By Kevin Coughlin
Monarchs rarely cross our mind… except, maybe, in the context of King George vs. George Washington.
And milkweed never gets a second thought.
But they will now, thanks to the Garden Club of Morristown.
On Thursday the club hosted three screenings of Flight of the Butterflies, a Canadian documentary about crowd-sourcing (before it was called crowd-sourcing) that solved the mystery of where monarch butterflies migrate for the winter.
By spotlighting the spectacular annual journey to Mexico by these delicate creatures, the club hoped to raise awareness and help save the species, said Meryl Carmel.
Overdevelopment and pesticides have landed monarchs on the “threatened” list.
How can the public help?
“Plant milkweed!” Carmel said.
Monarch caterpillars eat the milkweed plant; they cannot grow into butterflies without it. Don’t let the name fool you. Carmel said milkweed isn’t really a weed. “It’s a perennial,” she said.
“And a pretty one!” added club President Lisa Boles of Chatham.
(Just don’t eat it. Milkweed tastes so bad, many predators would rather go hungry than devour a caterpillar that’s gnoshed on this plant.)
Students from teacher Laura Gallagher’s 3rd grade class at Mendham Township Elementary School were among the 300 or so people at the morning screenings in Morristown’s Headquarters Plaza. Gallagher called the 3D film “amazing.”
“I liked the message of ‘citizen scientists.’ It’s super important for people to learn how they can help,” said the teacher, whose pupils raise monarchs as a class project.
Adalia Oscan, 10, left the theater with a smile. “I learned that monarchs fly north to south, and they lay eggs on milkweed,” she said.
Anne Enslow, a medical editor, traveled from Hoboken to catch the movie. She is a member of the Morristown-based North American Butterfly Association.
“It all began with a smudge of a caterpillar eating one of my plants,” Enslow said, explaining her fascination with these complex insects.
Butterflies pollinate plants, one reason the Garden Club likes them. Members are supporting efforts to create a “monarch highway” of milkweed in New Jersey. They handed out milkweed seeds in the cinema lobby.
Proceeds from the screenings, and from sales of original monarch artwork by member Susan Donnell, benefited the club. Established in 1913, it maintains the gardens behind Morristown’s Macculloch Hall, among other projects.
