Garden With Wings, the butterfly garden in the northwest corner of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Port of Spain, is thriving and doing its job, attracting several types of butterflies and moths to the area.
When Newsday visited the butterfly garden one afternoon, the garden beds were covered in flowering plants and vines which were far from pruned. The garden looked natural and untamed, even though it was obviously kept in check by the relatively clear paths lined by rocks.
The area was shaded by several large trees, and small orange, yellow, pink and purple blooms were scattered among the green of the leaves and bushes. And although the sight was welcoming, only a few butterflies were sighted fluttering around.
[caption id="attachment_1140443" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Monarch butterflies feed at the butterfly garden at the Botanic Gardens, Queen's Park Savannah, Port of Spain on February 13. - Photo by Faith Ayoung[/caption]
But the garden’s co-ordinator, Serina Allison Hearn, excitedly told Newsday it was more successful than she, the Friends of the Botanic Gardens and various volunteers thought it would be when they started the project in November 2021.
“When we started, we were using a pickaxe to break the ground, it was so compacted.
"Now, if you put your hand in the soil, it’s loose and fabulous. That’s because we’ve been making it, using leaves and grass cuttings to wood chips, to constantly mulch the beds and the path.”
She said one concern was that the plants would not survive the dry season without constant watering, but they thrived and she was very pleased they were doing well. She said the reason for the success was approximately 60 ollas in the garden – unglazed clay pots filled with water and buried in soil to water the plants.
“In 2024, Garden with Wings was able to survive the dry season into the rainy season and come through to 2025 with an extremely well established garden.”
She has seen a lot of monarch, postman, swallowtail and cloudless sulphur butterflies.
In addition, she has learned a lot about the ecosystem.
She recounted that last year, she saw one leaf with hundreds of butterfly eggs and tiny caterpillars, but over the next two days, more than half of them were gone. Eventually, she noticed tiny ants carrying off the caterpillars.
“When I started doing research on the relationship between these plants and animals, I learned the passionflower will send out some kind of smell, some kind of signal to the ants, to tell the ants to come because they are being eaten by the caterpillars. That was amazing!”
She said the insects did a lot of hunting in the garden, as expected in nature, so that, statistically, the survival rate of the butterflies was very low.
[caption id="attachment_1140446" align="alignnone" width="1024"] A section of the butterfly garden at the Botanic Gardens, Port of Spain. - Photo by Ayanna Kinsale[/caption]
Hearn said the next step was to get permission from the Horticultural Services Division of the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fish
