Plant now to help monarch butterflies, urges Fall River gardening club

FALL RIVER, N.S. — Lawrence Spencer cast a few handfuls of milkweed seeds in his garden last week.
“Nature will do the rest,” said Spencer.

It will.

Those milkweed seeds just need a good freeze to signal them to germinate into the soil.

Come spring their tiny roots will gather minerals and assemble them with carbon taken from the air in a photosynthetic alchemy fueled by a nuclear furnace 147 million kilometres away.

And then, if Lawrence and all of us are lucky, something equally amazing could happen.

An orange, black and white butterfly might  perch on its purple flowers, have a feed and lay some eggs on the underside of the milkweed’s leaves.

“It was Bob (MacDiarmid) who got the idea of finding some sort of way to alert people to the plight of the monarch butterfly,” said Spencer, a member of the Fall River Garden Club.
“We started reading about them and we thought as a Club, maybe this is something we do something about.”

The Fall River Garden Club has long acted within its capacity to do good in the world.

The group of some 40 primarily older HRM residents keep colourful flowers blooming in Jamieson Park and share seeds and their thoughts about small things that grow.

In January when there seems so much we can do so little about, they want us to think about monarch butterflies.

Soon they will wake

As you read this, they’re hibernating in mountain forests in Mexico.

But soon they’ll wake up and fill the air with their orange wings – overwintering sites have an estimated population density of 37.5 million monarch butterflies per hectare.

They’ll mate and their progeny will begin a multi-generational northern journey past innumerable perils.

With a lifespan of four to five weeks, it could be their grandchildren that begin arriving in Nova Scotia in late May.

When they get here, they’ll look for milkweed.

It’s the only plant on which monarchs lay their eggs. As caterpillars their offspring will feast upon the leaves and accumulate a toxin that makes them poisonous to predators.

The Fall River Garden Club wants us to know that casting a few handfuls of seed in January is a small good act we can do for little creatures on an amazing journey.

To remind us of this, the Garden Club commissioned artist Heather Lawrie of West Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, to create a sculpture from scrap steel of a monarch perched on a flowering milkweed.

The club’s two founding members, Evangeline Brown and Gloria Coughlin, unveiled it amongst the gardens they maintain in Jamieson Park late last fall.

“We’re just over the moon with what (Lawrie) came up with,” said Spencer.
“She’s a very talented lady.”