WONDERFUL WORLD OF BUTTERFLY GARDENS
Florida is a veritable Eden for the zebra longwing, the popular monarch, the white peacock and other butterfly species that dazzle the eye
Florida is a butterfly capital, home to both farms and gardens that welcome the fluttering insects. Find out where to see them, and which plants you should have in your garden to attract butterflies.
TThey look dead. The items dangling from small tree limbs and wires inside the screened wooden box at Lovers Key State Park, located between Fort Myers Beach and Bonita Beach, resemble tree bark. There are a few light turquoise things shaped like eggs among them, but most just look dead—until a friendly park volunteer summons trail-bound hikers to take a closer look. The seemingly unremarkable items are chrysalises—a step in the fascinating and fast-paced life cycle of caterpillars and butterflies. The pastels are the distinctive chrysalises of monarch butterflies.
Even more surprising is that these chrysalises are transplanted from North Fort Myers, where the “Lovers Key butterfly whisperer” lives. Yuki Mathes, 90, a 13-year park volunteer, collects the chrysalises—as well as tiny butterfly eggs that become caterpillars—from her eight small home gardens. She shares them with park visitors, many of whom know her by name. Others are wide-eyed when she educates them about the transplants—affixed with a mild glue or thread—hanging inside the box. “God bless you for what you do,’’ a visitor says. “Isn’t that wonderful?’’ remarks another. And park regulars know they are welcome to help by opening the box to free hatched butterflies, which immediately start eating and mating.
Welcome to the world of butterflies, where butterfly gardening can be much more than just planting flowers to attract an occasional lucky fly-by. Florida is a butterfly world capital, because of its climate, and Southwest Florida even hosts several butterfly farms.
One such farm, the 5-acre Gulf Coast Butterflies of Naples, nurtures and ships chrysalises all over the United States Because butterfly lifespans are so short (less than 2 months), farms meet a constant demand of zoo and garden butterfly houses—and even poignant special butterfly releases memorializing loved ones.
And those farms use much the same method that allows Mathes to make her hobby portable. Naples Botanical Garden, for example, gets its weekly supply of winged beauties to replenish its butterfly house shipped from Gulf Coast Butterflies. They arrive on toilet paper, which an intern unrolls before moving each chrysalis to a wooden display case only slightly more formal than the Lovers Key box.
LEARN ALL ABOUT IT
Education is everywhere you turn in the butterfly world. Kitty Fields, writing on the website dengarden.com, instructs: “They can see a butterfly from all stages of life. They will see the eggs laid; the larva stage where the egg turns into a caterpillar; the caterpillar cocoon itself into its pupa stage; and then the adult butterfly emerging. You can’t get this kind of a lesson in such detail and personal experience in a normal classroom.”
Naples Botanical Garden’s education director Britt PattersonWeber credits butterflies for her career direction. Studying anthropology and linguistics in college in Montana, she made a swift, passionate shift after an internship at the Calusa Nature
Florida is a butterfly world capital, because of its climate, and Southwest Florida even hosts several butterfly farms.
Center in Fort Myers. “That is when everything changed,” she recalls. “Butterflies had been off my radar after second grade.”
Thomas Hecker says that Everglades Wonder Gardens in Bonita Springs, where he is president and CEO, is expanding its butterfly gardening and exhibiting. “There are some very hardcore butterfly lovers that never miss an opportunity to learn more on the subject,” he says.
The rewards? “You have not only regular flowers,” Hecker explains, “but you get ‘flying flowers’ as well. You are also giving nature a boost to make the world a prettier place.” And a less stressful place, various butterfly people say.
HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF
When creating a butterfly garden, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences suggests using a diverse collection of native plants. Those plants need to be hardy and drought tolerant, as well as disease resistant and pest resistant. A variety of sizes and heights are also recommended.
Butterfly farms meet a constant demand of zoo and garden butterfly houses—and even poignant special butterfly releases memorializing loved ones.
The butterfly garden at Lovers Key State Park includes scarlet milkweed, blue porterweed, tropical sage, beautyberry, beach sunflower and coral bean. Also, websites and nurseries offer lots of free advice. So does Mike Malloy, who writes a popular column on Saturdays in the Naples Daily News. (“I’ve always said if you meet somebody that doesn’t like a butterfly, run like the devil; something’s wrong,” he’s known to say.)
“Butterfly gardening is as easy as any other gardening,” adds Hecker. “It is recommended that you do not use chemical pesticides and herbicides, to which butterflies are very sensitive.”
Which brings us back to the Lovers Key butterfly whisperer. She is sensitive, too.
Mathes, a native of Japan, notes that even though she loves her hobby and buys plants for caterpillars to devour, there is one thing she refuses to do. She absolutely will not touch or pick up a caterpillar. “Too icky,” Mathes says. For that, she uses chopsticks.