Essay: April 3
4/3/99
from Blue Ridge Country (1999)
Jan’s Butterfly Garden
by Elizabeth Hunter
We couldn’t have asked for more glorious weather. It was one of those late September days when softball-sized King Luscious apples are reddening, feathery-leaved cosmos is a mass of pink and burgundy flowers, migrating monarchs are making their way through the gaps, and the distant mountains are as blue and gentle as Jan’s eyes.
The orchard parking lot was dusty, filling with cars. Judy and I lugged more plastic chairs into the pavilion, an open air shelter next to the apple house. We could see we hadn’t printed nearly enough programs. The dedication of Jan’s Butterfly Garden was about to begin.
Last year I wrote a column in this magazine about a couple of enduring love affairs, one involving my friend Jan, who was dying, and her husband Jeff. About a month before the column appeared, Jan died at home, surrounded by family, friends and members of the Hospice team who had loved and cared for her in her last weeks. The church was full for the funeral; she was buried in a hilltop cemetery. That was that.
Except it wasn’t. This is a sequel, beginning with death and ending in life; it’s the story of a butterfly garden that’s taking shape below the Blue Ridge Parkway (MP 328.3) at the Orchard at Altapass.
Let me say at the outset that Judy — her husband Bill is overseeing the restoration of the century-old 285-acre orchard (see BRC column) — and I are butterfly gardening neophytes. We planted Jan’s Butterfly Garden because we wanted to memorialize Jan by helping butterflies, who are everywhere losing habitat to development. Jan, born with soft bones that progressively disabled her even before she got cancer, knew what it was like to lose ground.
The garden is properly dedicated to Jan for another reason. Before her last illness, Judy and I had never met, though Jan told me we would like each other. She was right. Judy and I have become the kind of friends that each of us once was to Jan. We have a working relationship in which money does not change hands. But I’ve got a pantry full of applesauce I canned from the Orchard’s Early Transparents last summer and the Orchard’s got a burgeoning butterfly garden and nature center. I don’t know that Judy and I have ever had a cup of coffee, but we’ve huffed and puffed and laid down an awful lot of newspapers and mulch to stifle the enthusiasm of blackberry brambles with earlier claim to the ground we’re filling with buddleia, Mexican sunflower (torch tithonia), coneflowers, zinnias, and phlox.
We’re learning as we go: from local gardeners like Barbara Young, who gave us the buddleia and periodically casts her expert eye over our efforts; from our successes and from our mistakes. We planted things last year that we’ll have to rearrange this year. We sowed seeds that never came up. But we’ve got our sleeves rolled up. This summer’s garden will be bigger and better than last.
Grieving for Jan, I suggested a butterfly garden. That it went beyond the idea stage is entirely to Judy’s credit. She’s one of those people who just digs in and does it. Late one afternoon last spring, Judy and Bill and I went to the spot she’d picked for the butterfly garden.
“Sunny,” I’d told her. “It has to be sunny for butterflies.” Sunny it certainly was: a south-facing slope with a gorgeous view, away from the parts of the Orchard they spray with big machines. “You can’t use pesticides in (or near) a butterfly garden,” I’d warned. I was apprehensive when I first saw the site. It was pretty steep. The soil looked depleted. But I told Judy it would be fine, and I’m glad I did.
Not that the drawbacks didn’t turn out to be drawbacks. They’re just not insurmountable.
In Jan’s Butterfly Garden’s inaugural summer, we inspected the tropical milkweed plants for monarch eggs and caterpillars (and found them). “You have to include not only nectar sources, but plants for the butterflies to lay their eggs on, and for the caterpillars to eat (in the lingo, that’s larval host plants) if you want the butterflies to stick around. Think of it as a sit-down restaurant, not fast-food,” I explained to Judy.
We gave educational programs, and even held our first butterfly walk. Jerry Nagel, a retired professor who’s taught himself butterfly identification the way we’re teaching ourselves butterfly gardening, has become an expert. He and his wife Sally drove over from Tennessee to lead the walk, for ice cream cones and a bag of apples.
In the Orchard’s gift shop, Judy raised monarchs and cecropias (this summer we’re adding swallowtails) in glass cages. A crowd gathered each time a monarch metamorphosed from caterpillar to chrysalis or emerged as a butterfly. When the migration began, we did tagging demonstrations. Judy kept a jar beside the cages for donations to a reforestation project near the sanctuaries in Mexico. We won’t have monarchs in Jan’s Garden if their overwintering sites are destroyed.
Jan’s Butterfly Garden is working in all the ways we thought of, and in several we didn’t expect. Take Roy Buchanan, the Orchard’s field manager. A no-nonsense guy, Roy’s responsible for seeing that everything’s mowed and sprayed and picked. But we discovered Roy’s soft heart when members of his crew started bringing in caterpillars they came across instead of stepping on them, and when Roy issued orders that
certain stands of milkweed among the apple trees were to be mowed around instead of down. I learned about this from my naturalist friend Harry Ellis. “I went to the Orchard today,” he called to tell me. “Did you know somebody’s weedeating around the milkweed plants along the road?” I hadn’t. But the next time I went there I saw what he meant, and it brought tears to my eyes.
The day we dedicated Jan’s Butterfly Garden, the pavilion filled with people who welcomed one more opportunity to remember a young woman they loved and missed. We’d asked several lifelong friends to share their memories; two read pieces of her writing. Afterward, we walked up to the garden. Though many flowers had long since bloomed, monarchs, swallowtails, pearl crescents, and fritillaries were nectaring in the
cosmos that Roy Buchanan’s wife Jean transplanted from her garden to Jan’s, back when our first plants were going into the ground.
After my grandfather died, my grandmother thought of him as “just being in the next room.” That’s the way Judy and I feel on that beautiful hillside. Working together, we sense Jan’s presence just beyond our peripheral vision, taking her ease in the garden we are making for her, looking off at those mountains, blue and gentle as her eyes.
If you’re down our way this summer, please stop and see how things are coming in Jan’s Butterfly Garden. Don’t expect something big, or perfect or finished. We have a long way to go. But we’ll share what we’re learning — and Judy will show you last year’s monarch baby pictures and give you the lowdown on whatever caterpillars she’s playing nursemaid to this year.
A note from Charlie: And the Butterfly Garden lives on in 2026. Read all about it here.