butterflies – Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society

September 2025 Talk: Clare Lanes on the Greenwich Park Rose Garden

Clare Lanes talking about the Greenwich Park Rose Garden renovation project.
CABAHS September 2025 — Clare Lanes explaining the Greenwich Park Rose Garden renovation project.

CABAHS members were delighted to welcome Clare Lanes, Project Manager of the ambitious Greenwich Park Revealed project, to talk to us about ‘The Greenwich Park Rose Garden: Renovation and Redesign 2023-2025‘.

Tackling this has been a thorny issue – no pun intended – amongst park users as the Rose Garden was a much-loved feature. Somewhat surprisingly the Rose Garden, as it was when Head Gardener Tom Brown began work on the replanting in 2021, was not one of the heritage areas that fell under the Greenwich Park Revealed project. The garden had first been laid out only in the 1960s with some updates taking place in the 1990s.

Pat’s Jobs for October 2024

1. Watch out for Cabbage White caterpillar on your Nasturtium: at our allotments they appear to be the new delicacy which they are devastating and they look like the only butterflies that are thriving.

Cabbage white caterpillars on nasturtiums

2. Make sure to plant lots of butterfly-friendly plants next year like Sweet Rocket, Scabious, Honesty and others. The butterfly count showed that butterfly numbers are very much down this year and we desperately need them. Please ask me for Honesty seeds if you want some.

Asters for Butterflies — Scabious for butterflies and bees

May 2022: Val Bourne on ‘Butterflies in Gardens’

CABAHS welcomed Val Bourne to speak at our May meeting, sharing her photographs, experience and knowledge of butterflies in the garden. She emphasised that she is not a butterfly expert (but she knows one!), she’s an organic gardener who has spent a lot of time observing butterflies, their habits and preferences – and, sadly, their decline in recent years.

Photograph of the FSC's Butterfly ID chart

As a starting point, Val recommended a book and a tool: ‘The Philips Guide to Butterflies’ and the Field Studies Council’s butterfly identification chart. Butterfly Conservation also provide a range of identification guides online. Photographs of a wide range of species – 24 different ones have been spotted in the Spring Cottage garden – showed us the beauty of even the smallest, brownest examples!

Val explained how useful even a small meadow area is for many species, how some species rely on quite a narrow range of plants for nectar, and how the timing of a butterfly lifecycle is intrinsically linked to the lifecycle of their food plants. She stated that climate change – causing plants to flower at different times – is demonstrably messing up this synchronisation, so as gardeners it’s important to grow a wide range of butterfly-friendly plants to try to mitigate that situation.

Some examples of butterfly-friendly plants, and the butterflies that particularly need or enjoy them:

Butterflies and sunflowers

Beautiful picture of Gatekeeper butterflies enjoying Sharon’s garden. Lysimachia clethroides is grown here with Anthemis “Cally Cream” near a Hydrangea Limelight in a pot.

These are Sunflowers, Helianthuis debilis “Vanilla Ice” growing daintily in Sharon’s garden, producing new flowers continually as she deadheads them.