How to Build a Butterfly Garden

The sun is shining, the nurseries are buzzing with gardeners, and more than a hundred species of butterflies are starting to spread their wings in Maryland. Not only are these creatures beautiful and friendly; they are also important pollinators for plants and crops. Welcoming them into your garden is an easy and rewarding hobby. Here are a few tips for building a butterfly garden or amending an existing garden to attract local butterflies.

What Butterflies Look For:

Sunshine - At least five hours of it each day.
Water - Ideally a muddy puddle but a bird bath should do.
Warmth - Rocks or a warm surface to rest on cloudy and cold days are a must.
Particular Plants - Some for laying eggs. Some for nectar. Some for caterpillar food. And some to protect them from wind (details below)
Insecticide-Free Gardens!

Great Butterfly Plants for (and native to) Maryland:

Joe-Pye Weed (Eupatorium sp.)
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)
Milkweed or Butterflyweed (Asclepias sp.)Speedwell or Ironweed (Veronica sp.)Zinnia (Zinnia elegans)

Great Nectar and/or Larval Hosts:

Annual and Perennial Flowers
Asters (Aster sp.)
Cosmos (Cosmos sp.)
Daisy (Leucanthemum sp.)
Goldenrod (Solidago sp.)
Phlox (Phlox sp.)

Trees and Shrubs
Blackberry (Ribes sp.)
Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis)
Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)
White Oak (Quercus alba)
Viburnum (Viburnum sp.)
Willow (Salix sp.)
Wild Cherry (Prumus serotina)
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

You may have noticed that the well-known Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii), pictured in this post, is not on the recommended list above. This is because the popular plant has recently found its way to the invasive list. Luckily there are plenty of other native plants in these lists with large, colorful flowers that will bring just as many nectaring butterflies to your garden.

*Special thanks to the students and faculty, past and present, of the University of Maryland's Institute of Applied Agriculture for the informative brochure on butterfly gardens

Mistletoe

While finding yourself beneath mistletoe in North America during the holiday season traditionally implies luck and increases your chances at stealing a smooch, the trees that the partially-parasitic Phoradendron flavescens are commonly found growing from are not so lucky.

Botanically speaking, the plant is a 'hemiparasite,' which means that it is capable of producing its own food by photosynthesis, but more often it sends out roots to penetrate the branches or trunk of a tree and steal nutrients. The seed is spread by bird droppings in the crown of trees and because mistletoe is an evergreen, like Christmas holly, it is most visible in the winter when the leaves of host trees have fallen. Perhaps most interestingly, the familiar Christmas decor is often "harvested" by shotgun. How romantic.

So how did a parasite become a symbol and tradition during holiday festivities? I don’t know for certain, but some say the answer lies in Norse Mythology. In ancient Scandinavia, if enemies met by chance beneath mistletoe in the forest, they would lay down their arms and hold a truce until the next day. This custom went hand-in-hand with the Norse myth or Baldur, whose mother, Frigga, made every object, animal and plant promise not to harm her son except mistletoe, which she overlooked. After a mischievous Norse god killed Baldur with a spear fashioned from mistletoe and brought winter into the world, his mother declared the plant sacred. Baldur was eventually resurrected and Frigga ordered that any two people passing beneath it must celebrate Baldur’s life by kissing.

More recently, Washington Irving wrote about a now often-overlooked aspect of the mistletoe tradition in a footnote of “Christmas Eve”

“The mistletoe is still hung up in farm-houses and kitchens at Christmas, and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked the privilege ceases.”

Those berries, by the way, are poisonous despite the fact that they have long been considered an aphrodisiac.

So if you find yourself beneath a parasitic plant this season, think of traditions of peace and the tree that is now free of a nutrient-thief. Or, if you need an exit strategy, distract the smoocher by spewing the fun facts you’ve just learned!

Now THIS is Brilliant

Have you ever walked by an old gumball machine and thought: Why is that machine filled up with useless cr*p made in factories in China instead of little seed and compost grenades that I could toss into that vacant lot over there to diversify the plants around here??

Me neither. But I wish I had. Am and thrilled that someone did.

Greenaid, a landscape beautification project started by the Commonstudio design firm, is doing it. They call the little eco-grenades "Seedbombs." They are packed with compost and regionally tailored seeds for wildflowers and grasses. Creators suggest chucking them into a vacant lot or cramming them into a crack in the sidewalk. Learn more here.

(Thnx again, Singleton)

World Wildlife Web

Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago and Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan devised an algorithm, inspired by PageRank, for the relationships in a food web in hopes to determine which plant and animal species play paramount roles and would have the greatest impact if they were to become extinct. According to PLoS Computational Biology: "The algorithm uses the links between species in a food web, like the links between web pages, in order to determine the relative importance of species." I'm not particularly good at explaining or even completely understanding algorithms so here is what the NY Times' Henry Fountain reported:

One key to PageRank’s success is that its developers introduced a small probability that a Web user would jump from one page to any other. This in effect makes the Web circular, and makes the algorithm solvable. But in food webs, Dr. Allesina said, “you can’t go from the grass to the lion — the grass has to go through the gazelle first.

“We could not use the same trick to make food webs circular,” he went on.
So they used another trick, he said. Since all organisms die and decompose, they created a “detritus pool” that all species link to. The pool also links to primary producers in a food web, which make use of the decomposed matter.

Their algorithm differs also in that it determines the relative importance of species through reverse engineering — by seeing which species make the food web collapse fastest if they are removed. The researchers found that the algorithm produces results that were as accurate as much more complex (and computationally costly) software that builds webs from the ground up, simulating evolution.

The next step, Dr. Allesina said, is to refine the algorithm so that it will work with more complex webs. There are many other factors that affect extinctions, including pollution and habitat loss. The goal is to create an algorithm that can take these and other elements into account as well.