A Recipe to Entice Floating Tapestries to Your Garden Part 2

Today: Did you know that today is the anniversary of the Interstate Highway System’s birth? Yep, June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill providing 33.5 million dollars for highway construction. It also happens to be the biggest public works program in history. Be it a bane or blessing to you—those are the facts. And what does that have to do with gardening? Well. Nothing actually—just thought it might be an interesting factoid to banter about at the dinner table tonight.


Attracting Floating Tapestries—Part 2

Greetings Earthling! Beautiful and a very important pollinator too!

Okay, so we covered providing a sunny, sheltered site with lots of host plants for the caterpillars and nectar-producing plants for the butterflies in our Part 1 post. What else do you need? The rest of this stuff is all bonus for our butterfly friends…

FACT—There are about 700 species found in North America and about 100 in Illinois.


"Do you like my hat? Butterfly not included." All of the pictures in this post (with the exception of Mr. Caterpillar) are compliments of Jim Frazier--one of Cantigny's Volunteer Photographers...Thanks Jim!

Ingredient number 5: provide a “Puddling” spot. What the heck is that you may ask? Well, butterflies need to access moisture by extracting it—but not from open water. You might have seen them gathering on a dirt or gravel road in a damp area where they are sipping up minerals and water. This is called puddling. So to mimic this you can use a shallow container or bury a bucket to the rim and fill with sand and gravel. You can then pour in various liquids depending on the time of the year. Water is fine at anytime of the year but, if you want to get really fancy you can add sweet drinks, or stale beer. Yumm-oh! One of their personal favorites is overripe fruit! Rotting bananas and grapes are especially attractive for early spring fliers as well as honey, molasses or syrup—these can be smeared on a rock or fence post. Maybe you’ve seen this in action at a butterfly conservatory, eh?


FACT: Most butterflies live 10-20 days. Some as short as 3-4, others such as overwintering Monarchs, can live 6 months.

Another plus to attract butterflies is to back off on your use of chemicals in your yard. Limited or no chemical use is ingredient number 6 and very important to our little friends. Use mulch instead of weed killer. Prune out a diseased branch instead of spraying. Swab soapy water on nefarious insects instead of using insecticides. Or, just have some tolerance for a bit of imperfection in your garden. The butterflies will smile in your honor. Also, if you have ever used Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) as a “safe” means to control caterpillars, don’t forget that butterflies in their larval stage are caterpillars too!

Swallowtail caterpillar on bronze fennel--photo compliments of Jack Bannister

FACT: Their proboscis (like a tongue) is like a double straw!

One more ingredient and you’re pretty well set—try to water at ground level (soaker hoses are helpful here). Sprinklers can wash eggs, pollen and caterpillars off of plants. It also limits the amount of time butterflies have to “get to” the flowers.

FACT: Butterflies “feet” or tarsi, have a sense of taste similar to a taste bud; when they come in contact with nectar, their proboscis uncoils.

Hawkmoth--sometimes people confuse this creature with a hummingbird--but he's much slower AND he's got antennae!

Combine all of your ingredients together. Add in a healthy dose of patience. Serves: Monarchs, Black and Tiger Swallowtails, Admirals, Viceroys, Morning Cloaks, Painted Ladies and Frittilaries. A very nice complementary addition to this recipe is a great butterfly identification book from your local library.

Monarch on Butterfly Bush

Enjoy with kids—yours or someone else’s. It’s a good way to get them interested in gardening period. Let them create and care for their own butterfly container garden. Raising caterpillars can be educational and fun too. The butterflies emerge from the chrysalis and can be released back into your own yard. See resources below.

www.monarchwatch.org
www.butterfliesandmoths.org
www.naba.org North American Butterfly Association
www.chias.org Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL

Went to a Garden Party

Asiatic Lily

Hemerocallis

After a stormy (yet another one) morning, the weather quickly changed into its “party clothes” and was properly turned out as a splendid summer afternoon. This past Sunday I went to a garden party at one of our horticulture volunteer’s private gardens and all the pictures you’ll see within this posting are from that garden.

Digitalis ferruginea 'Kirk Island'

Redbud 'Forest Pansy'


As you might imagine, there is a bit of stigma when you volunteer in the lovely gardens of Cantigny and then you invite people to come to your home garden. The hostess was initially in a bit of a tizzy at the thought of fellow volunteers and staffers coming to her house to critique her personal endeavors. But after a bit of pondering, she righted herself and decided, correctly, that her garden was a reflection of her—both her foibles and strengths are mirrored within her flower beds and borders. But my thought was, “We love her, why wouldn’t we love her garden?”

Acanthus mollis Bear's Britches


Stachys hummelo

Look at that nice color-mirroring in the flower and the stems of the sedum, mmmmm.

Ahhhh..very refreshing!

We all applauded her successes and thought her garden lovely with plentiful shade on a balmy summer day. We had mighty tasty things to eat and a glass of wine, or two. What’s not to like about spending a pleasant afternoon/evening with fellow gardeners/friends under those conditions? Our hostess was relaxed and, as just as she realized, we too should “learn our lessons well” and not stress over whether our container or flower bed designs are “right” or not…think of the lyrics to the above song….

"I learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself."

You truly only have to please yourself when designing. If you’re happy with the colors, the heights, the textures…that’s plenty good enough.


Not only did she grow this cool cardoon plant....

BUT, she's also a good composter too!

A Recipe to Entice Floating Tapestries to Your Garden Part 1

It usually happens on a sunny calm day in early summer. You straighten up from your perennial bent-over-position from pulling weeds (or planting, or moving what you have around to another spot, or, yeah, more weeding) to catch your breath, and you see one. A butterfly floating and gliding across your garden...and you think how can I “get” more of those floating tapestries to come through my yard?

Whether you have a large garden bed or only have space for a container (or several), you can entice butterflies to make a stop at a habitat you’ve provided for them. To create this butterfly area you’ll need to fulfill the ingredients list—a recipe to encourage butterflies to make a stop. They have their own agenda; you’re just trying to coax them to linger longer.

Swallowtail on Agastache (Photo by Lauren Fox)

Ingredient number one is a sunny, sunny, sunshiny area. A protected south or west-facing area is ideal. A nice addition, and one they would really appreciate, is a nice flat rock to sunbathe on—the colorful scales on their wings act kind of like solar panels. They need body temperatures of 85-100 ̊ just to fly and a flat rock will really help them come up to temperature on cooler mornings.


Fritillary on Zinnia (Photo by Lauren Fox)

Placing your butterfly garden in a sheltered area will satisfy ingredient number two. Butterflies don’t want to expend the energy fighting the wind. Try to use fencing or trees and shrubs to cut down on the heavy breezes for them; evergreens are especially helpful.


Tiger Swallowtail on Verbena bonariensis (Photo by Lauren Fox)

Are you squeamish about caterpillars? Don’t be! If you want to have butterflies—you’ve got to have caterpillars first. And if you provide food for the caterpillars (ingredient number three) and give them what they like to eat (host plants) you’ll increase your chances of attracting more butterflies! Think of caterpillars as the teenagers of the butterfly life cycle—they live to eat, and eat, and eat. Fact: a caterpillar can increase its body size more than 30,000 times from the time it hatches (from an egg) until it pupates (forms its chrysalis). Amazing, huh?

Some caterpillars will feed only on one particular host plant (Monarch caterpillars only feed on milkweed plants) and some will feed on a variety of host plants. Here are some top favorite host plants: Asclepias/milkweed (P), Asters, (P), Carrots (A), Dill (A), Fennel (A), Grasses (P &A), Hollyhock (B), Parsley (B), Queen Ann’s Lace (B), Thistle (P & A), violets (P)….A= Annual, P = Perennial, B = Biennial. Some trees are great host plants as well as good hibernation sites: Ash, Birch, Elms, Hackberry, Poplar, Tuliptree, and Willow.

Bronze Fennel and Verbena bonariensis (Photo by Jack Bannister)

Now for the nectar producers that butterflies love and crave. They do prefer flowers that are fragrant, colorful to them (purples, pinks, reds, yellow and orange) and the nectar should be accessible to them: flat landing pads (like daisy, sunflower and yarrow) or short-tubed flowers (liatris, zinnia). Here are some of their favorites: Ageratum (A), Alyssum (A), Butterfly bush and Butterfly weed (P), Calendula (A), Cetranthus ruber (Red Valerian), Cosmos (A), Coreopsis (P), Edhinacea (P), Heliotrope (A), Joe-Pye weed (P), Lantana (A), Liatris (P), Marigold (A), Milkweed (P), Mints (P), Pentas, (A), Phlox (P), Rudbeckia (P), Yarrow (P), Zinnia single-petaled (A). As well as these trees and shrubs : Buckeye, Caryopteris clandonensis (Bluebeard), Clethra alnifolia (Summersweet), fruit trees, Kolkwitzia amabilis (Beauty bush), Lilac, Lindera, Spirea, Sumac, and Viburnum carlesii.

Close up of Liatris (Photo by Jack Bannister)

Leucanthemum daisy 'Becky' (Photo by Jack Bannister)

Yarrow (Photo by Jack Bannister)

Try to plan your plantings in a dense cluster or grouping; butterflies are more attracted to the mass as opposed to individual plants.

So far you’ve got a great start on compiling all your ingredients. I’ve got a few more tips to add to the pot, but let’s leave it to stew in its juices for another day.

A Garden will Tell a Story

A garden will tell a story. And you will get a different story depending on how much time you care to spend “hearing” it. If you only have a bit of time a story may describe the color of a flower, the height and spread of a tree, or an impression on the grass where the kids had laid to look up at the clouds. And that in itself can be a pleasing story. But….if you take a little more time to really observe, to really examine a garden you will hear a whole different story.

If you were to look closely at one plant, a rose, for instance, you might notice that the sun and shade patterns are playing a little game of tag across the whole rose garden. You might become fascinated by how the last few raindrops on the petals remind you of seed pearls adding just the right touch of embellishment. Then, an industrious honeybee stops long enough to do his crazy little dance in the center of the rose, whirling about the stamens picking up a few pollen grains before he sambas off. You might focus on the color—the pink on the petals have that same crushed velvet color as the dress you wore to prom. Which, in turn, might draw you to a memory even further back, back when you were younger still…You close your eyes, and inhale deeply smelling that berry-licious fragrance, and it settles somewhere deep inside you of a time (not really so long ago) of you as a young child sitting in your grandma’s garden.

Gardens will do that to people. We are fascinated with the wildlife that visits, the unlimited colors and textures, the peace and tranquility and heady aromas that create memories in the young and refresh memories in the not so young.

The Gardens at Cantigny are over 40 years old—and still growing, evolving and changing. We can learn a lot by stopping to really look with an observant eye. A garden encompasses all those things that we are drawn to from a craving deep within us: earth, wind, sun, rain, wildlife and plant life.

With this blog, I hope to inspire your innate creativity with plants and the landscape they’re in as well as cultivating the desire within you to become a better grower of plants. Education via tips and examples will bridge the gap to get you where you hope to be as a gardening soul.

I hope you’ll join me as we go for a walk through the gardens. I’ll tell a few stories and I hope you will too!

Thanks For Your Patience

I will be posting soon, so in the meantime, please email topics you are interested in learning about to lomura@cantigny.org and I will try to cover them here.


I look forward to sharing my tips, ideas and tools with you and I am excited for you to be inspired, educated and cultivated.
Liz