For spicebush swallowtails, spicebush and sassafras trees work well in smaller spaces. Gardeners with yards can also provide habitat for swallowtails by planting bushes and trees that serve as larvae hosts. An added bonus: For all its delicate beauty, the plant requires no extra care. Passionflower, a gorgeous tropical-looking vine, hosts caterpillars of gulf fritillaries, zebra longwings, red-banded hairstreaks and other butterflies. Many people still confuse this plant with three-leaved poison ivy and yank it from their gardens, but its five leaves make it easily distinguishable. Virginia creeper, our native alternative, provides food for the Pandora sphinx moth caterpillar and berries for bluebirds and other animals. If you’ve ever had English ivy, you’re probably aware of how invasive it is. The wide-ranging cloudless sulphur butterfly prefers wild senna and related plants in the pea family, and native violets host a number of fritillary species while also providing beautiful ground cover. Even better, the plant also feeds the caterpillars of more than three dozen species of Lepidoptera (the large order of insects that includes both butterflies and moths).īlack-eyed Susans host the caterpillars of dozens of species and are broadly distributed throughout the United States. To help reverse this trend, plant butterfly weed, not butterfly bush, and other milkweed species.Īnother butterfly favorite is joe-pye weed just one of these plants in my backyard last summer had dozens of swallowtail butterflies fluttering around it all day for weeks, making it even more of a nectar magnet than a butterfly bush. For example, milkweed, which supports monarchs and many other butterfly caterpillars, is being wiped out by the proliferation of chemical-laden corn and soybean crops in the Midwest. Though many of the plants most useful to wildlife have the word “weed” in them due to their once abundant presence on the continent, they now need help to repatriate the land. Chickadees, for example, require an average of 9,100 caterpillars to raise a single brood. As entomologist Douglas Tallamy notes in Bringing Nature Home, 96 % of this continent’s terrestrial bird species rely on insects to feed their young. But it’s just one of many insect “specialists” who can digest only plants they’ve co-evolved with.įactoring in the needs of other animals reveals an even broader problem when nonnatives dominate a landscape. The struggling monarch butterfly, whose larvae rely on the leaves of disappearing milkweed, has become the poster child for the critical relationship between specific plant and animal species. Like many nonnatives, the butterfly bush provides no sustenance to butterfly babies, turning gardens into adults-only communities without the amenities that allow youngsters to flourish and grow. In fact, it takes over habitats that are of far greater value to butterflies and other creatures. But a growing number of wildlife-friendly gardeners understand that, for all its beauty, this shrub, native to Asia, has no place in our ecosystem.
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