Judy Clayton Ward’s fascination with monarch butterflies started accidentally, but she’s embraced these colorful and distinctive pollinators in her home garden in DeLand.
“My journey began with a caterpillar,” she says with a smile. “Actually, it was hundreds of caterpillars that appeared on coontie plants in my backyard and stripped them clean. It turned out these caterpillars were echo moth larvae—hairy, bright orange and toxic to humans if stung. They’re also voracious eaters, and they made my yard look terrible.”
With a college friend scheduled to visit, Judy headed to her nearby nursery to purchase more plants to fill in her landscape.
“I love being outdoors and watching things grow,” she says. “Also, all of my seven grandchildren love to visit and enjoy inspecting my gardens and exploring the trails that wander throughout our yard. There’s always something fun to do here.”
Creating a Butterfly Nursery
Judy and her husband, Bill, live on three-quarters of an acre landscaped with many native plants. Although her degree is in elementary education, Judy spent most of her career in nonprofit management. When she retired, she was happy to have more time to spend in the garden, although she says it’s really just a hobby.
“I’m like a kid in a candy store at a nursery, so it’s hard for me to keep to my intended purchases,” she says. “When I spotted some milkweed plants in the butterfly section, I decided to purchase three of them. Milkweed is the only host plant for monarch butterflies, and I knew their population was declining, so I wanted to do my part for the environment. Plus, one of my daughters-in-law had raised monarchs for a couple of years, and I thought it would be fun to share that project with our grandkids when they came to visit.”
Judy situated the milkweed plants in her backyard and discovered several small monarch larvae under the leaves.
“It was like I had gotten a bonus,” she says. “My curiosity was piqued to see if I could follow these teeny tiny caterpillars through their life cycle.”
The small larvae quickly grew into larger black, white and green caterpillars that constantly munched away on her milkweed—so much so that she soon returned to the nursery for more.
“By this time, I was hooked,” Judy says. “Following my daughter-in-law’s practice, I bought a mesh habitat cage in which to raise the caterpillars and watch as they eventually formed their chrysalises and then as they emerged into butterflies.”
Throughout the spring, she monitored the butterflies that laid their almost microscopic eggs on the undersides of the milkweed leaves. As they hatched, the small gray larvae with black heads began to devour the leaves and grow into caterpillars, reaching their mature size of half an inch to a full inch or longer.
Their black, yellow and white stripes became prominent, and they had two black tentacles at both their front and back ends. By this time, the caterpillars were regularly eating multiple milkweed leaves daily.
“It wasn’t long until I headed back to the nursery for even more milkweed,” Judy says. “I continued to rotate the plants in and out of the mesh habitat to keep the caterpillars happy.”
When the potted milkweed inside the habitat was eaten down to the spindly stems, she transferred the caterpillars onto a fresh plant and moved it into the enclosure. Then, she planted the feasted-upon milkweed in the yard where it could recover and provide blossoms for a variety of butterflies to enjoy and a nursery for the monarchs to lay more eggs.
About two weeks after hatching and feeding, the caterpillars were mature enough to create their chrysalises, which would be their home for metamorphosis into butterflies.
“Most of the caterpillars spun their chrysalises inside the habitats, attaching themselves to the mesh cloth or part of a milkweed plant,” Judy says. “But before I set up the enclosure, about a half-dozen hatched in the wild of my backyard, on the siding of the house or under the top rim of various pots. It’s almost like an Easter egg hunt to find the bright green capsules around the yard.”
A Living Science Lesson
Judy contrasts her butterfly-raising undertaking with becoming a mom for the first time.
“Unlike having a basic understanding about pregnancy, plus plenty of people to answer my questions, I went into my monarch adventure knowing very little about what to expect,” she says. “I knew the basic stages of development, but every time something changed, I worried, researched or texted my daughter-in-law, Lindsay. When I saw the first caterpillar spin its chrysalis—when the chrysalis turned from bright green to black and when the butterfly began to struggle to emerge—I just wanted to make sure everything was OK.”
Judy enjoyed watching the pupa inside the chrysalis mature, changing colors first to translucent green with a small circlet of gold dots, deepening to a bright emerald green as the butterfly grew inside, and finally darkening to black as the butterfly prepared to emerge.
“Even more so, I was intrigued when a mature butterfly begins to emerge—a process called eclosion—pushing its fragile wings against the shell of the chrysalis to become this beautiful creature,” she says. “At first, I wanted to help, but Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. I just sat and watched as the butterfly wriggled out of the chrysalis then patiently built strength in its wings as they dried and straightened out. When it finally flew off, I really felt proud and a little bit honored to have a small part in seeing more monarchs come into the world.”
Over the spring, Judy kept a close watch on the habitat and nature’s work in her landscape, but it took a while to actually see the exact times when a caterpillar metamorphosized into a chrysalis and when a butterfly began its emergence.
A caterpillar usually takes less than two minutes to form a chrysalis. After 10 to 14 days inside, a butterfly needs just a few seconds to eclose, or emerge from its pupal case, although it can take several hours for the wings to dry out and strengthen before the butterfly’s first flight.
“By the time my college friend arrived, I had seen the process from egg to caterpillar, caterpillar to chrysalis and then chrysalis to adult butterfly many times, and I was so excited to share this with her,” Judy says. “It was serendipitous that while she was visiting, I was able to make my first video of the entire sequence of a butterfly hatching and flying away. All it took was one caterpillar.”