 And now I'm also going to turn on the webinar and we'll be live. All right. Good morning or good afternoon, I should say. We're gonna get started in just a moment as the room fills up. Hello everybody. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for joining us on a. What's a gorgeous winter day in San Francisco. God love our winters. Let's give it a few more moments here. And I want to welcome our YouTube viewers as well. I am going to put a couple links in the chat to start us out. This is. Links to today's presentation, which will also contain all of the wonderful links that Susan provides us. And actually has a lot of the links from their past presentations. Also just so you know, this is being recorded so you can go back and watch it again because. These often contain a lot of information and here is a link to all of our past presentations with the California native plant society year, but when a chapter. And we want to thank them very much for being such a solid partners. All right, we're going to jump in. I'm going to give you a few announcements, library announcements and news and updates today. We are definitely, like I said, thankful to be partnering with the year of one, a chapter of the California native plant society. I'm going to be learning about gardening for bringing those beautiful black pleasant. We do want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the raw, the indigenous people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional home land. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the raw meat. Community. And in that link that I put in the first one, there's a great link to our reading and resource list around. We have a lot of folks and first peoples and particularly the raw mutation alone in the Bay Area. You can find some great places to donate to. And if you heard the news this past week, 500 acres in Mendocino was given back to the tribe there. So that's amazing news. San Francisco public library is celebrating our more than a month and I'll definitely throw the links in there again. San Francisco public library is celebrating our more than a month and that is our version of black history month. And the overall theme for black history month this year, and this is a nationwide theme is black wellness and health. So we have some amazing programs around black health and wellness, including our on the same page, which is our bi-monthly read that's been happening for 17 years. We've chosen yoga, but I'm going to talk about this book. I have a friend named Amy Jessamyn Stanley for her amazing book, my yoga of self acceptance. And she will be in conversation with my yoga teacher, Tameka casted Miller, and that happens on February 22nd. This book is widely available. You should be able to walk into any of our branches and find it, take it home and enjoy and join us for the other talk. I'm going to talk a little bit about my friend, who is an amazing Dennis Phillips, who is kind of a Bay Area icon. He, you can see in this picture right here. He is, he was an activist and he is featured in Crip Camp. So he is a member of our, our library for the, talking books in Braille center. So he is going to lead us in meditation every Wednesday in person at the African-American center and we will do all the safety protocols. I'm going to talk a little bit about my friend, who is a film series about African-American food. And that's every Thursday at noon in the beautiful caret auditorium. And just know we have a lot of events coming up surrounding more than a month, including authors, art. Tuesday we have a panel of these amazing brilliant humans, doctors, physicians, healthcare workers, and those bringing health to our black communities. Come on through. And we could never do any of this work without our friends at the San Francisco Public Library. Some non more than a month, January, February 24th, the total SF, SF Chronicles crew, interviews the amazing Charlie Jane Anders, who was like also a Bay Area icon and a, a supporter of authors and bookstores. So in the caret, if you haven't been at the caret, it's important just theater, lots of room to spread out. All right. I think that will do for our morning announcements. Let's turn it over to today. We are learning about butterflies and gardening. And maybe most of you have been here before, but if you haven't Susan gardens in San Francisco's clay soils, she brings the only the easiest plants survive approach to gardening. She grows a buffet of colorful native edible plant, pollinator plants, specifically gardening to be caterpillars, bees, hummingbirds and people. And I mentioned earlier to Susan, I'm not a gardening person, but after I've attended so many of these, I am like, I'm getting this whole like easy gardening. So I love it. Thank you, Susan. Susan, take it away. All right. Hi, I'm Susan curas off from the California native plant society here in San Francisco. We call it. Yerba Buena is the name of our chapter. And. This presentation will be about an hour and then we'll have time for questions afterwards. If you have questions, please put them in the zoom Q&A. Mary, Mary Beth James to bed out from the California native plant society is monitoring the zoom Q&A. Mary Beth will be answering some of your questions during the presentation. And then we'll take additional questions afterwards. So let's talk about gardening for butterflies. Let's talk about why plant native plants. Butterfly habitat needs. Butterflies in plant communities. Butterfly caterpillar plants in the garden. Container gardening for butterflies year round buffets for people in wildlife. And native garden resources. So why plant native plants? Well, insects have been declining. And insect declines are driving bird declines. And insects are how we get. Food from plants into really the rest of the food web. Our bees and our butterflies, those, their caterpillars need native plants, the plants that they adapted with. And our birds need, need to eat protein. And so the best protein they can find. Our insects. So if we don't have insects, we don't have birds. We don't have insects. We don't have birds. We don't have that ability for nature to move plants between, between areas. So birds are what transport plants from a mother plant to somewhere else. So our ecosystems, the health of, of our ecosystems, our ability to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Completely dependent on how we're going to live. We're going to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Completely dependent on having birds move plants into from, from mom plants to, to new areas. And native plants are the base of that food web. Dr. Tellamy. University of Delaware. Did a study in the Delaware area, area, expecting to find that every plant supports about the same number of plants. And he was surprised to see that different plants support different numbers of caterpillar species. And the U S department of agriculture paid his lab to go pull all of the published data from behind paywalls. Back in 2015 and 2016. And so all of that information is available. By county in the United States at the national wildlife Federation database. And you can go back and forth between butterflies and plants, but it is shocking to see how many different species plants can support. Willows, Oaks and cherries are the top three species that support the most number of caterpillars in every county in the United States. They may change position in terms of who's one of the top three, but those, this is the list for San Francisco County. The concern about planting, say another plant, even a drought tolerant plant is that introduced plant leaves feed somewhere between zero and two insects. So we want to feed our ecosystem. If we want to feed that base of the food web, if we want to feed the insects that eat the leaves, and then those insects feed other, other wildlife, then we need to plant native plants in our landscape. Dr. Tellamy's lab did a study on how many caterpillars it takes to feed a baby bird. And baby birds need caterpillars because they're the soft tofu or hot dogs of the ecosystem. It's soft protein and baby birds have soft little throats. And so they can only eat soft food. And it takes between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars to fledge one nest of chickadees. So we need a lot of caterpillars in our landscape to be able to feed the rest of our ecosystem. And you're thinking, but I want butterflies. So we need enough to feed the birds and still give you the ability to have butterflies in your landscape. So we used to think that we could just stuff nature into some sort of park or protected area. And that would be good enough. And then we could plant whatever we want. In our, in our homes or our, our, our business gardens. Yeah. It turns out not so much. There have been studies about insect biodiversity. Two completely separate studies. One looking at German nature preserves. And seeing a drastic loss in insects. And another one completely different study in a Puerto Rican nature preserve. And over time saw a lot of, a drastic loss in insects. So less than 4% of the land in the United States are national parks, state parks and protected areas. So we cannot depend on parks to save our ecosystem. We as home gardeners. And we as constituents of, of, of businesses. And places like our parks and green spaces. We need to plant native plants and add them to our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, Health and Social dynamics. Plants, we need to plant native plants and advocate for them to be put everywhere in our ecosystem, so that we continue to have a healthy ecosystem. So San Francisco estuary institute, which is a local research group did a study. To see, hey, urban areas. We're so paved. We couldn't possibly help our ecosystem. It turns out we could, They did a study and it turns out that the success factors one is paved to San Francisco, help our ecosystem is to put in native plants and have green corridors of stepping stones between our homes and the larger institutional green spaces. So if what you have is a north-facing balcony with containers on it, you can still plant native plants that will feed bees and butterflies and birds as they go back and forth looking for a larger green area and also the quality of the green space. So no invasive plants reduce the lawn, reduce the number of introduced plants and avoid using pesticides and herbicides. And then the green patch size because a lot of our bees can really and butterflies can can handle a very, very small space, but some of our wildlife really needs a larger space. Quail, California quail are our state bird. They are in groups of at least 50 individuals. So they need a very, very large space to live in something like the Presidia or Golden Gate Park. And so they need space. And so we need to give the rest of our birds that can take a little less space, birds, butterflies and bees. We need to make spaces for them in our homes. And then we need to take special care of our water, our aquifers, our lakes and our large trees. So 68% of San Francisco is paved and less than 5% of our natural landscape remains here. So every plant we choose to plant is an opportunity to feed our ecosystem. And that San Francisco Estuary Institute report called Making Nature City is available for free on their website, both in English and in Spanish. And it's beautifully written and very accessible. Also, native San Francisco plants evolved in San Francisco's varied soils and weather. So we're seven miles by seven miles. And we have six different kinds of soil. We have three North South Fog and Wind Banks. And it is a very challenging place to plant. I mean, you may be able to grow something that your neighbor cannot grow. In San Francisco, we have an enormous variation in rainfall. So the 2020-2021 rain year, we had eight inches of rain. San Francisco has over 150 years of recorded history, as little as seven inches and as much as 50, five, zero inches of rain. So last year, that last rain year, if you're listening to this live in January 2022, that was one of our worst rain years on record. And we have a lot of dead and dying. What were thought to be drought tolerant trees from other places across the planet that have been planted here, and they are not in good shape with last year's rain. And then this year, just in late 2021, we had 16 inches of rain. So almost our average of 20. So error bars are a way of thinking about variation. So San Francisco has got extremely high variation in our monthly rainfall, both for month to month and even within months. So our native plants, they are adapted to not only the very dry years, but also the very wet years. Keep in mind those plants, the native plants, when you plant them just all by themselves somewhere, or with a bunch of introduced plants around, they are really going to need a lot of help getting through this first few years. So you're going to need to water for the first three, two or three years to get them through, especially the first two summers. And then their root systems will be big enough, and they'll be able to take care of themselves. And plants evolved in plant communities. San Francisco Estuary Institute did a recent project called Hidden Nature that got a wonderful interactive map available for free on the internet. It's a lot of fun to look at. Look at all those different colors. Every one of those different colors is a different plant community. In San Francisco, we've got oak woodlands, coastal dunes, we've got dunes and grasslands and riparian areas. Riparian is a fancy word for creekside. The butterflies that we've got co-evolved with our plants, and those plants evolved in plant communities. Lots of good information. The city's department of environment has got SF plant finder with more information on our plant communities. Los Politis has got information on plant communities. The national park system for the Presidio has got information on our plant communities. Great places to learn more. But if you're looking for, I want to put plants that will work well together and really help my butterfly ecosystem thrive. Consider starting with all the plants you're interested in for the plant community that was in the area that you're in. So let's talk about specific butterfly habitat needs. So we've got to have the plants that feed the caterpillar, specifically the leaves. Caterpillars don't eat nectar pollen. They eat leaves. And we need to put in the leaves that they co-evolved with. We need to keep leaves on the ground because after caterpillars have finished getting all the way to their largest caterpillar size, they're going to make themselves a cocoon and crawl off because they do not want to get eaten by birds. Birds find them just as delicious in cocoons as they did when they were caterpillars. You'll see that a lot of cocoons look a lot like a dead leaf, so leave some dead leaves on the ground to disguise those cocoons. You will want to have nectar plants for adults. I will be making a case later in the presentation that your native nectar plants are going to be better for your ecosystem because their leaves are going to support more caterpillars while the flowers are feeding the adults. And if you can convince your neighbors and your nearby institutional green spaces to create those green corridors by adding more native plants so you've got more native caterpillar and nectar plants, that's better for your butterflies. They can find someone to mate with that isn't a close relative. And this is really fun. During the summer, go to the top of any of our hills. A lot of our adult male butterflies are what are called hill toppers. So you want to go to the top of the hill, any of our hills, and you'll see a bunch of adult males waiting for the females to arrive. So that's just a lot of fun to see and a great place to go take pictures of butterflies. So signs of your healthy ecosystem. You've got caterpillars. You've got the chewed leaves that the caterpillars were chewing on. You got bird nests. You got bee nests. You've got amphibians and predators. So you know you've got a healthy ecosystem if you've got all those things in it. Doug Talamy that we talked about earlier, he wrote a wonderful book called Nature's Best Hope. And these are the summary of what he is asking us to do. He's asking us to plant local native plants, especially the Keystone species. If you have room in your garden and it is appropriate, you've got a damp space to put a willow. If you used to be in Oak Woodland, if you've got space for our local coast live oak, that would be wonderful. You've got our local cherry, the hollywood leaf cherry, loves wind and fog and sand. So that's a great place to put it if you're out in a dune or dune scrub area. Plant a variety of native plants, the wider variety you have, the more variety of caterpillars and adults and wildlife you'll feed. And definitely plant for the specialist pollinators and caterpillars. And keep in mind leaves on the ground so that caterpillars have a place to pupate, which is the fancy word for make a cocoon. And then coordinate with your neighbors for a larger scale impact. Avoid spaying insecticide or herbicide. And if you are going to have outdoor lights, please use motion sensors and consider using yellow LED light bulbs rather than white. And maybe install a water bubbler for birds. Advocate for native plants with the city, remove your lawn if you don't need it, and please remove invasive species. You may or may not be familiar with the life cycle of a butterfly. So let's start. The mother is laying eggs on the caterpillar plant. And this butterfly, by the way, is the California Pipevine Swallowtail. Gorgeous butterfly, just a metallic blue when they fly. And they're big and they're showy. And they have exactly one plant that the mother will lay her eggs on. And that's the California Dutchman Pipevine plant. Just the one plant. So you need to have it in your landscape if you want those spectacular butterflies. The eggs in the early caterpillar phase, the tinier caterpillars, and then they eat more and they become a big caterpillar. And then it crawls off to look for a safe place for cocoon. We want to leave the leaves on the ground. You can see how much that cocoon looks like a dead leaf. And then you can put in a variety of California native plants that are nectar plants. And then if you've got that Dutchman's Pipevine plant, you'll be able to continue having caterpillars and butterflies in your very own garden and creating your very own ecosystem. Humans are omnivores. We are what's called a generalist feeder. We can eat all kinds of things. Caterpillars are specialist feeders. They can only eat one or very, very few kinds of food. Adult butterflies are generalists in terms of being able to get nectar from a flower. But those caterpillars, they got to have native plant leaves. So let's talk about our butterflies and our plant communities. We've got over 200 different kinds of butterflies and moths that co-co-evolved with our plant communities. We've got Coastal Dunes, Scriven Dunes. They're called Lepidoptera butterflies and moths. We've got Grassland butterflies and moths, Oak Woodlands butterflies and moths, Riparian or Creekside butterflies and moths, and we have one particular salt marsh butterfly. If this butterfly's name is in red, it is federally endangered. So we have a sterile, scary low level of Mission Blue and Coastal Greenhairstreak butterflies. Those are both Coastal Dunes, Scriven Dunes plants. Plant our local Lupine for the Mission Blue and our local buckweed and deerweed for the Coastal Greenhairstreak. You'll see that a lot of other plants can also use buckweed or Lupine or deerweed. So you'll get a lot of butterflies when you start planting our local Coastal Dunes Scriven plant. So if you are on sandy soil and you've got sandy soil, especially with some fog and wind, you've got Coastal Dunes Scriven or Dune Plant Community Area that you could put all of these beautiful, beautiful plants and then get all of these beautiful butterflies. The cherry, if you look on the middle level, far left, the echo azir is one of our gorgeous blue butterflies that uses the holly leaf cherry. The holly leaf cherry is a keystone species for the Coastal Dunes Scriven Dunes areas. Pale tiger swallowtail also like the caterpillars also like to eat cherry. So a lot of a wide variety here of different plants that you could plant to attract these beautiful butterflies. We have a lot of grassland butterflies and a couple of them are federally endangered at the base. Checker spot only uses one particular plantain, Montago erectae, and it's an annual and it's a cute tiny little plant. I'll show you pictures later. It is the only one that the Bay Checker Spot uses. The San Bruno Elphin just uses our local stone crop. So it's the only plant it uses. We have a lot of other beautiful plants. So if you're in an area that would have been really sunny and open, you are on what was a grassland and a lot of grassland areas have been planted on because that's such a nice place to put a home or a business. And so every grassland plant that we can add gives more of an ecosystem for all of these gorgeous butterflies. And our oak woodlands. So that western tiger swallowtail, we saw that earlier because we had oaks and cherries and maples. California sister only uses the oak, but it can use all of our oaks. California has got about 50 oaks and the California sister butterfly can use all of them. California tortoise shell uses the caterpillars use our oak and also our cnothus, which is this fabulously beautiful blue flowering plant. We're seeing the pipeline swallowtail there. We talked about that earlier. It only uses the pipeline and it is an absolutely gorgeous butterfly. The pipeline plant that uses is a transition plant between the oak woodland and the riparian area. And I wanted to give you just a look at a couple of our really spectacular mobs. These aren't your average pantry moth. This is a moth that likes to be outside eating oaks and cherries and cnothus and hazelnut. So these are riparian areas. So if your home or business is on top or school is on top of a little bit of a perennially damp area, it might have been built on top of one of our many creeks that have been built over. We were not particularly respectful of the water, which seems pretty strange considering that we're living in California. But violets are very important and the violet is an interesting plant. There is a dog violet that is another transition plant between grasslands and creekside. And the pipeline is that transition plant between the oak woodland and creekside. So these violets and the pipeline are all drought tolerant, but they did evolve near a creek area. There is another violet that is a yellow violet that takes a lot more water. So I tend not to recommend that one, but the dog violet, the viola adunca, is fantastic, shade tolerant, pipeline, shade tolerant, great plants to have in landscape. Willows that the western tiger swallowtail, the morning cloak and the satter comma all need, those need a lot of water. So only if you have a perennial damp area would you want to put a willow in. These are riparian butterflies and they're gorgeous. It is unlikely that you have a salt marsh, but if you do, the western pygmy blue would really appreciate you planting its native plants. So let's talk about butterfly caterpillar plants in the garden and we're going to talk about this from the perspective of a gardener. There's going to be a little note so that you can see the number of butterfly and moth caterpillar species fed by that plant's leaves. That little clock is going to show you if something is long blooming. I know for small gardens it's just really nice to have something that blooms for a very long time. And if something needs regular water or like the willow, a high level of water, regular water means it needs water at least once a week, even after the first couple of summers and the high water means it needs water most of the time. So let's talk about it from the perspective of a gardener. When we're choosing a plant, we want to choose it for the butterflies, but we also want to choose it in terms of what our space needs do. We need a ground cover. Do we like grasses? Do we want some shorter flowers, compact shrub, bigger shrubs, vines, trees, and then containers. We've got a lot of ground covers in San Francisco. These are our sun-friendly ground covers. The stone crop really likes the rocky areas. The seaside daisy can handle both sand and clay soil. California sagebrush is usually a bush. We'll see that again in small shrubs, but there are a couple of versions of it that are ground covers that are absolutely gorgeous. Strawberry can take a lot of shade. California lilac, that's one of those spectacular plants that is really just in California, and it's available both as a ground cover, as a shrub, and as a tree form. So really beautiful. California aster very low growing. So all of these can bring a lot of color and food and movement to your garden in addition to bringing some of our gorgeous butterflies. I was talking about the violet, that viola adunca is the purple one, drought tolerant. Those leaves are edible for people in addition to being edible for caterpillars. And for all that it only feeds 20 or a little over 20 different butterflies and mods, it feeds six, six of California's federally endangered butterflies. So please consider putting it in your garden. Shade friendly. It's about the size of a dinner plate. Just stick it beneath the tree, the back of a shrub. And then after it's had a couple of years to just get get dinner plate size, help yourself to a few leaves because it's delicious. That hasaki agaslis is absolutely the most gorgeous plant and it only grows in sand. So if you're on dune or dune scrub, you can grow it. I can't grow it. I love it. I envy you if you can grow it. Rotcrest, another sand only plant. Very pretty. Checker blooms a lot of fun. It grows both in sand and in clay. That's in my garden. It's just very showy, great pink flower, full sun to part shade. So it can take some shade and creeping snowberry can take a lot of shade, a lot, very, very, very dark shade. Keep in mind that if you are a ground cover, you likely evolved in shade because you're beneath the shorter plants and then beneath the taller, you're beneath the shorter flowers and they're beneath the shorter shrubs and they're beneath dollar shrubs and then beneath the trees. So a lot of our ground covers can handle shade. And this isn't all of California's native ground covers. These are just the ones that feed our butterflies. We've got a lot of grasses that are native to San Francisco and again difficult to find because so many of our grasslands are missing. But take a look at that middle one. That's a great picture from the Oakland Museum that shows just how deep our native grasses roots go. So they are great at holding a hillside. Once they're big, big enough to have that really long root system, they're able to absorb the water and then make it through our very, very dry summers. But all of these different grasses and all of these different grasses feed our grassland butterflies and they're gorgeous. And the red fescue, the festicorubra, you can mow that thing. So we were talking about that flantigo, that plantain that feeds that federally endangered butterfly that they check or spot. That's what it looks like. It's this tiny little white flower and it's just beautiful. It's a grassland plant, but a lot of our grassland plants are not only grasses, they're also flowers. Lomaceum is grassland. Yaro is grassland. Sunflower is grassland. Yampa is grassland. The California poppies, they're grassland. They're also everywhere else. But these are very, very, very drought tolerant plants. So it's lots of fun to have in the landscape. The Yaro can handle anything from full sun to quite a bit of shade. The rest of these want a lot more sun. Some flowers, you can eat those seeds. Some flowers are native to North America and those are the versions that are native to the Bay Area. And these are shorter flowers. So they're just beautiful. Sea pink, you can grow. I can't grow if you're on sand. It's just beautiful. Deerweed. Deerweed can be a little fussy in the landscape. I keep putting it in. Just keep in mind that if you are a new gardener, maybe don't start with deerweed, I have planted eight and had three of them live. I don't know why, but it's beautiful. It grows all the way down to Southern California. You can get it to live in your landscape. It's fantastic. Long blooming all the way through the summer. Our native clover. Clover is amazing. Clover is amazing for butterflies and amazing for bees. This is our native clover. It does want a little bit more water. It is our riparian plant. So if you got an area that's got lawn that you water, you consider putting clover and it'll be fine with that level of water. San Francisco Wallflower, we've got a couple of different ones. They're beautiful plants that you can put in your landscape. These are compact shrubs. Not taller ones, but definitely not ground cover. Ragwort's got a bad terrible name, but it's a very pretty plant. Nettle is going to have issues with touch. It's one of those things where you can eat it. You'll want to use gardening gloves to collect it and crush it or cook it to be able to eat that. Nettle's not a good plant to have in a landscape with small children. Pearly everlasting is a lot of fun. Very, very soft and fun to touch. Cow parsnips a lot of fun. It's a grassland plant and it can handle some shade as well as full sun. Bee plant is interesting. It is a grassland plant, so it's very, very drought tolerant. Those tiny little red flowers are very attractive to bees and it's an important butterfly plant. It can take a lot of shade and some more compact shrubs. This buckwheat really prefers to live on sand. The thistle prefers sand and well-draining soil. Cudweed prefers sand. Vervein can take sand as well as clay. There are a lot of verveins or vervinas that are from, that are nurseries that are not this particular one. Please consider going to a native nursery and getting our native verbena. It's just going to be better for the caterpillars. The flowers are just as attractive to adult insects and the leaves are going to be better for the caterpillars. And it's long-gluing and I've got that on my landscape. It's a lot of fun. These are a little taller. The lupine, that lupinous albafrons, that silverbush lupine is the preferred larval plant of our federally endangered mission blue butterfly. And it just look how pretty that butterfly is on that lupine. It's just gorgeous. So this is the shrub version of the Artemisia that we saw earlier, the sagebrush that comes in a ground cover version. This is the shrubby version. It can get to three or four feet tall. California latic. It is that spectacularly beautiful blue. That our local native Thrysophloris is that intense blue. It's just the most beautiful thing. It attracts all kinds of butterflies and bees, as well as supporting over 100 different butterflies and moths. The vetch is amazing. Angelica is really pretty. Orange bush monkey flower, grassland plant, just very vibrant in the landscape. Lots of fun to have. We do have some plants that can take quite a bit of shade that support a number of butterflies and moths. Goldenrod. It's a bee and insect pollinated plant. It's not going to cause allergies. It's not that goldenrod. It's a very, very pretty plant. Coffeeberry. Evergreen can take all kinds of sun and shade 15 by 15. So it's a big plant, but you can hedge that thing. It's really nice. Huckleberry wants some shade. And those berries are delicious for people. Huckleberry is a blueberry relative. If blueberries were having Thanksgiving, they would invite huckleberries over because huckleberries are one of their cousins. I think it tastes much more delicious than a blueberry. And it can take a lot of shade. Blueberries can't. And it can take both clay and sandy soil. And then there's redberry. It's another really nice relative related to the coffeeberry. It can take all kinds of sun and shade. So deciduous shrubs. Some people don't like deciduous plants. It's part of the ecosystem. We need to have those leaves drop so that those cocoons, so that the caterpillars can crawl off, make the cocoon, and hide from the birds. Pinkflower Incurrent is one of my favorite plants for the landscape. It is, if you are listening to this live in January of 2022, it is blooming right now all across the city. You can find this in parks. It's a beautiful, that bright pink, chandelier-looking flower. Fantastic for the early arriving bees and for migrating butterflies. It supports over 100 different caterpillar species with its leaves. It's gorgeous. Long blooming blooms roughly December to February. It's just great. It also has, it's great on both clay and sandy soil. So it doesn't really matter what kind of soil you have. You can grow that plant. Ocean Spray only wants to be on sandy soil. But it's got showy, white scented flowers. Snowberry, we talked about the ground cover version of it. It likes a lot of shade. So if you could use a shrub that's a little bit taller, it's got tiny little pink flowers. Very, very pretty. And full shade with that. And the California Wild Rose can also take a lot of shade. And those leaves are fantastic for butterflies. Keep in mind, both of the California Wild Roses, the Rosa California and the Jimno Carpet, have got a lot of thorns. So you want to put it someplace where you're not going to have to spend a lot of time trimming it. A lot of people like to use it as a hedge to keep, if you want sort of roving wildlife kept out of your garden, that's a good thing to have because it's got so many thorns. And vines. So there's the Dutchman's Pipe Vine at the bottom there. I just love that. I have that in my landscape. Had caterpillars last year, looking forward to having caterpillars again this year. The Pacific Pea can support a lot of different caterpillars. And we've got native Clomatis. And it supports a lot of caterpillars in addition to all of those flowers supporting the adult butterflies and bees. We've got taller trees. The Coast Life Oak is a 70-foot tall tree. It is our only local oak. There's 50 oaks locally across California. But for San Francisco, we just have the one. And it grows fine on every single kind of soil. Sand, clay, all three kinds of stone. Coast Life Oak is fantastic and loamy soil. So regardless of what kind of landscape you've got, if you've got room for a 70-foot tall tree, consider putting that in. It's fantastic and drought tolerant once it gets through its first summer actually. The top there is the Hollywood Cherry. I was talking about how fantastic that is in sand. I have heard that it will grow in clay. And it's just wonderful with sand and fog and wind. It's just got, it'll be covered with showy white flowers that are very attractive to bees and adult butterflies. And then it's fantastic for caterpillars in the landscape. Blue elderberry is a lot of fun. You can eat those berries. Those people can eat berries. And it's kind of like a bird feeder. The caterpillars are attracted to the leaves. The birds come to eat the caterpillars. And then they come to eat the insects that are able to get nectar and pollen from the very shallow flowers. And then they help themselves to the berries. So they just, birds will stay in the landscape to just keep eating from the blue elderberry. It is a very, very large. It's considered a shrub, but it's 30 feet tall. So to me, that's a tree. And it grows very quickly. It is deciduous. So just know that you are going to get leaf fall from that. And then the big leaf maple is 30 feet tall in our landscape. If you gave it a lot of water, it would be fine with that. It does grow all the way up to British Columbia where they make maple syrup from it in British Columbia because it gets cold enough there. I have a native maple and I keep looking at it hoping I can get maple syrup. We do not get cold enough for native maple syrup here, but I can just keep hoping. It does have fall color. The flowers are very attractive to tiny insects, which brings in the birds. And the flowers are also very attractive to hummingbirds, which is a lot of fun to have in the landscape. It'll get 30 feet tall here. If you water it, I've seen it 100 feet tall in British Columbia. So just know that if you water it, it's going to get bigger. And then we have shorter trees. That willow really wants constant water. So if you are on top of what was a native stream, then you can put one of those in. Or if you just have an area that is consistently damp or that you are just going to consistently water, the willow is going to be amazing. Over 300 different caterpillar species. And our toyan supports four species, but it supports one of our butterflies and those flowers are attractive to bees and adult butterflies. And the birds are an important winter food for the berries are an important winter food for birds as they migrate north and south. And the berries are very short, showy, a really pretty red color. So nice to have in the landscape. And the toyan is evergreen. So again, really nice to have in the landscape. I have seen it hedged. So if you want to turn it into a hedge, you can do that. Same thing with the hollywood cherry. You can also hedge that as well. Container gardening. So we have a bunch of native plants that are great in containers. This is focused just on the native plants whose leaves feed caterpillars. So go see really any of my other presentations to get a much longer list of caterpillar plants or take a look at the California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena's Biodiversity Resources link on our website. We've got a long list of container plants, but for container plants that where the leaves feed caterpillars, it's these three plants here in San Francisco. It's some of our lupine annuals, which means they're going to have short little root systems. So they're going to be fine and in a takeout container. Stone crop, which is you'll want to put that in cactus mix. You want to make sure it's very well draining for that. The same for the lupines, by the way. And that plantain, that plantago erectab, these all work beautifully for federally endangered butterflies. So consider adding these to your containers. So ludics, the leaves don't feed caterpillars. So I would normally not trouble you with this, but when I was looking for pictures, I just kept coming across an enormous variety of butterflies that like to get nectar from this plant. It is a bulb, like a little tiny bulb, smaller than a pearl onion. So again, you could put it in a takeout container or a window box. It's as shallow as a takeout container and you'll be fine. It's going to be fine. And you will just attract butterflies to your garden specifically for the nectar. So it'll be really fun to watch. I like to feed my ecosystem. So I like to think in terms of a buffet and I like to plant to plant a year around buffet. I've got a hummingbird that wants to live in my garden all year round, which means she needs food all year around the whole hummingbird family. They want to eat every day. They want to eat not only nectar, but they want to eat little tiny insects like gnats. So I need to have something blooming every day for the hummingbird. There is not the same bee in the landscape year around, but different. We've got 1,500 species of native California bees. Honey bees are not native, but our native California bees would also like to be able to eat every day in our landscape. So make sure that something is blooming. And then there are a bunch of native plants that we can eat as people. So I like to put a native plant buffet out there for me, hummingbirds, caterpillars, bees, and adult butterflies. Keep in mind that when you plant a native plant buffet, you're feeding your caterpillars and your caterpillars are feeding the rest of the ecosystem. So let's look at what just some of the native plants that feed our adult butterflies and just when they bloom. So manzanitas, this is, again, we're giving this talk live January 2022, manzanitas are in bloom, seaside daisies in bloom, cuddweeds in bloom. Those currents, they're still in bloom. We've got all kinds of things that are in bloom right now. So please consider putting something from one of these sort of winter blooming species into your landscape because we want to make sure to feed that ecosystem. March is when we really get going in terms of California native plants. If you think of a plant trying to decide when to bloom, if you bloom, you're not working on putting resources towards your root system. And so what plants need to do is they need to take that rain, work on their root system, and then bloom when they know how much rain they've gotten. That's why we have just a few plants that are blooming in the winter. They're taking a risk that there will not be any more rain in the the rest of the rain year, but they're going to risk it and spend resources to bloom. Many, many California native plants really bloom between March and May or March and June because they know about how much rain they've gotten. They know how much rain, how much resources and energy they can put towards the root system. And so they know how many flowers they can afford to have because they're spending resources on that. When we had that terrible 8-inch rain year 2020-2021, I had so few blossoms on my native plants. They just, they put a few out just going, oh okay, I'll do a few. But for the most part, they really didn't spend a lot of resources on that. They needed to stay alive through that terrible drought year. And already I'm seeing so many things bloom this year because we've gotten 16 inches of rain so far. So that March to May list of plants that are blooming, it's a huge list. So I'm starting, if you go top to bottom March to May, we're looking at so many plants that support so many different caterpillars, the willow, the, you know, the California lilac, the cherry, the lupines, fissilias, and onions, just a lot of different plants to support those caterpillars. And then as we transition into the dry period, which is July to October, it's a lot of those grassland plants, sunflowers and goldenrod and gumweed. The buckwheat is a, is a do, coastal dune scrub, but the ragwort milkweed, yarrow, those golden aster, coyote bush, those are grassland plants. And that's why they have very long blooms and why they can afford to bloom in our dry season. They've, they've adapted to that. More native plants for the adult butterflies, more gorgeous native plants that support caterpillars on their leaves as well as feeding adult butterflies. So let's think of this from point of view of the bees. We've got specialist bees as well as generalist bees. The adult, all the adult bees are generalists in terms of what they can eat, but they're putting little baby bee lunchboxes wherever it is that they are, are, are building their families. So 70% of our bees are grand nesting our native bees. Some of them nest in stems, some of them nest in wood, but our specialist bees need special pollen for their baby bees. And so those are fissilia and sunflower and gumweed and thistle. Even the poppy and the morning glories have got some specialist bees associated with them. So please have a wide variety of native plants in your landscape so you can feed our generalist and specialist bees. And hummingbirds. We talked about how they want, they want to live in your landscape. They do not want to migrate. They can, they will, they'd rather not. They're territorial, they would rather live in your landscape year around. And so please consider planting, especially those, those winter plants and those, those dry summer plants. The California fuchsia is spectacularly beautiful and your, it will bloom August to October and it's full sun, grassland plant, gorgeous. And your hummingbird will thank you for planting it. And as well as, as these other plants, these are all native plants and they all feed hummingbirds and people. There are a variety of native plants that feed people leaves, fruit, nuts, seeds, bulbs, lots and lots of fun. I did give a native edible plant presentation for the library. You might consider taking a look at that. Also looking at our resources page to get an idea of all the variety of things that you can eat in your landscape, you and your family, as well as feeding caterpillars and bees and birds. So where can you find more information? We're going to look at iNaturalist, which is a citizen science tool that lets you look on a map to go see, hey, where can I find that pink flower in current to see if I like it? Where can I find a hilltop with lots of adult mill butterflies on it so I can laugh at them while they try to talk to females. It's a lot of fun. Plant selection tools, sources for native plants, bloom periods, native plant lists, butterfly community projects, and national butterfly organizations. I love iNaturalist. This is a citizen science project written by the California Academy of Science, but it's a worldwide project that lets you look for plants both cultivated and wild and it lets you look for wildlife. It's just wonderful. If you want to go see where you can find those butterflies that you're interested in, or if you're thinking, oh, hey, I want to see what that buckwheat or that pink flower in current looks like in the landscape, add that to iNaturalist, and you can go find out where it is and go track it down. It's a lot of fun. There is a version for children called SEEK, same technology behind it, but with SEEK, the privacy is set to extreme. The data on iNaturalist is available to researchers on SEEK, not so much, so still a great tool to have. California Native Plant Society has written our own plant selection tool. This way you can look to see if I want ground covers, do I want shrubs, do I want a tree, do I want something that's good in sand, do I want something that's very drought tolerant? It's a great tool. Keep in mind that it's got a 10-mile radius, which means that it is inaccurate for San Francisco, so know your soil type, and if you're like, yeah, it's recommending a sand plant, but I'm on clay or I'm on serpentine rock, just forgive them. They haven't managed to dial it in a little closer than that, but it's very helpful. And as of a couple years ago, they've got the butterfly information on that, so you can go back and forth between which butterfly uses which plant, if you were looking for specific kinds of butterflies. They've also got information about where you can find that plant at a native nursery, and then a map of the nursery, so you can decide which nursery you want to go to. This is all free, it's on Calscape. Calflora is another really great native plant tool. It has got very good precision on when something blooms, so if you are looking for to make sure that you've got that year-round bloom in your garden, it's a great tool to use. Also, if you want a particular colored plant blooming for your birthday, it's a great tool to use. We are the California Native Plant Society Year Bruena chapter. There are chapters of California Native Plant Society all over California, every square inch is covered by one chapter or another. Ours is San Francisco and Northern San Mateo County, and on our website, on our Biodiversity Resources link, we have got all kinds of free plant, plant lists. So there's a butterfly caterpillar plant list and hummingbirds and edible plants and bees and long-living shade plants and color plants, plant communities and sidewalk plants and container plants. And landscape design softscape is fancy for if you're a landscape designer, you specifically want to look for something you can hedge, or you just want the whole list of ground covers. That's where you find it is landscape design softscape. These are local organizations that are specifically adding caterpillar plants to the landscape so that we can bring back and enhance the habitat for our local butterflies. There is nature in the city. They've got a green hair streak corridor walk. It's over in the coastal dune scrub section of the city. It's so much fun to walk this. You will see some absolutely gorgeous hills and views. Make sure to wear a windbreaker. It is always, always cold and windy there. There is San Bruno Mountain and San Bruno Mountain Watch. They have got four federally endangered butterflies that they plant for, and all kinds of different plant communities. It's a beautiful place to go, and it's one of the few natural areas remaining in the San Francisco-San Mateo area. And then California Native Plant Society of Uruguayna has a lot of projects that we work on. It's on our calendar, and you can go weeding with us and planting and restoring things. It's lots of fun. I keep talking about Doug Callamy because he's just so incredibly informative. He's got a bunch of books out. The library's got them. Nature's Best Hope, Nature of Oaks, and he's got great websites too. Oh, really, really good lectures on YouTube. He did a couple for the California Native Plant Society, Santa Clara Valley Chapter. They've had their lectures on YouTube for years, and so they're a great resource. And then the California Native Plant Society at this day level, he did one that was a little bit more Southern California-centric. We've got a bunch of national organizations that are working to improve habitat, and so they've also got great lectures and great resources. There's the Xerxes Society that is working on improving pollinator habitats specifically for butterflies and also for bees. There is Monarch Watch, which is a West Coast group to look at the West Coast Monarchs. I love the Oregon State University's pollination podcast. It does focus more on bees, but their butterfly lectures have been amazing. There are some butterfly books that you can get that are very useful. And this is part of an ongoing Native Plant lecture series, gardening series in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library. We did one on edible native plants and gardening for butterflies and pollinators, shade gardening, gardening for biodiversity, garden color, shrubberies, windscreens, and ground covers, children's gardens, and drought-tolerant plants. So thank you to all the people in iNatural, those two pictures I used because I still laugh too hard when I'm taking pictures of these and butterflies. And yeah, so all of these people provided the pictures as well as a lot of professionals on their websites. Thank you to all my reviewers. We are the California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena chapter. We have free lectures and free hikes. We go out and we do restoration and we advocate with the city to plant more native plants in our public spaces. We've got all of those free resources on our website. So thank you for planting for caterpillars. Let's take some questions. Oh, Mary Beth, have you answered all the questions? This is great. Oh my gosh, Deborah, you've got a pink flowering current and you've got hummingbirds. Woo-hoo! Oh, thank you for putting the Doug Tell me information in there. Oh, you've got Ocean Park. So Mary Beth, James T. Buena, who's been working the chat and the Q&A, is a much more experienced gardener than I am. I'm giving you shout outs, Mary Beth, because you used to be in charge of the nursery for the same prunum mountain watch. So Ocean Spray can do well on clay. That is really good to know. Oh, you've got deer reading a crack in your sidewalk. I don't know why it doesn't like my garden in San Francisco. But as we as we know, I am a Darwinian gardener. I just kill a lot of plants. Let's see. So, Deborah, you're asking if a yarrow hybrid is considered native or non-native? We've got a funny word for that called nativars and we haven't done a lot of studies about which plants do better for the caterpillars. Are nativars okay? Doug Callamy has actually done a study himself. It's referred to a nature's best hope. If the leaf is the same color and color indicates chemistry, then you're probably okay. So, for instance, there's a beautiful cenothus called diamond heights and it's got a variegated leaf. Please don't plant that unless you've got a lot of other cenothus. I do have a friend down in San Mateo who has a variety of cenothus and she's got a diamond height. It's like, okay, you got a diamond height. The caterpillars can't use that with the funny colored chemistry in the leaf. There's a really cute flower that there's a version of it. I can't remember what that name is, but the regular version has got a green leaf with a little bit of red on the edge. They did a nativar version of it where it's sort of all a reddish purple leaf, not good for caterpillars. You want to make sure that that leaf color, which is an indicative of chemistry, is the same. They didn't even think that grasses could be unsafe to cats. There is a very good website at Airsooth California about what plants are unsafe for animals. But I'm having trouble imagining what your cat's issues might be. You had a blue fescue and you didn't know if they were safe yet. As far as I know, they're all safe. Very shady corners. Oh yes, we've got all kinds of incredible shade plants. It depends on how big your plant needs to be. So Sunset District, that means you've got sand and wind and fog. So you've got the ability to grow holly leaf cherry and silk tassel bush. Those are both pretty big plants. The silk tassel bush is really good at blocking some of that wind. So the rest of your plants will be okay. But behind that you can put in your very shady corner, you'll be okay with. Hazelnut can do well. Huckleberry, the violets, it kind of depends on where you are in terms of big or small. The violets are going to be amazing. Definitely take a look at the shade plant list that's on the Biodiversity website and see if that works for you. You can also look at Cowscape under Shady Plants. Just keep in mind that when you check Cowscape for shady plants at your address, you need to select for the sand-friendly plants. Keeping raccoons away from huckleberries, you're going to have to plant more it's really hard to keep raccoons away from the food. Mary Beth is talking about the violet sweet pea shrub. So there are some plants that are just in California, for instance, that Dutchman's Pipeline. And there are some plants, so that huckleberry is related to the blueberry. There are some of those in Europe. And we've got, there are cherry trees in both Europe and North America. Sunflowers are only in North America. Pea shrubs or pea vines, those seem to be in a lot of different continents. You definitely want to pick the pea that is local to California and local to your area. So that's those are the leaves that are going to feed the most number of caterpillars. Kathy, are there San Francisco organizations supporting planning in public spaces that are not currently managed by DPW or Rec and Park? So public spaces in San Francisco. Every single San Francisco city organization makes its own decisions. Rec and Park makes its own decisions. DPW makes its own decisions. The library makes its own decisions. Schools make their own decisions. The Port Commission makes its own decisions. It is a long and tiring list. Plus, you've got the National Park system, so the Presidio makes their own decisions. Although Presidio is now doing a lot of restorations, so they're not planting eucalyptus anymore. They're only planting native plants. But we can, I specifically do the outreach to city organizations and I could use your help. I could use all of your help. All of the city organizations are on. Their meetings are on the internet. There's an urban forestry council where you can talk to a lot of different city organizations at once. Take a look and see if you've got time to attend even a few of their meetings. Public comment tends to be limited to three minutes. It's usually only between one and three people at any one of those meetings. And so right now, they're still all on Zoom, so you don't even need to travel to go to them. I'm hoping they'll continue to have, well, Zoom or WebEx, they have three different kinds of calling, but they do have call-in ability to the meetings. It's three minutes from public comment. Plan what you're going to say at a time. I find that it's very useful to thank them for putting just any native plant in a nearby public park to you. Usually, they've at least put in a coffee barrier or a toy on. And then tell them what you want them to do. I always ask them to plant 100% native plants in every public space short of a botanic garden where I understand they need to, it's a botanic garden, you need to have Australian plants in your Australian area. And then I thank them for their attention. So if it's three minutes from it, as I tried to get it in under two, the only meetings where I've seen more than three people attend tend to be the climate change meetings where there's two or 300 people and you will get one minute. But thank you very much for, so California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena, I am the outreach lead, Kathy, reach out to me on through the library and we'll talk about the level of involvement you'd like to have. The more people we have interacting with city organizations, reminding them what we want them to plant native plants, we want them to plant native plants the better. Well, if we don't have more questions, again, there's a lot of information on the California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena website in terms of plant lists. Calscape is a really good resource to go find those, the right plant for your space. And you're always welcome to reach out to California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena chapter and we will answer your specific garden questions. Anisa, over to you. Thank you, Susan. I always love your programs and obviously our community does as well. And Mary Beth, thank you for joining us today and in the background and helping us answer all these questions. YouTube viewers, library community, a YouTube question just came in. Sure. Okay. Anything good to say about planting honeysuckle flowers? No, don't do it. Please don't. If a hedge grow ever dries up, that would be at the top of my list. No, you're saying no. No, please don't. Not for caterpillars. No. There you go. YouTube viewer, your questions have been answered. So for what it's worth, if it's because you're looking for a lanocera, which is the fancy Latin name for the genera, the family of honeysuckles, we do have lanocera that are native to San Francisco. So please check Calscape. If you're going to do a honeysuckle, please plant our local lanocera. And a lot of there is L-O-N is the north I-C-E-R-A. And I'm going to throw those links into YouTube again. Yeah, please plant the local one. Please don't plant. There's a few reasons not to plant the non-native ones. A, those leaves aren't going to feed any caterpillars. And B, some of them are invasive, so really, really don't plant them. All right. And again, the link I put in there has all of the links that Susan talked about and more, and you can watch this again. And we thank you all for being here. Have a wonderful