Cloudless sulphur caterpillars

It's been great fun (as well as rewarding) to have a new butterfly garden (that emphasizes host plants as well as nectar plants) at the Botanical Garden where I work.  Two of our long-term volunteers and I came up with a list of our essential plants for a butterfly garden, as we were relocating ours from a less hospitable site (windy and rocky).

Most of the plants were then rounded up with the help of Garden staff, purchased with support from the Carolina Butterfly Society, or donated (largely from our home gardens).

Cloudless Sulphur caterpillar on Cassia

It's been magical through summer and fall.  The garden has flourished beyond expectations, and has been full of caterpillars and butterflies.

The sulphur butterfly caterpillars taking advantage of the Cassia obtusifolia (Sicklepod) plants were excellent to see, along with monarch caterpillars munching common milkweed, gulf fritillary caterpillars on passion vine, black swallowtails decimating the fennel and dill, and sleepy orange caterpillars on the Cassia plants.  Not to mention the Giant Swallowtails that have appeared, apparently because Rue and other herbs are around.

A establishing meadow

We transformed the mulched beds in front of our small mountain house into a new 'meadow' border last fall and this spring. It's probably best described as an informal perennial border, rather than a meadow, but we're working on it.

Rain and warmth this summer have nurtured these plants.  We lost a few over a very tough winter, but mostly they've thrived in the heavy clay soil (somewhat amended).

The Joe-Pye has been great;  in the Piedmont, it sulks without extra water.  In the mountains, this plant is a wonderful butterfly nectaring spot.

The purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), always short-lived, looks great, and was a magnet for this swallowtail butterfly (I think a Giant Swallowtail, as it had two stripes on its wings and isn't something I see often, but they're not evident on this picture).



And I'm looking forward to seeing the Arkansas Ironweed in full flower, and the Solidago, and the asters, too.

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.

Cleaning up

There's nothing like a month of enforced neglect to get a gardener worried. I'm not a fussy gardener at all; in truth, I quite like an exuberant and prolific garden, whether it be in borders, meadows, woodland plantings, or my vegetable garden.

But weedy beds and declining vegetables are not a happy sight. I worked on vegetables yesterday for my allotted hour or so (it'll be nice to get back to normal!)

So I was glad to be able to get out this morning and clean up a primary perennial border. It was full of crabgrass (yuck), but thankfully easy to pull, and various other pesky weeds.

Some judicious editing, and it was a good effort, even though it was about all I could manage.