Last summer my son and I made several trips to our favorite cat rescue shelter hunting for the right kitten. His wonderful Maine Coon cat had died and his remaining cat, the MONSTER of Hannah’s nightmares, was sad. Obviously, he needed a kitten!
One Caturday in July, we pulled up to discover that the butterfly garden planted in front of the rescue shelter was in full bloom. The most stunning flowers on display were the milkweed.
Wow, I thought, milkweed! I almost never see it blooming like this; I’m always late to the party and come across it once it has gone to seed. This was pretty amazing, and there was a lot of it. I stayed outside to take pictures while my son went into the shelter to hunt for a kitten. No kitten this day, but I did get great pictures.
Over the years I’ve been steadily adding flowers to my yard that are good for butterflies.
The butterflies in the pictures above are painted ladies and a swallowtail. Butterflies need flowers that are large enough to support their weight and have nectar conveniently available. Milkweed certainly fits that bill, and it is especially important since it is the major food source for the monarch butterfly. Monarchs are the butterflies of my childhood in Southern California, and they have recently been placed on the endangered list. Why are they struggling? Habitat loss, insecticides, a dwindling food supply…
Food supply! Milkweeds are food for monarch butterflies. I was pretty excited to see some more milkweed growing along the road in a field near my house. (Yes, I look for stuff like that. I am a BioGeek. I’m still on the lookout for some nice teasel, but that is another post…)
The picture on the left is of the remaining pods after the flowers were done blooming, and the one on the right is a few weeks later, the pods burst open and the seeds getting ready to fly on the wind like a dandelion to a new location. Cool, right. With luck some of these seeds will find a great place to live and more milkweed will appear in this field over the next few years.
Do monarch butterflies come through Colorado where I live? Why yes, yes they do!! They migrate right through the state in early fall and evidently you can see them in the Denver area. In my yard? Not so much right now. To the east of where I live, Monarch Watch tags and tracks monarch butterflies through their migration and has implemented programs to provide food for the monarchs along the way. Imagine thousands of plots of planted milkweed and other nectar plants put out just for these butterflies and you get the picture. Eventually this field near my house could be one of the stops along the way for these migrating butterflies.
Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady of the United States, died two weeks ago and her memorial service was last Wednesday. It was hard to keep the tears out of my eyes as the people who knew and loved her shared their memories. Recipes that featured mayonnaise. Twenty-dollar bills included in birthday cards. Her strawberry cake recipe. Her love for monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies!
That’s right. Rosalynn Carter was a driving force for the establishment of butterfly gardens. She made saving the monarch butterfly her personal mission towards the end of her life. There is a Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail, and here is where you can register your own butterfly garden. You should have milkweed in that garden, by the way!
Someday I will perhaps find a monarch butterfly in my own yard, because you know some of those milkweed seeds found their way home with me this fall. I’m planting them in the sun where they can hang out with the yarrow, the coneflowers, and the butterfly bush.
Oh, did you forget about the kittens? My son eventually found the two most perfect kittens in the world and his cat Jonesy MONSTER is a very happy boy again.
Update: Knit One, Spin Too just let me know about a new book about milkweed that came out in September called The Milkweed Lands. Who knew there was so much to milkweeds? I just ordered a copy. 🙂
Yarn, Books & Roses 