This ragged-looking plant is called a crown flower. It grows into a big tree, and its name fits: the flowers really look like little crowns, in a beautiful purple. It’s a very poisonous plant, and there’s only one butterfly whose caterpillars feed on it.
A rescue from the garden store
These are monarch butterfly caterpillars, about 5 cm long and 1 cm thick. A home-and-garden store had about six of these plants out, and this was the best of them. The rest were in shambles — nobody had even been watering them, so they were all wilted, yet covered in caterpillars, and some caterpillars had fallen over and died. I felt sorry for them. The store let me have the best plant at half price, and I gathered every caterpillar I could find on the other plants, put them on it, and brought it home.
See, there they are! Their striking colors are a warning sign that they’re poisonous. There are tiny whitish-yellow eggs on the leaves too, almost too small to see, and those will be the next caterpillars.
About the monarch
Monarchs aren’t native to Hawaii, but for some reason they’re protected — a bit of a mystery insect to me. The adult butterfly is orange with black lines and white dots, a stylish pattern, and you see them flying all over Hawaii. The caterpillars wear bold white, yellow and black stripes.
The caterpillars eat this poisonous plant and store the poison in their bodies. Grown-up monarchs fly in an odd, fluttery way, which makes them surprisingly easy for birds to catch, so the poison is their way of saying, “Don’t eat us!” A monarch is said to weigh only as much as a paper clip, about one gram, but with its wings open it’s a big butterfly.
Hawaii’s monarchs just drift around, but on the U.S. mainland they travel thousands of kilometers to get through the winter. They gather together until the trees look like they’re growing butterflies, endure the cold until their bodies nearly freeze, and lay eggs after winter. Hanging in the trees like that, they’d be easy prey, so maybe that’s another reason for the poison.
A butterfly room someday?
Hey, caterpillar, move! It won’t. When I was in elementary school, I raised them inside the house, and one day there were suddenly about 30 butterflies flying around indoors. Look at this cute face!
I’m not sure there’s enough food on this plant for them all to become butterflies, but I’ll try raising them for now. It might be fun to have a butterfly room someday. Thanks for watching!