One of the things on my Bucket List (that I’m flying through, heyyo!), was to visit a butterfly garden! How had I never done that? No clue. But sometimes it seems like the simplest things escape us, and that’s why it’s important to set goals and create time for the things that might seem trivial to someone else, but you know would make you happy.
I went to Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland, which is a place I was ignorant to for thirty years and I’m so thrilled to have found it! There are like ten themed gardens and one of them is a butterfly garden. Besides the butterfly garden, everything is free! I highly recommend it.
So once you pay your ticket to get in, you wait in line and the employee shows you all the caterpillers and the cocoons that are forming/in progress outside of the butterfly room. When you enter it’s basically green room temperatures, but it’s so worth it because there are butterflies of every species all over the place! Some are flying high, some are sleeping on trees, some fluttering close to the ground where you just keep waiting for them to land, and a bunch are sucking on rotting bananas they put out because that’s what most of them prefer to eat!
I wanted so, so badly for a butterfly to land on me, and then one landed on Joe and stayed there for a while. It was adorable. And after much waiting (I was wearing a flower dress and a flower crown, come on!), one finally landed on me. We each took pictures of when the butterfly landed on each other, and it turned out the same species landed on both of us. It was the Blue Clipper (Parthenos Sylvia Lilacinus) indigenous to Asia. So interesting! The little orange Julia Longwing (Dyras Iulia) were also really attracted to me.
My favorite ones to watch fly around were definitely the Tawny Owl and Mournful Owl (Caligo Memnon and Caligo Eurilochus). When they close their wings they look like a spotted owl; the perfect camoflauge. But when they fly around, they’re the most brilliant bright blue you’ve ever seen.
I kept thinking about how butterflies see with more rods and cones than humans do, and how they probably look even more spectacular to each other than we think they look. Can you even imagine?! I can.
Butterfly gardens are amazing, and I hope everyone gets the pleasure of having a butterfly land on them at some point in their lives.
What’s on your bucket list?
