Asclepias

[Matsukaze]

Does anyone have any experience of these as butterfly plants in a southern English context? I'm well aware that my chances of attracting Monarchs are virtually non-existent, but I'm wondering whether our native butterflies would take to them as a source of nectar.

[David M]

After seeing how attractive they were to insects in Spain last October I decided to buy three asclepia curassavica plants, Chris:

https://www.hotplantco.co.uk/9769/Ascle ... ood-Flower

They arrived promptly and have positively thrived inside my living room next to the patio doors. I will probably plant them outside at the end of April and see how they get on, although they'll have to be taken back inside before the cold weather arrives in autumn.

[Matsukaze]

I have spread my bets with seeds from three species, curassavica, incarnata (swamp milkweed) and tuberosa (butterfly weed). I doubt curassavica will survive a worse-than-average winter here, and our porch is already full to the limits of my wife's tolerance with citrus and pelargoniums; the other two should have no trouble with frost, being used to far colder conditions in much of their native range.

[David M]

Let me know how you get on with the non-curassavica ones, Chris. I rather suspect that I may have to go for a more temperate species as curassavica likes semi-tropical conditions which are in pretty short supply in Swansea.

[PaynterQ]

In NZ, where I live, the monarch is a self-introduced species (arriving once people started growing host plants in their gardens). The most common foodplant is Gomphocarpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomphocarpus_physocarpus, which is fairly frost hardy. NZ is hardly a butterfly hot spot, so I'm not sure how attractive the flowers are to butterflies in general but monarch butterflies do use the flowers. I've also seen native yellow admiral butterflies using them (so I suspect red admirals etc. might go for them). The only other butterflies that we regularly get in the garden are long-tailed blues, "common blues" (Zizina otis) and introduced small white butterflies, which ignore them

[David M]

I'm pretty sure that's the first Yellow Admiral image on this forum - beautiful insect.

Thanks for posting that, PaynterQ, as well as the other comments.

[Matsukaze]

The seeds have germinated! Not sure whether the hardy perennials will flower this year though. The packaging for one of them promises big things - the large fritillary nectaring away would be excellent (SWF visits occasionally) but the black swallowtails are perhaps a bit much to hope for...

[Matsukaze]

A. curassavica couldn't grow quickly enough to cope with even the unusually good summer of 2022 here, failing to flower before autumn kicked in, and (hardly unexpectedly) died off over winter. The other two have at least proved hardy but are very vulnerable to slugs, and have taken considerable losses. Hopefully next summer I'll have a better idea of their attractiveness to butterflies.

[David M]

Have to say that without a supply of tropical conditions, curassavica struggles. Mine petered out last year before I could even consider putting them outside.