Garden Answers Mini-Mag

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.
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