Hershey Children’s Garden Cool Plants
(#7 in a series of 10)

Bird Plant: Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis)

Some adults bring their children to Hershey Children’s Garden and become engrossed in exciting adventures and programs — and possibly miss some of the horticultural nuances of this great garden space. Hershey Children’s Garden is a sophisticated and — now in its 10th anniversary season — mature garden with many plantings that any adult gardener or garden enthusiast would love to have in their personal greenspace. Who can blame them?

Here is the seventh plant in our series of 10 of our staff’s favorite Hershey Children’s Garden plants, along with their special and unusual properties to appreciate with a child.

Cardinal flower is one of the many stunning blooms visitors may find in Hershey Children’s Garden right now. Redder than fire engines, hummingbirds love the flowers of this Midwestern native. It naturally grows in wetland environments, sporting a spike of brilliant blooms from mid- to late-summer. Visitors will find this plant growing along the water fall section of the pond, stretching toward the sky alongside other riverbank lovers golden Alexander and swamp milkweed. This  bloom offers a great opportunity to speak to children about how observing flower shapes (i.e. tubular), colors (i.e. red), and sizes (i.e. medium) serve as good indicators of a species’ pollinator. Wander outside and see if you and your little one can guess who or what visits your flowers.

Caterpillars are eating machines. If they could eat any plant they wanted, our Costa Rica biome would probably be reduced to twigs. Luckily, most butterflies are very host specific, and the caterpillars will only eat the leaves of a few select species of plants, often from just a single genus. We generally avoid planting any of the host plants of the butterflies that we keep. Occasionally I will discover that some species of butterfly has found a newly added plant as an acceptable host plant.

     Passion vine is the host plant of several species of longwing butterflies in our exhibit. For the past few weeks, there have been several passion vines placed on the learning cart in Costa Rica, so visitors are able to see the butterflies laying eggs. The passion vines attract dozens of butterflies and allow the visitors to really see them up close.

     You can also see how much damage the caterpillars do as they munch away all the leaves.  I had to start rotating passion vines onto the cart after the caterpillars completely defoliated the first couple of plants put out. If we were to breed our own butterflies, it would take a whole lot of greenhouse space simply devoted to growing host plants and would be much more costly. As it is, our butterfly pupas come from breeders in tropical countries. They are able to grow host plants much quicker and without the use of greenhouses.  

     The butterflies were so excited to start laying eggs on a fresh passion vine that I had put out, that one of them made a mistake and laid an egg right on my shirt.

- Nate Tschaenn