SPRING WILDLIFE Give BUTTERFLIES a boost Fill your flower borders with these dainty fluttering pollinators. Adrian Thomas explains how 14 <strong>Garden</strong> <strong>Answers</strong>
When it came to inventing butterflies, Mother Nature clearly felt it was time to bring out the paint box. It’s a great joy for us that she did, for how can you fail to be entranced by such a dazzling display of colour and pattern? Take the peacock for example (pictured left), one of the most widespread and familiar of all Britain’s butterflies. With its wings closed, it looks almost jet black, but as it slowly opens it reveals not only a ground colour of rich chestnut-red but also four mesmerising ‘eye’ shapes, like the pattern on the tail feathers of its avian namesake. Look closely and those ‘eyes’ are a vibrant palette of white, yellow and iridescent blue, set off against black kohl ‘eyeliner’. Or, how about the male brimstone butterfly, that harbinger of spring in the southern half of the UK, whose upper wings are the most vivid pure yellow, but which at rest sits with it wings closed looking for all the world like a leaf. In stark contrast, the male common blue has upper wings that on a sunny day are more shimmering in their sky-blue colouration than any garden flower you can imagine. Ok, a number of garden butterflies are predominantly brown. But if you set your Common blue expectation levels to ‘simple elegance’ rather than ‘kaleidoscopic’, there’s little that can match the understated beauty of the ringlet with its chain of glinting eyes around the edge of its under wing, or the subtle golds of the large skipper as it opens its wings like the pages of a book. No wonder butterflies are so well loved. Flowers are wonderful, but to have ‘flying flowers’ in among them is the icing on the cake. For 16 years now, I’ve been doing what I can to increase the numbers of butterflies in my garden. Fifteen of those years were in a garden that was just 6x8m (20x26ft), but by the end of that period I was counting more than 120 butterfly sightings in a year, six times more than when I started. If you want to boost your own butterfly bounty, follow the three steps below to Tortoiseshell make your garden a more welcoming place for our fluttering friends. ➤ The underwing markings of the common blue BUTTERFLIES & BRASSICAS Each butterfly species is specific in its food plants, so only large white and small white caterpillars will eat brassicas. Luckily there are lots of wildlife-friendly ways to protect crops: l Use butterfly mesh cages. Build them large enough to prevent cabbage white butterflies laying their eggs on your brassica leaves. l Don’t sow large numbers of brassicas together. If a large white butterfly finds a solitary cabbage with different plants nearby, they’ll look for a larger food supply for their young. l Patrol brassicas daily. Wipe off any tiny yellow eggs with your thumb. Alliums can mask the distinctive scent of brassicas 3 WAYS TO WELCOME MORE BUTTERFLIES GROW FLOWERS IN SUNSHINE, IN 2 SHELTER, EN MASSE. Butterflies much prefer it if their favoured flowers are planted in a sunny, sheltered position. It’s not easy drinking through a bendy straw if you’re being buffeted by the wind! If flowers are growing in profusion, so much the better. The buddleia below has caught the attentions of a red admiral. PROVIDE THE RIGHT NECTAR- 1 RICH FLOWERS. Butterflies love a swig of nectar, but they’ll only visit a very small number of flower types – such as sedum and buddleia, above. It’s not that they’re picky; it’s because their long probosces will only fit certain flowers, and also that many garden flowers are poor in nectar. CATER FOR THE CATERPILLARS. 3 Long term monitoring by Butterfly Conservation has shown that more than three quarters of our butterfly species have declined since 1976, so we need to plant for caterpillars in order to see more butterflies. The camouflaged critter above is a brimstone caterpillar, feasting on his foodplant (an alder buckthorn). See over for more. Subscribe at www.greatmagazines.co.uk 15
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