Our swan plant is thriving.
I haven’t seen it so healthy in the three years since I planted it.
How come it’s not eaten away to its bare branches, as it normally is, by monarch butterfly caterpillars? The sad truth is that there is a dirty little secret afoot in my garden. No butterfly has pupated here in over a year, and it’s none of my doing. You may picture me in your mind’s eye, out there in all weathers, overzealously squashing eggs and baby caterpillars alike to preserve the health of the bush, but you’d be wrong. There’s an all natural process going on here – it’s an ant infestation. A thriving colony has built up from taking advantage of all the hard work of many a butterfly, who have been thanking their lucky stars in finding such a pristine swan plant and laying their eggs on it with gay abandon. If you look closely, you can even see where some of the eggs have hatched and a caterpillar has made small headway on eating a leaf before it’s been harvested. Chilling. It’s just like the Morlocks and the Eloi in that H G Wells novel.
I’m a little torn I must confess. It’s nice not having to worry about Monarch butterfly caterpillars eating themselves out of house and home, and it feels wrong to interfere with Nature in tooth and claw. On the other hand, isn’t the whole point of putting a swan plant in your garden to help the butterfly population?
In any event, we may be heading for some sort of showdown, as the miserable and scraggly swan plant behind the big one has a number of good sized caterpillars on it now.
I’m not sure how big they have to be, to be safe – I’ve seen those army ant documentaries – but they’re going to run out of food in a week or so, so they’re going to be on the march and will inevitably find the lush plant less than a metre away. Let the best bug win!