Butterfly Pavilion

The best way to attract butterflies and other pollinating insects to your yard or community garden is by providing their favorite food: plants! Adult butterflies typically drink nectar from a variety of flowers, but the caterpillars can be pickier. Providing host plants for the caterpillar stage is very important if you want to support butterflies through their entire life cycle. 

Below are two resources from the Theodore Payne Foundation: a list of plants native to Southern California that both adult butterflies and caterpillars will need to thrive, and a list of plants that are suitable for containers. Even a few plants in a small patch of yard or on a balcony can help the pollinators in your neighborhood!

Guide to California native plantings to support butterflies and moths

Guide to California Native Plantings suitable for Containers

Many nurseries carry Southern California natives, which are both drought-tolerant and a great resource for our local pollinators. Below are a few providers of CA native plants in the Los Angeles area:

• Theodore Payne Nursery - Sun Valley
• Hahamongna Native Plant Nursery - Pasadena
• Tar Weed Native Plants - Glendale
• Artemisia Nursery - El Sereno
• Plant Material - Glassell Park

If you live outside of Southern California, we recommend the Xerces Society as a resource to help you find plants that will attract the pollinators in your region. 

Many different kinds of insects go through a larval stage, the immature worm-like phase before they transform into an adult insect. Butterflies, moths, beetles, and flies are just some examples of insects that go through this type of metamorphosis. The larvae of butterflies and moths, what we commonly call caterpillars, have special fleshy “prolegs” on the back end of their body that help differentiate them from other insect larvae.

In Southern California, we have several thousand different kinds of moths and butterflies, which can make caterpillar identification difficult, but still possible. We recommend online resources like iNaturalist, where you can submit a photo and the location of your caterpillar for specialists to assist in identification. Field guides are also useful for common species; for example, The Insects of the Los Angeles Basin is a great resource for Angelenos.

Caterpillars can be very picky eaters so you must identify your caterpillar first to know which host plant(s) it prefers. (See the above Q/A for suggestions on how to identify your caterpillar). If you found the caterpillar on a plant, there is a good chance that plant is its preferred food since adult female butterflies will lay their eggs on their larval host plants.

If you found the caterpillar on the move (not sitting on a plant), there is a possibility that it is getting ready to pupate, as caterpillars often leave their host plant when it is time for the next stage of metamorphosis. Some moth larvae will bury themselves under dirt to pupate, and others will wrap themselves in silk (which we call a cocoon). Butterfly larvae pupate above ground and form what we call a chrysalis. Don’t be surprised if your wandering caterpillar refuses to eat and instead transforms into the pupal stage. Provide a few inches of soil as well as some branches to make sure they are able to pupate properly.

We take great care of our butterflies in the Butterfly Pavilion during their relatively short lives (only a few weeks as adults for most species). Our NHM staff gather up the butterflies after they have reached the end of their lifespan to use them as touchable, educational tools for our visitors and science camp students. Visitors to our pavilion are able to gently touch these specimens, but we do not give them away to our guests.

If you are interested in buying butterfly or moth specimens from reputable vendors, we highly recommend visiting the NHM Bug Fair on May 20th and 21st!

Inside the Butterfly Pavilion, we provide a variety of milkweed species, including some tropical milkweed along with native species, as a food source for our native and tropical butterflies. However, we strongly encourage the use of native milkweed in outdoor gardens and yards and no longer plant tropical milkweed in our Museum’s Nature Gardens. According to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, tropical milkweed “in the U.S., particularly at southern latitudes, may encourage monarchs to lay eggs outside of their regular breeding season, thus disrupting their migratory cycle (Batalden & Oberhauser 2015), and increase the prevalence of monarch infection by the protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, commonly referred to as “OE” (Satterfield et al. 2015).”  

Below is a selection of articles that provide more information about milkweed and monarchs:

• Guide to Monarch Nectar Plants for California
• Fact Sheet for Non-native Milkweed
• “The Right Milkweeds for Helping Monarchs” by Daniel Feldman, NHMLA Horticulture Manager
• Milkweed Finder- Online tool to find local native milkweed for your garden
• Xerces Society Milkweed FAQ
• Monarch Butterfly Fact sheet form, CA Department of Fish and Wildlife