Native Plant Garden

Fun with caterpillars!!

It turned out when we removed the tall alien plants in one area, we had two slender river oaks hiding in there. They greatly appreciated the daylighting, and they pretty quickly grew a crop of caterpillars that enjoyed them also! A group of caterpillars pretty much denuded the smaller tree, so we had a fun activity of moving some of the caterpillars to the larger tree one afternoon!

Then we started getting Monarch caterpillars on our milkweed and butterfly weed — and had to pretty hastily get some more butterfly weed, and do a little judicious moving of caterpillars to a fresh plant. And, we were lucky enough to have a Monarch cocoon on our fence gate, and my husband even got a photo of the butterfly emerging!

We love watching the butterflies dancing around the yard. We also have a ruby-throated hummingbird that comes to our coral honeysuckle every day, but I haven’t yet been fast enough to catch it on video.

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