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Going native to help our butterflies

Laura

We all want to encourage pollinating insects into our garden but how can we achieve this? Butterflies and moths are challenging as they have a two-stage life cycle, caterpillar and winged adult, whereas bees rear their young themselves so we need only to worry about feeding the grown ups.

So I am leaving Elaine the simpler task of making recommendations on which are the best nectar plants, whereas I will take on the more intellectually rigourous topic of larval foodplants, (don’t think Caroline has moved on from her childhood obsession with stag beetles so goodness knows what her insect related contribution is going to be this week …..)

She seems fixated on stag beetles. Could it be because we used to drop them into her pram when she was a baby?

Now here’s the problem for us gardeners, whereas adult Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) have cosmopolitan food tastes and will take nectar from a wide selection of non-native garden flowers, their caterpillars, having evolved alongside our wild British flora, are much fussier, each requiring a quite specific range of native host plants, and the adult butterflies are poor dispersers, never straying far from these plant populations.

Some of these plants are dictated by habitat, such as ancient woodland, heathland or chalk grassland, so unless you live on the edge of one of these ecosystems you are unlikely to ever encounter a silver washed fritillary, a green hairstreak, or an Adonis blue flitting through your garden.

So best to concentrate on the generalist butterflies, which it is feasible to encourage. The orange tip butterfly, which we are starting to see flying around now, simply needs the cuckoo flower (I know it as milkmaid) or hedge garlic, to lay its eggs on, both easy to have in a hedge bottom if you are not overly OCD about tidying up.

If you have this growing nearby….
….you may get one of these appearing in your garden

If you can get a bit of a native meadow going on some poor soil, put in plugs of birds foot trefoil and you may get caterpillars (and thus adults) of the common blue butterfly or the day flying six spot burnet moth appearing.

I think we all know that a bed of nettles is a Good Thing for all sorts of caterpillars, but some trees are just as good, oak and willow are both wonderful caterpillar pantries, and if you can manage to find a damp patch for a clump of alder buckthorn,  you might be lucky enough to establish a colony of the stunning brimstone. (See our feature picture taken by our local butterfly guru Neil Hulme of Butterfly Conservation)


Elaine

Laura is absolutely right – it is so important that we encourage pollinating insects – it comes down to sex really, doesn’t it (like most things eventually, don’t you find?)…..the bees collect nectar so that they can nurture young and in the process they pollinate the plants so that they can procreate.  See, Laura bores you with the science, and I give it to you straight.

My go-to plants for attracting insects are Buddleia (of course -not called the ‘butterfly bush’for nothing!), Verbena bonariensis (such a pretty, tall but airy plant to thread through the border, flowering late and really rich in nectar), and sedums (Hyelotelephium) – the ordinary  old-fashioned pink ones like spectabile seem to be much more butterfly-visited than the ones with dark-coloured leaves.

Welcome early nectar

Lower-growing things can be really attractive to bees etc. as well, and I am a huge fan of marjoram (Origanum), which may not be terribly hardy in your part of the country, but certainly is here in the favoured south.  You may have to grow it as an annual or tender perennial, sheltered from frost in the winter. It makes a lovely fragrant mat in weed-smothering fashion, and for months through the summer its flowers fairly hum with happy insects. Another option would be winter-flowering heather, which is a godsend for the early bumble bees coming out of hibernation.

Hoverfly’s delight –

An annual I keep meaning to grow again – and then forget again – is the poached-egg flower (Limnanthes douglasii). It’s a crazy-simple low-flowering annual plant to sow in a sunny spot (you’ve still got time now, this is one plant you can sow pretty much any time, actually!); and it becomes utterly covered in cup-shaped white and yellow flowers which are hugely popular with helpful hoverflies.  

Pop it around your veg beds, and the hoverflies will pollinate the plants and eat the aphids.  It comes from California, but sometimes we can accept a bit of help from our friends across the pond, can’t we?


Caroline

Yes thanks to my beastly sisters I spent my childhood running away from stag beetles as well as having spiders dropped down my vest and being being invited to sit on an ant hill to have my packed lunch.

What a wonderful education, so as well as for butterflies and bees, let’s hear it for the ‘undateables’– the woodlice, centipedes and even slugs – uh-oh I can already hear Laura pointing out that none of these are technically insects, but they are vital for a hedgehog’s healthy waistline so let’s give them fewer pesticides and more tolerance.

Stay calm, this is what wildlife-friendly gardening is all about

Although I admit slug-ravaged hostas are a challenge to my inner ‘eco-warrior’, the slug pellets have stopped after my anxiety attacks about the wellbeing of thrushes (becoming greater in number now).

I’ve mastered the bee hotel (hang on wall), so I’m going to the next level with a ‘beetle bank’ which involves mounding a load of soil into a heap (because beetles and bugs like to get a bit higher up apparently) and planting different grasses on top – all actually within my  horticultural skillset. I’m trying!

You’ll find seedballs to attract butterflies to your garden in our shop here

NB Louise Sims shares one of her most beautiful mistakes in this week’s Great Plants this Month

More NB!: If you’d like to get a bit more gardening chit-chat from the3growbags, just enter your email address here

By the3growbags

We're three sisters who love gardening, plants and even the science of horticulture but we're not all experts. We'd love everyone even remotely interested in their gardens to be part of our blogsite.

2 replies on “Going native to help our butterflies”

Saw the hedge garlic on a walk along our family farm road yesterday and wondered what it was, so thank you for that.
So much of it, don’t think I’ll be committing a crime digging some up and trying to establish it in my wild banking….anything to encourage butterflies.

Hello Ishbel, yes once you know to look out for it you see it all over the place. But it’s life cycle is biennial(like foxglove) so the plants you see in flower now will actually die soon, so a better strategy to get it going in your hedge bank would be to mark the spot where you saw it flowering and go back in a few weeks, collect some seed, and scatter this where you want to get it established. The first year you will just get rosettes of foliage, but these will throw up flowers in the second spring.If you repeat this process next year you will have flowering plants every year instead of every other year. This is a trick you can use with honesty too, which is another biennial used by the orange tip butterflies as a caterpillar food plant but apparently not such a good one as hedge garlic. I alternate two different cultivars of honesty, ‘Corfu Blue’ which has light blue flowers and ‘Chedglow’, which is quite different with purple flowers and dark foliage and as they flower in alternate years they can never cross pollinate so the characteristics of each cultivar remain unadulterated in the seedlings. Enjoy those butterflies! Laura

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