Eastern Black Swallowtail 2007

I ran out on lunch one day last week and hit a few local nursery's looking for Fennel and Parsley. We want to add these plants to what we call our butterfly garden in the hope of attracting MORE butterflies. This garden already contains a nice assortment of plants; (6) different color butterfly bushes, phlox, sedum, black-eye susans, daiseys, chives, columbine and a rose of sharon tree. The butterflies seemed to enjoy these plants last summer and were often seen fluttering from one flower to the next.

To my surprise I found both Fennel and Parsley at the second nursery I stopped at. I bought (1) Fennel plant and (1) 6-pack of Parsley. I've not had the chance to get these in the ground yet, soon. I was watering them, as well as our other plants not yet in the ground, Saturday morning and was shocked to see that an Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillar had already taken up residence on the parsley, see the pictures below. You can see in the first picture that this dude is just about an insect long (picture taken Sunday AM); he was literally half that size just a day earlier - no kidding!

Stay tuned...

See my Tuesday, September 26, 2006 posting titled, Eastern Black Swallowtail. Also, my Monday, June 04, 2007 posting titled, Black Swallowtail - UPDATE.