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1. Garden "Pubs" for Butterflies
by Alcinda Lewis
Like most gardeners, I take such pleasure in flowers that I lose sight of the fact that they did not evolve solely to bring me happiness. As we all know but usually forget, flowers exist first and foremost to attract pollinating insects. Some of the most intriguing pollinators are the butterflies, which grace our gardens with their unique beauty and magic. As you'll see in this book, to attract butterflies we need to make only relatively small changes in our current practices and styles. The result can be gardens that require less labor but provide more enjoyment.
Several years ago, I lived and worked for a few months on the estate of British biologist Miriam Rothschild, an early promoter of butterfly gardening. I arrived in late winter to an unkempt, seemingly chaotic assortment of gardens, fields and medieval woods. But as spring unfolded and flowers appeared everywhere, I saw the method in this apparent madness. Wildflowers were combined in lovely tapestries with prized horticultural varieties, and plants that butterflies love were intermingled with the roses they ignore.
As Rothschild demonstrated in her book The Butterfly Gardener (Michael Joseph, London, 1983), we can attract butterflies by providing a garden "pub" -- by growing the nectar-producing flowers they prefer. Creating such a butterfly pub is the subject of this book, from an introduction to butterfly biology and the principles of butterfly gardens, to detailed encyclopedias of common butterflies and their nectar plants.
As you succeed in attracting butterflies to your garden, you will also want to give them incentives to linger. For this, you'll need to provide food for their young. Food plants for butterfly larvae are not necessarily the same as nectar plants for adults, and they are not covered extensively in this book. We do list larval plants in the butterfly encyclopedia and provide leads to further information on this second stage of butterfly gardening in the bibliography.
One not-so-hidden agenda of many advocates of butterfly gardening is conservation. Jennifer Owen, in her book The Ecology of a Garden (University Press, Cambridge, 1991), argues that even small, conventional gardens can be a significant collective nature reserve, particularly in urban areas. Even if conservation isn't your primary goal, you can take some satisfaction in knowing that your efforts may be contributing to the preservation of some of the world's most beautiful creatures.
As with so many endeavors, these worthy reasons for butterfly gardening coexist with ones grounded in human pleasure and excitement. Jo Brewer, one of the first proponents of butterfly gardening in this country, recognized this when she wrote, "A garden is as static as a painting until butterflies bring it to life."
Alcinda Lewis is the guest editor of Butterfly Gardens. She is a biologist specializing in plant-animal interactions, most recently learning in butterflies. She was editor of the journal of the Denver Botanic Gardens and of Insect Learning: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives with D. Papaj. She has contributed to Fine Gardening and other publications.