Want to see more butterflies in your yard? Lazy gardening may be the answer

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

If you want to see more butterflies in the yard, lazy gardening might be the key. NPR's Paige Waterhouse has the story.

PAIGE WATERHOUSE, BYLINE: It's a sunny May afternoon, and Susan Parker is showing me around her front yard.

SUSAN PARKER: We have maybe five or six different milkweeds in the yard, some blue-eyed grass. I have a number of asters because the...

WATERHOUSE: Parker lives just down the street from my parents' house in Virginia Beach. Surrounded by homes with neatly trimmed green lawns, Parker's yard stands out.

PARKER: And when we moved into the yard, we had a ton of grass. I knew the pesticides weren't good, but we were also getting weeds. So we decided to turn a very large portion of our yard into a native garden.

WATERHOUSE: Among a hodgepodge of tall grasses, weeds, and flowers, a little sign pokes out of the ground. It reads, why native plants? and displays a QR code.

JACK MONSTED: Native plants are a lot of times the only plants that can serve as foods for a lot of these different pollinators and insects, and then that in turn moves up the food chain.

WATERHOUSE: That's Jack Monsted, an assistant curator at the State Arboretum of Virginia. He says not only are native plants crucial for supporting local ecosystems, they're also much easier to maintain.

MONSTED: You don't want to clean up your garden. You want things to flower. You want them to go to seed, turn brown, fall back into the ground, decompose.

WATERHOUSE: Monsted says that taking a step back from yard work can really help local pollinators, like butterflies. Simply leaving a patch of your lawn uncut can provide a safe haven for young caterpillars to feast and grow.

MAURICE CULLEN: What you want to look for is this little, tiny, creamy-colored little dot there. And there's your monarch egg

WATERHOUSE: They're so small.

CULLEN: Yeah, they're - yeah. But once you train your eye and the more you start kind of peeking around - there's one.

WATERHOUSE: Maurice Cullen is a middle school biology teacher and member of the Butterfly Society of Virginia. Kneeling in the dirt, he shows me how to spot the egg of a monarch stuck to the leaves of a milkweed plant.

CULLEN: It's not just about flowers. It's about host plants. That's the importance of natives. Because the caterpillars - that's what they have to have. A butterfly - nectar is nectar.

WATERHOUSE: We're in a rain garden tucked behind Virginia Beach Middle School, a plot of land Cullen started filling with native plants about 10 years ago. Cullen says the garden has attracted a dozen different species of butterflies.

CULLEN: If you plant it, they will come.

WATERHOUSE: Paige Waterhouse, NPR News, Virginia Beach, Va. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.