Week 12Spring Week 12
That world is fast disappearing. But it’s not gone yet.
—Wendy Williams, The Language of Butterflies
I was pretty proud of myself the spring I planted my first garden. It was 1986, and I was a first-year graduate student. After six months in a city where I had no car and so no way to escape to the woods, I was desperate for nature, any kind of nature, and nature wasn’t especially forthcoming at my garage apartment behind the Family Dollar store. But the Family Dollar sold seed packets, and I figured I’d give gardening a try. Surely the butterflies would find it, even so near a busy four-lane highway.
Growing up, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to my mother’s passion for gardening, though paying attention would not have helped with my own plans: Mom believed in wiping out all insects with a liberal application of Sevin Dust, while I aimed for a strictly organic operation. In my garden, I would rely on companion planting—marigolds between the tomato vines, petunias beside the beans, sunflowers among the cucumbers—to repel bugs the natural way. Any lingering pests would be dispatched by beneficial insects like ladybugs and praying mantises.
One evening a few weeks after planting, I watched happily as cabbage white butterflies flitted over silvery broccoli leaves. Those little butterflies pausing on the water-beaded plants made for a charming tableau of bucolic harmony behind the Family Dollar.
It didn’t dawn on me until the caterpillars appeared that a) those cabbage white butterflies had been carrying out the usual biological imperative of springtime, b) the butterfly’s name references not only its color but also its host plant, and c) broccoli belongs to the cabbage family. Instead of broccoli, it turns out, I was raising cabbage white butterflies.
As their offspring turned those lovely, silvery plants into leafy lace, I ordered some praying mantis eggs from a catalog. No baby mantises ever emerged from the sac. I considered ordering live ladybugs next, but by then broccoli season was over and I was having better luck with tomatoes and peppers. Eventually I stopped trying to sort the damaging insects from the “beneficial” ones and started planting enough vegetables for all of us. Decades later, I gave up raising vegetables altogether and planted a pollinator garden. I was always rooting for the butterflies anyway.
Now my raised beds are full of native perennials that provide nectar for bees, wasps, skippers, and butterflies, or that serve as their nurseries: yarrow for painted lady butterflies, dill and parsley for black swallowtails, false indigo for clouded sulphurs, passion vine for gulf fritillaries, asters for pearl crescents, ironweed for American ladies. Most of all, I planted milkweed—butterfly weed and swamp milkweed, the varieties that fare best in this sun-limited yard—because milkweed is the host plant of the monarch butterfly, and the monarch is in danger of extinction. In a contest for garden space, the broccoli I can buy at the grocery store for $1.99 a pound carries no weight against the mass extinction of a butterfly once so numerous it filled the skies with gold.
Monarchs are the only butterfly known to conduct an extravagant multigenerational migration, flying thousands of miles north in the springtime and thousands of miles south in the fall. Somehow, butterflies that hatch in Minnesota and New York know how to get to their wintering grounds in Mexico without ever having left Minnesota or New York before. Along the way, there are many deadly assaults on the monarch population—herbicides, development, extreme weather—but the only one I have any power over is loss of habitat. I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.
It takes the monarch four generations, sometimes more, to complete its annual migration. Each generation flies farther north to lay its eggs before the “Methuselah” generation turns south again and heads to Mexico. What those northbound butterflies need is milkweed, the only plant monarch caterpillars can eat. So I filled my garden with milkweed—more and more and more milkweed—and waited.
But years passed and not a single monarch arrived. Short of cutting down all our trees and replacing them with an entire field of milkweed, there was nothing more I could do. I finally decided to take the same approach to my pollinator garden that I had once adopted for my vegetables: I watered and I weeded, after a fashion, but mostly I let it go its own way.
Then one Sunday afternoon, I was reading a book on our back deck when a flash of orange in the pollinator garden caught my eye. From a distance it could be mistaken for a monarch, but from a distance any orange butterfly can be mistaken for a monarch. Years of roundly rejected milkweed had taught me my lesson.
Still, could it be?
I got up to look. There, lifting herself barely above the green leaves of the butterfly weed, was a female monarch, pale and tattered, looking as though she had come a great distance. She was fluttering from plant to plant, completely ignoring the nectar-filled flowers and pausing lightly on one milkweed leaf after another. When I looked closely, I could see she was laying eggs.
Five days later, the eggs hatched. It took a magnifying glass to be sure, but there they were: on each leaf an infinitesimal creature with black-and-yellow stripes and black faces and black waving antennae. By the time I found them, they were already eating, leaving behind pinprick-sized holes in the leaves.