Beautiful Butterflies 2019

Victims & the guilty parties

The victims were Rons spare Brussel sprout plants

& the guilty were 16 of these Large White caterpillars, this one was making it's way up the side of the grenhouse towards the end of November

& Small White caterpillars, this one also on the greenhouse

We counted at least 10 pupa a few days ago, so we're doing our bit for Biodiversity. The other Brussels are doing well, having transferred any caterpillars to the sacrificial plants a while back!

Thanks, Russell, We will probably give them a try. Have you had anything else from them which was particularly wonderful?!

Never forget my time of rearing the large whites H, feeding on nasturtiums & cabbage ... they did pong! Lol

Hi Ann,

Mainly whites I think. My other great butterfly attractor is sedum spectabile (not the cultivar 'Autumn Joy').

Close-ups of a Silver Y and a Comma above on one. The great thing about sedum is you can just break off a branch and shove it in the ground and you get another one!!

Russ

Thanks, Russell. We had Sedum spectabile in our old garden but I'm not sure which sort. It was not in the best location either as the nearest tree eventually overshadowed it. We'll have a closer look at ordering a few things in the new year once the holiday entertaining is finished. There are some lovely sunny spots in the current garden, that is, only when the sun is actually out! Fingers crossed that the rain stops occasionally during the rest of the winter. We have natural ponds in several places in our normally pond-less garden and the lawn is rather squishy. The birds are turning up their noses at our tiny birdbath and opting for the ponds.

Yes Ann, I've never known rain like it. I might rename our house to Castle Russell as we are getting a moat around it!
It's like all the rain that never came in the summer is coming now.
Bw
Russell

Agreed, Russell. Our new house has a gravel path along the wall of the kitchen extension, between that wall and the slightly raised lawn and I thought I was joking when I suggested that, particularly in the summer when we will want to go out into the garden by way of the glass double doors, that we will need a "bridge across the moat". But we have now seen that when it rains heavily, the gravel path actually does become a moat between the house and the lawn!

2019 was a good year for butterflies for me.

A buddleia self seeded in my garden later in 2018 and I decided to let it grow, glad I did because it started flowering just before the painted lady invasion started. About 6-8 of them at one time and they also liked basking on the ground. A hummingbird hawkmoth made an arrival soon after (thought it was a large bee at first as I had never seen one in real life), then 1 peacock before a few small tortoiseshells arrived in about mid-August and one speckled wood that only very briefly fed on it compared to the other butterfly species (which makes sense considering their shorter proboscis and liking for honeydew over flowers). Watching the behaviour of the small tortoiseshells was fascinating, when the sun went behind a cloud, they flew off over the top of my house to somewhere nearby (don't know where) and then when the sun came out again came back. They spent most of the day on sunny days in my garden on the buddleia, feeding up for their winter hibernation, I am surprised they can drink so much nectar without being sick! I also had some Rosebay Willowherb near the buddleia which had self seeded there too (nice to have a native plant in the garden) which they would occasionally nectar on too but nowhere near as much as the buddleia. Only late in the year in October, after the buddleia had stopped flowering, did a red admiral arrive, and just to bask in the sun, not to feed.

Took the Butterfly Conservation website's advice and made sure to take the dead flowers off the buddleia at the end of flowering in the hope it wouldn't self seed as much as the naturalised buddleia can be a big problem for that.