My Native Wisconsin Butterfly Garden

It didn't take long for all the silver maple "helicopters" to start sprouting. But, a nice treat to see one of the plugs (Foxglove) already blooming -- a rare sight the first year in a perennial garden.

While my hope is that native violets will fill in as a living groundcover, mulch is needed in the meantime. I've labeled every single plant so that I will know what should appear where and to better inform my future weeding activities after a long winter.

With a few desirable plants protected, and a pile of dirt waiting, it was time to get busy...

I convinced my husband to purchase landscape timbers and build a small retaining wall so that we could build up the soil level.

Exhibit A: "The Ailing Flower Bed" -- consisting of a deep slope, a shallow soil bed, gravel from the driveway, garlic mustard, and some invasive shrubs. As a co-leader for a Girl Scout troop, I was thrilled when my troop voted to plant habitat gardens for monarch butterflies and native bumblebees. I even tried talking them out of their plans, making sure they really didn't want to do one of their other ideas instead. I didn't want my unexpressed enthusiasm for the project to somehow have subliminally influenced their decision. So when they finalized their idea and selected their garden plans, I set out only to make sure the plants in the pre-planned monarch and pollinator gardens they chose were really ideal native plant choices for monarchs and native pollinators. As I did some fact-checking, something clicked, and I just had to put together a butterfly garden of my own. I researched the common butterflies of Wisconsin, along with their native ...