Make sure butterlies feel at home

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Plant milkweed and the monarchs will come.

Cathy Icaza, an avid gardener living in Santa Ana, didn’t set out to be a butterfly keeper when she innocently spied a pretty plant with orange and red flowers at the nursery.

“(Late nursery owner) Mary Lou Heard pointed out that the caterpillars living on her milkweed plants were monarchs. So I brought a plant home because I thought I might try to attract butterflies into my own garden,” she said.

So what started out seven years ago as a typical day of nursery-hopping evolved into a monarch mission.

Icaza is a cottage gardener, bunching roses, perennials and annuals in tightly packed borders along her picket fence and backyard beds. Flowers by the armful are her reward for the three to four hours a day she spends tending her plants.

“I can’t go a day without it,” she said. “I love the flowers. I love planting pretty things that the neighbors can enjoy.”

Planting milkweed, though, brought more to her beds and borders than blooms.

Botanically known as asclepias, milkweed is a prolific re-seeder and the single food source for the monarch species of butterfly larvae.

By spring, this colorful perennial had sprouted along the length of Icaza’s picket fence. By fall, she noticed that the plants were hosting many monarch eggs and caterpillars.

Monarchs have a unique adaptation. Even though these beloved butterflies are hard to track, scientists believe that four generations can occur in a single year of migration from Canada to California to Mexico.

At least one generation of offspring, either the grandchildren or great-grandchildren, return to the spot where their ancestors were born. For 100 or so butterflies heading south in November, that place has become Icaza’s garden.

“There has only been one year when they didn’t come and that was in 2002 when there was a freeze in Mexico that killed millions of monarchs over-wintering there. But I like to think that my milkweed garden is helping to bring back the population.”

Monarch caterpillars are easy to spot, with their plump white bodies and black and yellow markings.

“Within days the caterpillars form metallic-green chrysalises that hang on my fence, on the steps of my ladder, even in my gardening shoes,” she said.

Icaza helps them along when she has time. When the caterpillars are plump, she picks them off her milkweed plants before predators can get them and puts them into butterfly boxes that her husband, Alex, made.

The boxes are made of wood, with a solid top and screens on four sides. The butterflies continue eating milkweed in the box for a day or two, then crawl up the sides and form chrysalises on the ceiling.

Within a week or so the striking orange-and-black butterflies crawl out of their metamorphic pouches and stretch their wings.

“It takes them a few hours to warm up before they fly off,” said Icaza.

Where do they go?

“I haven’t a clue. But every year like clockwork, they come back.”