Your Florida Guide to Butterfly Gardening: A Guide for the Deep South

This colorful illustrated guide shows you how simple it can be to start a butterfly garden today!The book, the third in the popular "Your Florida Guide" series, offers a thorough look at Florida s most important butterflies and the plants they prefer for food, shelter, and egg laying. The guide helps you select plants for a yard where butterflies can live and return year after year. It includes planting diagrams, easy one-day container projects, and full garden layouts designed for each of Florida s three major growing zones and suitable for gardens throughout the Deep South.The author, an avid lepidopterist, persuaded his household to allow their garage to become a butterfly farm and raised many of the creatures pictured in the book. The full-color photographs, all taken by him, show butterflies, the caterpillars they develop from, food plants, host plants, and garden designs.Of special interest is a section on conservation that describes the way individuals can act locally to improve the quality and biodiversity of their environment.Jaret C. Daniels is curator of lepidoptera for Butterfly Kingdom Conservatory in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Formerly the manager of the Boender Endangered Species Laboratory at the University of Florida, Gainesville, he has written extensively on butterflies and other beneficial insects in such publications as "Fine Gardening, American Butterflies," and "Tropical Lepidoptera." For the past nine years he has worked on the ecology and conservation of several endangered and threatened butterfly species in Florida and the Caribbean, including the Schaus Swallowtail."