To create the first live butterfly exhibit ever attempted at the annual Chicago Garden and Flower Show, Chicago Academy of Sciences staffers found themselves coaxing butterflies to life during one of the nastiest late-winter snowstorms in recent city history.
They did it in a way they would never advise the public to do:
They “cooked” the cocoons to trick the butterflies into thinking it was May instead of March, then quickly refrigerated the ones that got “done” a little too soon.
The unseasonably vicious snowstorm threatened to wreak havoc for several of the more than 30 exhibitors at the show, which opens Saturday at Navy Pier.
All garden exhibitors have spent much of the winter fooling the plants they plan to exhibit into acting as if warm weather had arrived, getting them to bud and flower into full refulgence just in time for the show.
Thousands of plants, in fact, ended up stranded for a day or two in trucks trapped by snowdrifts on Interstate Highway 80 in northern Indiana, where they were en route from regional greenhouses and sunnier Southern climates. Show officials said all exhibitors eventually got their exhibit plants here safely, however, and expect the annual flower and garden extravaganza to get off without a hitch.
Of all the exhibits, the butterfly garden planned by the Academy of Sciences’ Nature Museum staff is probably the trickiest.
Using live caterpillars and butterflies and appropriate plants, the museum will demonstrate how people can build backyard butterfly gardens by sowing flowers that butterflies seek out. It’s a simple thing at the right time of year.
Certainly gardeners shouldn’t do what the Nature Museum staff found itself trying in this past week of blizzards and arctic freeze. Using hot pads placed under aquarium terrariums holding several dozen butterfly chrysalides (cocoons), curators coaxed the butterflies into emerging into the world several months early by gently “cooking” them out.
“First of all,” said Doug Taron, the museum’s butterfly expert, “when we found out we were going to do this exhibit about six weeks ago, we had to find some chrysalides. There aren’t many at this time of year anywhere in the country, but we found a couple of scientific-supply companies in North Carolina and California that collected some for us.”
What he found, he said, were chrysalides of four species that normally migrate into the Chicago area from warmer climates in the springtime. They included eight tiger swallowtails, 20 spicebush swallowtails, 20 black swallowtails, and 50 painted ladies.
Butterflies lay eggs that hatch into caterpillars. The caterpillars mature for a few weeks and then create cocoons, metamorphizing over another few weeks into adult butterflies.
Two weeks ago, Taron put the chrysalides into terrariums heated to 80 degrees to mimic early summer temperatures.
“This is more a feeling-out process than an exact science,” Taron said. “We had been told the butterflies would emerge in about three weeks, but they were coming out in little more than a week’s time.
“That was way too soon, especially for some of the swallowtails, that only have a week or two lifespan as butterflies. We started worrying that they’d all be dead before the flower and garden show even opened.”
To save them, Taron, a specialist in population biology, fell back on a trick he has learned in raising moths, close cousins to butterflies. As the butterflies emerged, he hustled them into a refrigerator, which slowed their metabolism without killing them, placing them in a sort of state of suspended animation to make them live longer.
“That seems to be working fine,” Taron said earlier in the week.
He will be in charge of the huge year-round butterfly exhibit that will be the central attraction to the Nature Museum’s new building at Fullerton Avenue and Cannon Drive in Lincoln Park, scheduled to open in the spring of 1999.
Getting the plants to the museum’s flower and garden show exhibit was almost as tricky as getting the butterflies ready for it.
“A major, severe snowstorm is not something you want to happen on the day you have planned to transport blooming flowers, trees and shrubs from Woodstock to the lakefront in an open flatbed truck,” said landscape architect Carol Yetken.
Yetken, who designed the garden that the academy’s butterflies will populate, had to scramble Monday after the blizzard hit.
The plants had been assembled in a Woodstock greenhouse for several weeks as horticulturalists worked to convince them that it was spring. The exhibit includes a couple of dozen species, from crab apple and magnolia trees to lilac and rhododendron bushes, to goldenrod, phlox and primrose flowers.
“We wanted everything just ready to pop at the end of this week, and they were,” Yetken said. “We had been counting on temperatures being in the 40s Monday to truck the plants to Navy Pier. When we saw all that snow flying and temperatures plummeting, we had to throw every plan we had out the window.
“We spent most of Monday trying to find shrink wrap to put around the plants and trees and calling around to find an available covered van big enough to handle our trees.”
Among other exhibitors, “the most seriously affected,” said show director Carleton Rogers, “were a couple of Indiana gardeners who couldn’t move up the road Monday and Tuesday.”
One of those stranded trucks was carrying thousands of cut flowers from Europe and South America that are being brought to the show by the Dominick’s supermarket chain. Dominick’s is co-sponsoring the butterfly garden and will be selling the cut flowers.
Among them will be flowers that the Nature Museum butterflies will feed on during the show, which runs through March 22.
