The pilot butterfly garden emerges

December 2024

To get a butterfly garden established in the first season at the new house, even a small one, I had to turn my attention to #9 on the project plan, even though other tasks "ahead" of this hadn't been completed. Such is life with lomandra.

9. Propagation of flowering plants and planting out. Much of the garden is on a slope, so there will be a learning curve as to the best plants to cope with the flood or famine environment.

I am a loathe to buy punnets of plants from places like Kings Plant Barn and Mitre 10 Mega when I have pollinators in mind. Much as I love those retailers, the modern cultivars they sell seem to lack a good nectar load. There are exceptions and both those shops offer small, bee-friendly ranges of single plants, but on the whole their punnets provide wonderful colour, but not the food.

That's why propagating from seed is so important for a butterfly garden. At the old house I raised heaps of milkweed and swan plants for the monarch butterflies, as well as gaura, calendula, scabiosa, cosmos and other flowers. I fully own that my abilities in this area are rudimentary and I either get nothing or far too much to be useful. Still, I'm willing to learn and I had a table on the covered back deck, which meant the seedlings never had to weather any extremes.

There isn't any covered outdoor space at this new house and once we'd moved in I bought a mini-greenhouse from Trade Tested. I have a heated propagation tray, but I've had mixed results with it (user issues rather than equipment failure) and besides, it was in a box, yet to be unpacked. I bought some old fashioned sweet pea seeds, and I had other seeds left over from the old garden - alyssum, marigolds, swan plants. The mini-greenhouse arrived quickly and I got stuck in staining it to protect the wood and then constructing it. I felt very Kiwi building something.

The mini-greenhouse in the courtyard in December

I decided to put the greenhouse in the courtyard garden at the west side of the house. It seemed to be protected and it got some good sun in the afternoon. It was early October and yet to warm up, especially at night, so I was pleased to see the sweetpeas germinate and get a good start. I am prone to over-watering seeds, because I can't get it right when they say the soil should always be damp, but not wet. How do I do that?! It's not like I can wring it out like a cloth. Still, aware of my limitations I was careful with the watering can. Yey me.

It all went wrong with the first summery days. It was properly warm and lovely to be outside in the sunshine. I opened the greenhouse late one afternoon and was hit by a wave of heat. All the punnets had dried up and it was clear I had cooked the peas. Weeks of work lost. Nothing was salvageable.

I wasn't ready to admit defeat though. I tried more sweetpeas and most of them survived, until I planted them in the garden and then they failed. Out of the whole packet, none made it to adulthood. One verbascum survived and flowered in the garden, but it had no friends. Things weren't looking good.

My plant cage on the patio with all the plants to put in the ground

Time for plan B.

I had brought some planted pots with me - buddleia, echinacea and tropical milkweed for the flower garden, plus some natives for the bush that self-seeded in the old garden. Also, I went SHOPPING! Kaipātiki Project, where I'll be ordering my native plants from, had a sale to the public of a limited number of species towards the end of October and I bought some flax, dianella (NZ blueberry), koromiko (a native hebe), muehlenbeckia and libertia. Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand (MBNZT) had a plant sale in Auckland at the start of November and I bought dahlias, Chatham Island nettles, zinnias and strawflowers. A few days later I found a nursery in Hawke's Bay, Broccoli's, that sells trailing lantanas, and I bought raspberry swirl and white lantanas, as well as some geums. Finally I bought a couple of Waverley salvias from Auckland Botanic Gardens. With some cosmos that survived me growing it in the mini-greenhouse, I had a good number of plants to put into the ground.

The start of planting

Although I had started planting natives in the bush and by the stream, it wasn't until the beginning of December that I started planting the butterfly garden. The problem with this bed is that you are precariously balanced if you are trying to use two hands. I had to give up kneeling, because I kept pitching forward, such was the slope. It took a lot longer to do the planting than it did at the old place, with its lovely flat lawn adjacent to the flower beds. Downhill is definitely not the direction in which to garden. I kept the woody lavenders and a couple of hebes that were already in the beds and the rest of the bottom border was mine to plant. It took several days to get the flowers in and I had a few plants that had to go into larger pots, because there wasn't room to plant the larger shrubs (stupid lomandra). Whilst the zinnias have started to flower, and the dahlias have started to die, there's nothing really to show you yet. Watch this space.

The transition garden bed where I also cleared some lomandra was planted up as well. This is a raised bed the other side of the butterfly garden's hedge and the idea is to have a mix of native flowers and butterfly plants there as a transition between the exotic flowering butterfly garden and the native bush. I planted mountain flax, dianella and koromiko there. I've also left room for some kakabeak I grew from seed and haven't killed yet, but are too small to plant out.

It is definitely easier planting uphill! I watched some YouTube videos regarding gardening on a slope and I made sure I put stones or logs downhill from the new plants to make sure that water lingered by their roots. The angle of the hole also comes into play, but it's too hard to explain and I honestly am not sure if I got it right. After a couple of weeks I decided to put in some tropical milkweed as well, because the more they and swan plants are dotted around, the more chance the monarch caterpillars will have of survival.

I've still got a lot of plants without forever homes yet, including some grown from MBNZT cuttings, but time and lomandra was against me. Hopefully everything will survive until the autumn rains come on and the weather cools down once more. Still, I'm not going to wish the summer away. This is the butterfly season. Once the flowers start blooming, we'll see who comes to visit!