GUEST COLUMN: Consider Native Plants to Attract Your Own Butterfly Guest

Last year, Pat and Mike Worsham hosted a monarch caterpillar and witnessed its transformation into a butterfly. Here's how you can attract one of your own.

By Pat and Mike Worsham
GUEST WRITERS

The Worsham's little monarch "cat." All photos by Mike and Pat Worsham.

Here’s an easy way to plant natives and create your own small butterfly garden. All you need is a flower pot that drains well and some butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa). This might make a fun school science project too.

The flower pot can sit on a patio, an apartment or condo balcony, or—as in our case—a ceramic pot placed on our driveway. You’ll want to find a place that receives a good amount of sun for most of the day.

Our pot is fairly deep since most native plants, like butterfly milkweed. produce a deep taproot and need room to grow. Butterfly milkweed is drought tolerant, but since we are using a container we need to be careful not to let it get too dry.

The Worsham's container butterfly garden.

Butterfly milkweed is a native perennial that has beautiful bright yellowish-orange flowers. The flowers are a rich source of nectar that attract a number of pollinators like butterflies, bees, and even hummingbirds—although the hummers seemed to prefer the coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) that is growing on the fence just behind the milkweed (more on this plant later).

We were very surprised when we spotted a monarch caterpillar happily chewing away on the milkweed on September 1 last year. We knew butterfly milkweed is the host plant for monarch butterflies, but we hadn’t seen any monarchs flying anywhere around this plant and certainly didn’t know one had laid eggs. We are by no means experts on monarchs and knew almost nothing about their lifecycle. so what we got to see was a wonderful learning experience for us.

We started looking up information online to try to understand what this caterpillar—or, as we began saying, our little “cat”—was up to.

We did not see when the egg hatched or when the larva grew through its instar stages. We believe we first spotted it after it reached its fifth instar stage.

We checked the next day and could not find our cat on the milkweed and thought it had become a meal for something like a wasp or another predator.

Then, we found it on the that nearby coral honeysuckle. It must have dropped off the milkweed onto the driveway, made its way across the pavers, and then scaled the wooden fence up to the honeysuckle.

We continued to check on it for the next few days and on the afternoon of September 4, we found it hanging in its distinctive “J” shape from another part of the coral honeysuckle. We learned this “J” is the “pre-pupa” stage and happens just before a cat forms a chrysalis and begins its metamorphosis into an adult monarch.

We continued to check on it over the next few days and were absolutely fascinated to see the different stages of metamorphosis this complex little creature went through.

And then on September 19, we had a beautiful monarch butterfly emerge or “eclose” from its chrysalis. The male markings (pheromone pouches) on the hind wings are unfortunately not visible in the photo below, but they were there when we looked. We didn’t want to be too intrusive by taking too many photos, so we left him alone. Apparently, he didn’t stick around very long because when we went back he was gone.

We hope he had safe travels and that his offspring come back to us and start this fascinating process all over again this year. And we hope he can find a safe and welcoming space to complete his life cycle.

Safe spaces for our wildlife are unfortunately becoming harder to find. Predation is not the only threat wildlife faces. Pollinators, beneficial insects, birds, small mammals, aquatic organisms and fish are highly susceptible to pesticide poisoning. Applying pesticides to your lawn and garden can potentially have extremely detrimental effects on wildlife, your pets, and your family—and can disrupt the sensitive circuitry of life that we all depend upon. Pest control companies are completely profit and sales driven and are not the most reliable sources of vetted information.

Their sales staff and workers who apply chemicals to lawns and gardens may not be knowledgeable of the risks of environmental contamination and human health impacts. Homeowners who apply chemicals or who contract with pest control services can pick up toxins from their lawns and bring the chemicals into their homes by walking in their yard. Children and pets can be exposed to potentially harmful toxins simply by playing on the grass.

If you feel you need to control insects like mosquitoes, look beyond marketing information supplied by pest control companies. Research objective sources that study the detrimental effects chemicals used in pesticides can have on humans and animals. Just because lawn and garden chemicals are marketed as “natural” does not guarantee they are safe. For instance, radon gas and anthrax spores are naturally occurring substances, but you wouldn’t want to expose yourself to either.

Lawn chemicals are proven to be hazardous to wildlife and humans. Several types of cancer, immuno-response deficiencies, neurological diseases, and birth defects are associated with exposure to lawn chemicals. By releasing chemical toxins into the environment, air and water quality suffer, ultimately leading to potentially grave and fatal health problems.

In our native garden, we’ve been using mosquito buckets instead of chemicals to help control these pests. You can find how these buckets work by looking at the Home Grown National Park website, and read from experts about why chemically treating your lawn for mosquitoes is not particularly effective or a good use of your money.

If you are interested in learning more about native plants and other environmentally positive lawn and garden practices that support wildlife, please check out our local native plant group: the Central Rappahannock Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society. We have native garden tours and native plant sales coming up this spring and you can become a member if you want.

Pat and Mike Worsham live in Fredericksburg and are charter members of the Central Rappahannock Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Association, members of the Virginia Bluebird Society, and recipients of the 2025 Friends of the Rappahannock Steward Award.

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