RECORDING BUTTERFLIES IN AN IPSWICH GARDEN 1996–2005

Page 1

88

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 42 RECORDING BUTTERFLIES IN AN IPSWICH GARDEN 1996–2005 RICHARD STEWART

Location and Garden In late November 1995 my wife and I moved to our present house at 112 Westerfield Road, Ipswich, TM169461. It is close to the Westerfield roundabout on Valley Road in a housing area largely composed of detached houses with mature gardens. Close by is the Spinney, a long ‘green corridor’ running at the back of south facing gardens in Borrowdale Avenue, from Westerfield Road right through to Tuddenham Road. The old and new Ipswich cemeteries, two large areas of allotments and the railway line from Ipswich to Lowestoft and the one branching off to Felixstowe are about half a mile away. There is open countryside leading to Westerfield within a third of a mile of our house. For our first year of residence a field opposite was used by Victoria Nurseries and had good peripheral butterfly habitats. This has now become a new housing development. The smaller front garden has not been designed for butterflies. The rear garden, approximately eighty foot in length and forty foot width, was largely overgrown when we moved in. By Spring 1996 many nectar-rich species had been planted. These supplemented the meagre nectar resources already present, which did include a large buddleia close to our rear kitchen and also visible from back rooms upstairs. The garden now fulfils almost all of the criteria listed under ‘Basic Requirements’ in Butterfly Conservation’s ‘Gardening For Butterflies’ (Payne, 1987) being sunlit for much of the day with areas of shelter, having a wide seasonal variety of nectar sources and being close to open countryside. Ideally it should face south but our east facing back garden receives sunlight from the south from mid morning and the taller florets of the main buddleia receive evening sunlight as does the main trunk of a large Silver Birch, Betula pendula, at the bottom of the garden, making it a favoured basking spot for Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta L. Nectar Sources The planting of additional nectar sources was based on ‘Butterfly Plants For The Garden’ (Vickery, 1995), which not only lists the two hundred best nectar sources as compiled from the annual Butterfly Conservation Garden Butterfly Survey but also gives the Latin names of the best varieties for attracting butterflies: this is particularly important with a plant such as sedum since the variety Sedum spectabile attracts more autumn butterflies than others in the same family. Vickery considers that a good butterfly garden ‘should contain at least thirty different nectar plants with flowering spread from spring to autumn’. Twenty nine plants in our garden have attracted at least on feeding butterfly plus Red Admiral and Comma, Polygonia c-album L. on soft fermenting plums and sap flowing from tree pruning.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 42 (2006)


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.