where I work.

We've had a Butterfly Garden for many years, but it was not a good site (on a hill, windy, and in poor soil). So relocating it in a sheltered site below established Children's Garden plantings (the Ethnobotany Garden, the Peter Rabbit Garden, and the Food for Thought Garden), makes a lot of sense.

We'll be putting plants in the ground tomorrow, hooray! I'm totally thrilled about it. This was my post on our not-official garden blog.