While the Monarch population is currently non-existent in my garden and many others in the St. Louis area, there’s a good replacement in early August – The Cloudless Sulphur.
This lemon colored butterfly is slightly smaller than a Monarch, but it’s still striking in the garden.
The trick to getting these in your garden is to have Partridge Pea growing in the garden. It’s a magnet not only for bumble bees, but it’s also the host plant for the Cloudless Sulphur. Once you get these plants started in your garden, you never have to buy them again. They are an annual which will gladly freely reseed itself and provide you with plenty of plants the next year. You can also save the seeds and plant the seeds in the fall anywhere you want them to grow next year.
I like them to grow as a second flowering annual. Usually I have bulbs, milkweed and coreopsis flowering in spring and then Partridge Pea comes on strong in August.
The eggs are tiny, white and football shaped.
What I’ve found is that the butterflies even like petunias for nectar.
Lobeila cardinalis and red salvia are also favorites of theirs.
Butterfly Gardening 