From cocoon forth a butterfly

Lepidoptera in my garden

From cocoon forth a butterfly

As lady from her door

Emerged — a summer afternoon —

Repairing everywhere,

Without design, that I could trace,

Except to stray abroad

On miscellaneous enterprise

The clovers understood.

So begins Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Butterfly’s Day”. Somehow, in so few words, the poet has captured the delight of watching a butterfly flutter by. Butterflies are most wonderful creatures, majestic to watch, and fascinating to study. I often pause in my gardening to watch one of the Lepidoptera skitter by. And I’m still amazed when I think of the four different life stages of the butterfly: butterfly, eggs, caterpillar and chrysalis. The transformation to butterfly is mind boggling - most of the cells and tissue of the caterpillar break down and reform inside the chyrsalis to reform into a butterfly. It’s bizarre.

While I’ve always been fascinated by our six legged cousins I’ve never taken the time to learn to identify them. As a conservation minded human, it’s always useful to know the names of our local wildlife and what they need to thrive, especially these insects at the base of many food chains. It wasn’t my intention to start filling in my own insect knowledge gap this week. Rather I had decided to start a series of articles on different aspects of my garden as a way to share the joy I get by seeing wildlife up close and knowing I’m creating places for the different life stages of animals. I like to think I’m creating or protecting places for my animal neighbors to lay eggs or indeed fawns, providing things to eat and places to spend the winter. I never use pesticides and practice intentional messy gardening, which happens to suit my personality just fine.

But as I started this newsletter, I realised I didn’t actually know much about the insects in my garden. So the first task was to identify them. Rather than using a species identification key or a guide book (which I don’t have), I took my insect photos and uploaded them to images.google.com. This brought me to similar photos where the insects had been identified and I could use the names to see if my specimen was indeed the same. iNaturalist would yield a similar result no doubt, but I was too impatient for that. I’d encourage anyone whose ever wondered which bugs they’ve got in their garden to give one of these tools a whirl. It was very fun, perhaps because it was reminiscent of being five years old. Here’s the butterflies I found.

Pictured at the start of the article is the red-spotted purple butterfly (Limenitis arthemis). It is stunning at rest, and differently spectacular in flight - opening to mostly blue wings with orange tips. It is always special to spot one of these beauties. It is thought the red-spotted purple is a mimic of the poisonous pipe vine swallowtail (Battus philenor). Many butterflies use mimicry to avoid getting eaten. The red-spotted purple ranges from western Florida to eastern Texas and as far north as Vermont and Minnesota. The larval stage is another mimic but in this case a rather unappealing mimic of bird droppings. The caterpillars favor black cherry trees (Prunus serotina) and deer berry (Vaccineum stamineum - a relative of blueberries) and sometimes Carolina willow, (Salix caroliniana) though they’ll feed on and pupate in other plants too.

Another stunning regular to my garden is the eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus), shown here on an echinacea or cone flower. We get these butterflies by the hundreds when the tulip trees at the back of our lot are in blossom. But then all the action is a 100 feet up so we don’t get to see much of it. This time of year, the swallowtails come down to the flowers blooming in the garden. The have a very distinctive flight pattern: they flap their wings very slowly but still manage to move at a decent speed because of their large wings. These are the largest of the eastern US butterflies and are fairly common. They have a long proboscis so they favor plants with tubular flowers like milkweed, Japanese honeysuckle (a nasty invasive in my garden), and wild cherry. The caterpillars prefer tulip poplars, which is why their so common in our garden, willow, lilacs and other trees. They complete 2 lifecycles every summer in the north and up to 3 in the south. Some butterflies take several years to complete a lifecycle. The female can be the same cheery yellow as pictured above or can be nearly all black.

Another common butterfly in my garden is our old friend, or enemy, the cabbage white butterfly. I had long thought this was the species Pieris brassicae, because the Pieris family of butterflies are white, and brassicas are cabbages. I and veg gardeners will be very familiar with the damage these little darlings can do to brussels sprout and broccoli plants, stinkers. However this here photo was taken in my garden in Maryland where Pieris brassicae doesn’t life. More likely, it is a Pieris rapae, as indeed I realize now, were the ones I saw my English garden. Piers brassicae have distinctive black tips on their wings, much more than the faint darkening on the tips seen in my photo. The one pictured here is probably a female having two black dots on her fore wing. These butterflies were originally native to Europe and Asia, but have spread to North Africa, Australia, New Zealand and North America. It’s no wonder they’ve expanded so far as it is estimated that within a few generations, one female can have a million descendants. Which is amazing given that she lays her eggs singly rather than in clumps. And a tidbit for the gardeners out there, the caterpillars are blue-green-yellow with a faint yellow streak down their mid-dorsal line. They hang out on the undersides of leaves. Bizarrely - the females reflect UV radiation while the males absorb it. The wonderful world of nature never ceases to amaze.

The final butterfly species I want to share with you this week is the variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia). Fritillary is a name which is applied to both butterflies and flowers, which has always confused me. Turns out the Latin root of fritillary means checkerboard (or dice box), a pattern on both the butterfly and the flowers that share the name. The variegated fritillary’s larva prefer violets, which explains why I have more of these in my garden of late as I’ve let the violets run rampant in the “Let It Be” section of my garden. Females of the closely related great spangled fritillary will lay their eggs in autumn amidst completely defoliated violets - possibly smelling out the roots. The other members of the fritillary family, like the variegated one I’ve photographed, just lay their eggs in appropriate habits - shady low growing places that favor violets - and hope for the best. The caterpillars hatch in the autumn and immediately go to sleep. They wake up when the violets start to emerge. This is a perfect example of how shifting climates may threaten a species’ survival for the triggers for the larvae awakening and the violet starting grow may become offset. This may lead to there may be nothing to eat when the larvae awaken. Serving as another example of how everything is connected and that what we do at home matters.