If You Plant It...

Eggs and newly emerged larvae of eastern black swallowtails

Newly hatched caterpillar of giant swallowtail
Newly emerged white peacock butterfly caterpillar
When I moved from my former home in Seminole, I took a few pieces of water bacopa (Bacopa monnieri) with me. It is not always an easy plant to find at a native plant nursery and it is easy to transplant. To be honest, I simply pulled up about half a dozen runners, each about 2 inches long, from my former created wetland, kept them moist and pushed them into the ground in my new wetland in various places.  This was important to me because water bacopa is the best larval host plant for the white peacock butterfly and I was determined to have this butterfly living with me in my new home.
Over the past 9 months, the bacopa has spread across pretty much every square inch of the wetland surface and has even begun creeping over the edges into the leaf mulch beneath the native azaleas I planted outside the wetland itself. All this time, I have been waiting for white peacocks to stop and lay eggs and daily I've not been able to find evidence that they had - until today.
The white peacock is a common butterfly in this part of Florida and it is most often seen along moist roadsides and at the edge of open wetlands - places where water bacopa is also often encountered.  I have seen the adult butterflies passing through my yard, but that had been all I'd seen until this morning when I spied a tiny bit of frasse at the edge of some of the bacopa stems. At least one of the butterflies had obviously stopped long enough to lay eggs a few days ago and the caterpillars had obviously hatched.
The same is true for the water dropwort (Tiedemannia filiformis) that I added to my wetland in its earliest days. I positioned it near the drainspout to help block the speed of the water that enters this wet area and it has been growing in stature these past 9 months. My experience has always been that it is a favorite host plant for the eastern black swallowtail, but that they won't lay eggs on it until it blooms. Since moving here last October, I've had eastern black swallowtails lay their eggs on parsley, fennel and on the weedy annual native mock bishopweed (Ptilimnium capillaceum), but they have completely ignored the water dropwort until a couple of days ago. Today, I was greeted by eggs and at least a dozen newly hatched caterpillars. The water dropwort is blooming.
Gardening for wildlife often takes a great deal of patience and planning as trees and shrubs do not mature quickly and the habitat they will someday provide can take several decades to become a reality. That is not the case with butterflies and moths. If you plant their host plant (and they live within your geographic zone), they will find you and, once they do, they will use your landscape to complete their life cycle pretty much into eternity if something catastrophic doesn't occur - like if your neighborhood begins to get regular pesticide applications.
I have admired butterflies since my early childhood and I have learned that you attract them with larval host plants more than with flowers. It took nearly a month to see a butterfly here after I moved in and months to get more than 1-2 common species. My landscape is proving that if you plant it, they will come.
White peacock butterfly nectaring on a Coreopsis

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