Host Plants and Hope


Yesterday, I took my first direct move to help create life in my new landscape. I planted a Bahama cassia (Senna mexicana var. chapmanii) to serve as a larval host plant for three species of sulfur butterflies - cloudless, orange-barred, and sleepy orange, native to my area. It is not enough to simply provide nectar plants to attract the adults. The real goal of a living landscape is to provide for their reproduction. Attracting wildlife is not enough; we must produce it within our landscapes. With butterflies, that means planting their host plants and not worrying over much about the nectar ones.
Butterfly gardening is the most straight forward form of landscaping for wildlife. It is also the one likeliest to produce the quickest response. While creating songbird habitat can take a decade or more to reach its potential, butterflies can arrive the day your landscape is planted. Of course, that depends on the butterfly and on how close the nearest population is to your landscape.
Just about every butterfly book lists the larval host plants for each butterfly. It is a simple process to:
1. Identify which butterflies you're most interested in landscaping for
2. Identify what the larval host plant(s) is/are for each
3. Confirm that each butterfly is native to your locale
4. Locate a seed or plant source within your region that can sell you the plants you want

In my new locale, nestled within an ecological desert, I know what I've been able to landscape for in the past, but no idea how likely it will be to get them to find my new plantings. I saw a cloudless sulfur flying over my residential road about 3 weeks ago. It has been the only one I've seen in the nearly 4 months I've lived here, but sulfurs are great roamers and I have hope that they will one day find this Bahama cassia. Creating a true living landscape takes knowledge and patience, but it also incorporates hope.

Comments

  1. David Kyle RakesJanuary 20, 2019 at 2:58 PM

    I have a senna in my backyard but don't know what species it is, your blog now prompting me to find out. I'm glad to also be contributing to the sulfurs life cycle from egg to adult.
    I have also found that some deciduous plants are good roosting spots for the cloudless sulfur. Every year when the leaves turn yellow on my beautyberry bushes and a small bass tree, the cloudless sulfur's, sometimes as many as three or four, hang upside down from leaves that match the butterflies wings. I'm sure the sulfurs are roosting here for camouflage. Question is do the butterflies look at their own wings to decide if the color matches, or is it a color that is already preconceived in their minds?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hawthorn HillJanuary 24, 2019 at 6:57 PM

    Again, Kyle, thanks for weighing in .

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ethics of Collecting Seed

Image
I've been writing lately about seeds and using them to create what is often called a pollinator meadow. A great many of the plants in my new landscape were grown from seed. Frankly, I have always loved sowing seeds and watching them sprout. I started in early childhood and I've been doing it since. It's rewarding and the anticipation of waiting for seeds to sprout is difficult to match unless you play the lottery. I rarely purchase seeds. I collect them. When I can, I purchase a few plants of a species I wish to add to my landscape and I then collect their seed after they bloom. If a plant doesn't prosper sufficiently to set seed for me, it is not a plant I wish to continue to grow. Over the years, I've tried a great many plants that I've failed to adequately provide for. Today in my landscape, I'm trying a few that I've never tried before. The exceptions come from plants that are not available in the trade. To grow these from seed, I need to collect
Read more

Wildflower Meadows - The Importance of Grasses

Image
A Natural Wildflower "Meadow" - Apalachicola National Forest I grew up in the prairie Midwest and was fortunate to have been caught up in the prairie restoration movement that blazed brightly in the last few decades of this past century. Very little of our original prairie ecosystems remain as the rich prairie soils were quickly converted to agricultural uses as European settlers swarmed their way over the continent.  These ecosystems are extremely diverse, regardless of where they occur. From the tall-grass prairies of the Midwest to the rockland prairies of the Mid-South and the true dry prairie systems here in Florida where I now reside, there are several universal characteristics - they are some of the most species diverse systems in the world and they are dominated by grasses. Grasses, in all their many shapes and forms, are what form the foundation of any "meadow." That must also be true for all the "wildflower meadows" I see extolled on s
Read more

A Pollinator Garden is More than Wildflowers

Image
A natural grass-dominated meadow in the shade Splitbeard bluestem - Andropogon ternarius Lopsided Indiangrass - Sorghastrum secundum Sites on social media that are promoting pollinator gardens are rife with posts about wildflowers. Folks seeking to make their landscapes pollinator friendly seem to be almost-universally focused on wildflowers. What these well-meaning people seem to not understand is the importance of native grasses. Meadows, prairies, and other wildflower-dominated systems are mostly grass. Grasses form the backbone of every one of these plant communities. It isn't the wildflowers. They simply provide most of the color - but a living landscape is not about color, it's about creating habitat, and this habitat requires us to incorporate native grasses. It is true that the vast majority of grasses, and their graminoid relatives, are wind pollinated. They do not provide nectar and pollen for the most part, but despite that they are significant. More s
Read more