The butterfly garden on N. Trade St. has been raided! Recently, numerous plants have gone missing, obviously dug up and removed for someone’s personal gain. It is very disheartening that someone would take advantage of this gift to the community – built out of love and respect for the plants and animals that we share our great planet with – then enter the garden with ill intent, and steal the plants that have called this space home for two years and provided habitat for countless insects, arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.

In 2015, as part of an initiative by the Pacolet Area Conservancy (PAC) to raise awareness about the decline of the migratory Monarch butterfly due to habitat loss, as well as to create habitat for the Monarch butterfly (and other butterflies), PAC volunteers worked diligently to transform the courtyard next to the former PAC office, at 850 N. Trade St., Tryon, into a beautiful butterfly garden and habitat.

Thanks to a generous grant from Tryon resident, Loti Woods, landscape design by Mark Byington, PAC’s wonderful volunteers, and by permission from the owner of the property, Dora Edwards, the courtyard area, which used to be overgrown with non-native plants that provided very little to the ecosystem, was transformed into an amazing butterfly habitat loaded with native plants that provide shelter and nectar for adult butterflies and host plants (food) for their caterpillars!

Over the past couple of years, the garden has flourished and we’ve been rewarded with visits from numerous butterfly species, many of which are completing their life cycle in the garden. 

PAC and Ms. Edwards invite the public to come and enjoy this beautiful butterfly garden – a gift to the community – and we encourage the community to create native butterfly habitat, particularly for the Monarch, but to do so by supporting the numerous native plant nurseries that have so diligently worked to make native plants available in the retail market.

Thanks to Ms. Edwards, PAC has been granted permission to continue to steward the butterfly garden and the community is still invited to enjoy it, but as with all public places, please take only memories and photographs and leave only footprints.

For more information about native plant nurseries and PAC’s initiative to create habitat for the Monarch butterfly, visit pacolet.org, click on the “Conservation” tab, then “Saving the Migratory Monarch.”

– article submitted by Pam Torlina