Butterflies don’t live on flowers alone.

If you’re a butterfly gardener, you’ve no doubt heard the
advice to plant "larval
food plants" so your butterflies can lay eggs on them. Then
watch the spectacle of
insect metamorphosis unfold before your eyes.

This advice sounds sincere and simple. But has it ever worked
for you?

Chances are you’ve rarely seen a sure-enough butterfly
caterpillar in your garden –
except maybe cabbage butterfly larvae, and who cares about them?

One thing that works is to keep a patch of truly wild weeds
and grasses.

Georgia has more than 150 kinds of butterflies. There are
more kinds of larval food
plants than there are butterflies. A hundred or so native
grasses and other plants
gathered from old fields will put you off to a good start.

If you prepare such a wild place, the butterflies will come.
They will most likely be
small, obscure butterflies, including some skippers, satyrs and
wood nymphs.

But unless you get down into the weeds and crawl along
looking for them, you won’t see
their larvae.

You could also plant trees that will serve as caterpillar
food. The tiger swallowtail
would be nice to have. Its larvae feed on trees including tulip
poplar, wild cherry, ash
and sweet bay.

But the tiger swallowtail has so many common trees to choose
from, why should it choose
yours?

That’s why I like the sugarberry. It tends to be scarce. But
I have a few in my yard.
Sugarberry is the host for hackberry, tawny emperor and snout
butterflies, which come to
my yard each summer.

But tree-feeding caterpillars are likely to be up too high to
see.

How about flowers?

Certain flowers are advertised as larval food plants. But
before you buy, ask
specifically which butterflies use them.

Milkweeds are a common recommendation for monarchs. But I’ll
bet you’ve never seen a
monarch caterpillar on milkweed in the Southeast. It does
happen, but northbound spring
monarchs are scarce in these parts.

Up north, monarchs are common all summer. There a butterfly
enthusiast can search a
milkweed patch in July and have a good shot at finding monarch
caterpillars.

So what will work here?

Forget flowers — think vegetables.

Plant parsley, carrots and dill for black swallowtails. Dill
is their favorite. If
black swallowtails pass through your garden, this will work.

Maypop or passion flower is a good choice. It’s not a
vegetable, but it thrives in the
disturbed soil of a vegetable garden better than in the wild.

In late summer, search maypop for the spiny caterpillars of
two beautiful butterflies,
the gulf fritillary and the variegated fritillary.

Plant beans for long-tailed skippers. This butterfly is a
gem. It’s brown with dusty
blue hindwings bearing long tails. Its hairless, big-headed
green larva is fat in the
middle and tapers to both ends.

Longtailed skipper larvae can defoliate your beans. So plant
a few extra for them — or
thin out the caterpillars if they’re eating too much.

If you don’t mind a few pests and like moths, too, watch the
tomatoes for tomato sphynx
larvae. They come by night like jumbo hummingbirds to lay their
eggs.

The caterpillar is green with white diagonal stripes. It has
a conspicuous, but
harmless, horn on the tail. It may grow to be four inches long.
But it doesn’t make a
cocoon. It burrows into the soft soil and transforms into a
chrysalis.

If you want to see your caterpillars transform, gently
capture a few when they are
nearly full grown. Put them in a cage and feed them the source
plant from which you took
them. Then watch for the miracle.