21 July Facebook Butterflies 2.

Butterfly garden irresistible & Wildlife Gardening Notes

It is turning into a bumper year for butterflies! Great news as their numbers have been plummeting. Flower borders and shrubs are alive with wings, as much as cultivated and wild

meadows. Border favourites for butterflies and bees, particularly bumbles, are lavender 


with Comma; pre-loved(!)

pre-loved(!) Rose Campion with male Brimstone; 




 Veronica with Comma, showing the actual comma on the underside of its wings; 


Globe Thistle with bumble – the other four on this flower and one of the White butterflies were too busy jostling in their feeding frenzy for me to get in focus!

Into the cultivated mix put in a few wild plants which are even more irresistible to these valuable pollinating insects, then the banquet is complete. The wild herb, marjoram

 in pale to fuller pinks, is a useful flower cluster ‘filler’ between cultivated plants and a butterfly magnet: with Meadow Brown in

. My usual score for one small clump is 9 Gatekeepers and Meadow Browns along with several of the various whites and bumbles.

Add tall architectural teasels to make a dramatic backdrop (topped with a Peacock and a tinier visitor ,


. Alongside a clump of cultivated Globe Thistles (4), teasels create a theme of tight-packed miniature flowers creating giants!


Buddleia (with Small Tortoiseshell ) is the favourite shrub for all, and also on the bigger cultivated plants scale is Everlasting Sweet Pea 

with Brimstone).

But hang on a minute... pale whitish fluttering on the lavender


... but not a butterfly jizz! It is fluttering, semi-hovering...the antennae are not typical butterfly antennae. This is the welcome sight of a day-flying moth, one that used to be very

common in this garden, but now no longer... it is a pale Silver Y Moth. Like so many insects they vary in colour intensity, beige though brown with a bright silver Y on each forewing. Amazing s

mall creatures - they migrate from Europe and have been recorded migrating at altitudes up to 1.2 km!

More on amazing moths in following post soon, meanwhile...

THREE important events to note...

1.

Talk by Bat Expert, Ellie Hack

(who nurtured the exhausted young Bechstein’s Bat back to health early last October)

St Nicholas Church Winsley, 7.30 pm

Tuesday 30th September.

2. Talk by Alison Green on Fungi (now recognised as vital to 80-90% of plants for growth, stress tolerance and disease resistance.)

St Nicholas Church Winsley, 7.30 pm

Tuesday 14th October

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3. Please don’t do a seasonal ‘tidy up’ of straggling, drying up wall plants such as seeding Iv-leaved Toadflax or ferns or other wild plants you may have in your garden. These and their progeny could be at the core in an exciting plan for a future project... and every plant will count! Watch this space...!

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