The longer you do something, the harder it is to discover new things. Maybe that’s because you don’t pay attention to the details as much or because there is just a little less to discover. At this point, I’ve been giving seminars at the nursery for nearly 20 years. And of course, one of our most popular ones is the Butterfly Seminar, which also happens to be this weekend, along with our Butterfly Bonanza. 

In having done this seminar almost 40 times, at some point I’m not really surprised by much. It kind of feels like I’ve seen all the butterflies, raised them through the life cycles, and grown all kinds of different flowers to attract them. But then one afternoon, our Social Media Manager Olivia showed me a picture of a caterpillar that I’d never seen before. It was feeding on our Passion Flowers, and it looked kind of like a gulf fritillary caterpillar, but it had these white markings on it. So now we were both puzzled. The Florida State Butterfly is the zebra longwing, and its caterpillar also feeds on Passion Vine, but where the gulf fritillary is orange, the zebra longwing is white. This new-to-us caterpillar looked like a cross of the two, but they are completely different butterflies and can’t crossbreed.

Now I was stumped. Just when I thought there wasn’t something new that I could discover, here was a caterpillar I hadn’t seen before. Between Google Lens and my trusty old hardback butterfly book, we discovered that it was a variegated fritillary. After so many years of teaching others about butterflies, it was fun to find a new one that I knew nothing about! It’s a little smaller than our more common gulf fritillary and not quite as showy. When it folds its wings, it’s a little duller in color – more brown than bright orange. And even the caterpillar, while different from the gulf fritillary with the white markings, is pretty similar if you were just glancing really quickly. We never saw the adult butterfly, and this one caterpillar was the only one we discovered. But it was a great reminder that Mother Nature always has something new to show us!

So whether you are new to butterfly gardening or have been doing it your whole life, come join us this weekend to discover (or rediscover) how much fun butterfly gardening is during our Butterfly Bonanza. All weekend long we’ll have information about the most common Florida butterflies and what you can do to attract them to your garden. And if you really want to get the scoop, join me for the seminar on Saturday morning at 10 am. I’ll show you just what you need to make all the neighborhood butterflies want to play in your backyard. No matter how long you’ve been doing it, I’m sure that you’ll discover something new.