Book Review: Butterfly Gardening for the South

A Fair Trade Book (run don't walk!)



Title: Butterfly Gardening for the South 

Author: Geyata Ajilvsgi

Date: 1990

Publisher: Taylor

Length: 342 pages

ISBN: 978-0878337385

Illustrations: beautiful clear full-color photographs, as shown on the cover, throughout

For all those who can't wait for spring, and have already sunk too much money in those seed catalogues...here is the ultimate seasonal eye candy. Butterflies are active only in sunny, fairly warm weather when there are flowers. Here is a book about how to recognize the butterflies found in the Southeastern States (including Texas and Oklahoma) and their favorite flowers, how to plant either flowers for the adult butterflies or host plants for their young, and how to take gorgeous photographs like the ones in this book.

There may be another book Out There that covers these topics in comparable depth. I've never seen it. This one is a real masterpiece by a woman who's grown old studying, documenting, and writing about the flowers and butterflies of the Southern States, especially Texas. (Her other two books, also beautiful coffee-table picture books, are about the butterflies and wildflowers of Texas, specifically.)

The cover butterfly is the Zebra Swallowtail, Eurytides marcellus. It's usually one of the earliest (and also latest) butterflies active at the Cat Sanctuary; there are three or four generations a year, and each butterfly normally flies for about a month. Strange-looking in North America because it shares its wing shape with a family of tropical butterflies, Zebra Swallowtails vary so dramatically in size and color that when I was growing up they were believed to be three distinct species before scientists confirmed that temperature makes the difference. Individuals that were exposed to cold weather, even as eggs, are much smaller and paler than those that grew up in the tropics. They can be white butterflies, about the size of playing cards, with black stripes, or black butterflies, big as your hand, with light green stripes, or anything in between.

Adult Zebras will sip nectar from a lot of sources. They also slurp up water and mineral salts from mud. They don't gravitate to nasty stuff as much as some other Swallowtails, but they do visit polluted, oil-slicked puddles; they're part of nature's cleaning system.

Baby Zebra Swallowtails are seldom noticed. They're small caterpillars with distinctly humped backs, and spend their lives on pawpaw trees. The pawpaws, like the butterflies, seem odd, exotic, the northernmost members of a tropical family. Usually the mother butterfly lays only one egg on a tree, or on each limb of a bigger than average tree, so the caterpillars never eat enough leaves to endanger the tree. It's possible to see Zebra Swallowtails for most of the summer in my part of the world but it's rare to see more than two at a time.

Butterfly Gardening for the South provides this kind of information for all the butterflies normally found in any of the Southern States, including some northerners found only in the Blue Ridge Mountains and some tropical species found only in southern Florida. If you want to be able to look up not only a butterfly's name but why it's likely to have visited you and what you can do to encourage more (or fewer) of it, this book is for you.

Ajilvsgi admits to being 84 years old so there's still a chance to buy her books as Fair Trade Books if you act quickly. Send $10 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. Please note that, although this web site usually encourages packing multiple books in one $5 package, in this case few other book will fit; this is a big, heavy book.

It's anything but heavy reading, though.