History of Butterfly and Wildife Garden

I remember when I first moved into my house, never before had I even attempted to grow a plant, nor did I know anything about plants.  I looked over some popular press books created for the masses (not specific to Houston) about building some type of garden.  I read the few pages devoted to butterfly gardening and decided it was too complicated, plus I had never seen any butterflies around my area.

Lesson one.  Ignore gardening books that aren’t specific for the Houston or Gulf Coast area.  At best you’ll end up lots of dead plants or ones that are prone to all kinds of diseases.  Also don’t get caught up on this grand layout that is typically presented thinking that you don’t have near enough space or it will take too much time.  Trust me, it’s quite easy, butterflies will come if you plant the plants that they are attracted to, and it’s also quite fun, particularly if you start with Monarchs.  Monarchs, to me, are the most friendly and curious butterflies.  Often I’ll be out mowing the yard, not a butterfly in sight, when suddenly 1, 2 or 3 Monarchs come slowly gliding by watching what you are doing.  They are not skittish like some other butterflies and they really seem to just be as curious about you as you are about them.

So I originally started with just a couple of Milkweed plants and a nectar plant or two.  Within a couple of days the Monarchs had arrived.  A few weeks later, my wonderfully full milkweed plants had turned to sticks and I was out of milkweed.  The poor critters were making laps around the outside of my pool searching for more milkweed.  I felt terrible and just couldn’t let them starve to death.  I made several calls to friends seeing if they could help me out by picking up some more milkweed.  All that I could find were little tiny milkweed plants.  I bought 60 of them.  That was barely enough to make it to the weekend.  Now I had to go walking all over the backyard and gather up these poor caterpillars to put them back on the milkweed.  You would think about this example I would have learned my lesson about always have enough milkweed on hand.  Nope, not quite.  I constantly underestimate the amount of milkweed I will need.  Live and learn I guess