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Nature Notes: Orange-Tip Butterflies and Hedge Garlic

Orange tip butterfly on hedge garlic

When I go into the conservatory this morning for breakfast, there is an orange tip butterfly. He doesn’t seem unduly bothered to be inside, but flutters from window to lemon verbena and pelargonium plants. I get close and notice that when he closes his wings up underneath they are speckled greeny-black for camouflage.

The female orange tipped butterfly has black, not orange, tips to her wing. Here the underside speckling is shown. Photo: Ralph

The orange tip butterfly lays her eggs on hedge garlic. This wild flower lives along country lanes, hedgerows and in woods. The older plants have nettle-like leaves which when you rub them smell of garlic. Younger hedge garlic has more rounded leaves You can cook the leaves for a gentle garlic flavour or use them in salads. Some people eat the seeds as a mustard-like seasoning.

Hedge garlic in its first year overwinters as low growing mounds. Image: Agata Sochalska.

The butterflies’ caterpillars don’t actually eat much of the leaves of the hedge garlic, but prefer to snack on the seed pods. They like native brassicas, of which hedge garlic is one, and also favour lady’s smock or cuckooflower.

hedge garlic flower

Although I’ve always known it as hedge garlic, the plant also has other names like Jack-by-the-Hedge and Garlic Mustard.

So spare a space in your garden for the hedge garlic, loved by the beautiful orange-tip butterfly.

No butterflies were hurt in the writing of this article.

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