Hello my friends!

We are nearing the end of butterfly season for 2026 and so this week I’ve got a summer butterfly tale to tell you as we slowly plod on towards the end of the year.

On a normal year I spot maybe 40 Painted ladies in the garden, for 2026 I’d seen that many by the end of May!

I’m now into my forth summer of growing a nature garden for pollinators and many of my plants are now fairly well established – mainly the rudbeckia, daisies and thistles and the butterflies are finding the plants I’ve grown for them.

Back in June I actually saw Painted lady butterflies laying eggs on the thistles in my flowerbed (and was over the moon) the last time I raised these butterflies was back in 2023 when I bought the thistle plants and came home from the garden centre with hitchhikers (link at the bottom if you want to read about them!).

Over the summer I watched hundreds of them happily devour the thistles in my garden – which thankfully are perennials and will regrow next year! I decided to leave them free-roaming and just watch from a distance, these are one of my favourite butterfly caterpillars, because they grow so quickly and are very active!

Painted lady caterpillars come in two colours variations the more typical black version and a more green one with a distinctive red head, I was thrilled to see so many in one place!

Just to point out my usual butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

These caterpillars happily stay on their food plant and basically only leave it to either find a new food plant or to find somewhere safe to pupate. I kept finding them on the patio and didn’t want them to get trodden on or eaten by the dog so that was when I started picking up any that crossed my path!

In the end I picked up 76 fully grown caterpillars from either the patio or the garden path, that pupated in my butterfly house almost immediately! They climb to the top of the pop up enclosure where they hang upside down and look like a fish hook before they turn into this wonderful, almost pearlescent pupa, where they stay for about a week.

The release days were incredible, they emerged in three groups the first had 10 butterflies, the second 24 butterflies and the final group had an amazing 42 butterflies!

I’m enough of a loser to admit that I felt like I’d really helped nature but I didn’t really do anything!

As always they were offered a slice of orange when they emerged – although I always offer my butterflies cut flowers from the garden too. 

While its been an awesome year for our fluttery friends its also been super hot, Cornwall is much wetter than anyone ever says but we had no rain for 4 months – my water butts actually ran dry! So there weren’t quite as many flowers as I hoped for in the garden but the well established plants were surprisingly strong. 

One of the nicest things about releasing these butterflies was that they didn’t all fly away and on a couple of afternoons I could sit in the sunshine surrounded by butterflies, crispy grass and the plants that beat the heat!

2026 has seen record amounts of migrant butterflies heading to the UK, with Painted lady having a bumper summer but theres also been large numbers of Clouded yellow and Long-tailed blue, even a handful of Queen of Spain fritillaries and plenty of Hummingbird hawk moths!

This is the exciting part if you click on either of the images above it should take you to a reel I posted to IG where you can see a whole host of Painted ladies having a garden party on the sunshine yellow flowers!

I’m literally overjoyed that my summer project paid off and I was able to take part in creating a habitat for these creatures and that the 76 I picked off the patio flew off into the big wild world!

So thats it for this week, my plan is to post some new embroidered butterflies next week.

I really hope you enjoyed this little slice of fluttery goodness! As always thank you so much for reading this post and have a great weekend!

Ps. If you fancy reading my 2023 edition of Raising Painting Lady butterflies its HERE!