Essay: Nurturing Butterflies in the City

Amid the cacophony of helicopters whirring and trains blaring their horns in the suburbs of Chicago, my daughter and I discovered a beautiful—albeit ravenous—natural phenomenon two summers ago.

It’s worth noting that my daughter was 2 years old at the time, so it didn’t take much to impress her. But I grew up on a few acres outside city limits with a clay-bottom creek, woods, and lots of chickens and was still amazed at what we witnessed.

On a whim, I had purchased fennel from a plant nursery and potted it in my “herb garden”—a 15-gallon planter on my back deck. My daughter took to eating the fennel straight off the stem, unnerving our less nature-enthusiastic neighbors, whose facial expressions implied they thought she had transformed into some sort of ruminant.

One morning we discovered green-striped caterpillars on the fennel and, after some research, discovered they were swallowtail butterfly larvae.

We purchased a butterfly house and provided these colorful little crawlers with fresh fennel cuttings every day. What I didn’t realize was the sheer amount of food that one swallowtail caterpillar can eat, and we quickly sacrificed the fennel and two additional parsley plants to them.

By the end of fall, we managed to help grow and release close to 40 swallowtails—while teaching a handful of city children about the life cycle of butterflies. This year I’m starting dozens of fennel, dill, and milkweed plants from seed and reserving a portion of my yard for a butterfly garden.

While going from childhood in the country to seeing my neighbors through my kitchen window is an adjustment, the one constant for me is that nature exists everywhere. Sometimes it can be as vast as fields of coreopsis and yarrow—or as small as a corner of my yard.

When she’s not re-enacting Disney movies with her daughter, Olivia DeSmit can be found baking sourdough, growing heirloom vegetables, and, of course, writing.