It has been a great year for butterflies….with the possible exception of eastern tiger and black swallowtails, at least in my garden. Several times last year I counted dozens of caterpillars stripping bronze fennel foliage to nubs. This year, despite allowing almost every seedling fennel to sink tap roots in my garden, as I always do, I saw only a couple of caterpillars and hardly any adults. I finally thinned the forest in defeat. It goes like that in nature. The pendulum swings between boom and bust. Sometimes alarmingly, which is why I’m excited to see the monarch butterfly population on an upswing.

I remember going a whole summer and fall without seeing any more monarchs than I could count on one hand, and only one of those in my own garden. These guys should be, and used to be, common as grass. Population data gathered the winter of 2013-14 was a real shocker. Only a fraction of the already declining population showed up in the Mexican forest where they overwinter and we gardeners and environmentalists panicked. I rushed out to plant everything in the Asclepias family (caterpillar food) I could lay paws on and signed endless petitions against Roundup resistant GMOs. Since 2014, the winter count (based on occupied hectares) has shown a slightly wobbly rebound, but according to the National Wildlife Federation, they’re not out of the woods yet, by any means.

So let’s not stop signing those petitions or planting milkweeds. You already know my favorite is bright orange butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa). But while swamp milkweed (A. incarnata) and the rather inelegant common milkweed (A. syriaca) have no trouble at all seeding themselves throughout my crowded garden, butterflyweed, which is only about 2-feet tall, hasn’t been as….enthusiastic. It might like your garden better.

I can’t remember the last time I saw so many painted lady butterflies. They are an international species — some call them “cosmopolitans,” and not endangered, perhaps because their larval diet is much less restrictive with several plant species, including artemisias, mallows, and thistles, on the menu. The North American contingent doesn’t often make the trek in great numbers to this part of the country from their overwintering grounds in the southwest, but this year their exodus showed up on weather radars in Colorado. Imagine that! And conditions — wind direction, rainfall, temperatures, bloom times — must have been just right to wing so many into the northeast.

As I write this it’s just into November, we’re on the other side of a wicked windstorm, and I’m still seeing monarchs and painted ladies in the garden on sunny days. I know these latecomers are unlikely to make it all the way back south but I would hate for them to go hungry while they linger. Most adult butterflies aren’t terribly picky but they taste with their feet and prefer plants with a landing platform and florets they can sip through their tongue straw. Composites with pollen-loaded disk flowers, such as asters, old-fashioned mums, blown open dahlias, and zinnias are nutritious and delicious. Evidently.

They also seem to enjoy tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis), which is currently ignoring the calendar and sending new stems with fresh purple flower clusters into a lattice of seedheads. I’m surprised this perennial isn’t in everyone’s garden, while butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) is. (I blame the common name; let’s call it monarch magnet instead.) Technically, it’s only marginally hardy, but never fails to deliver an ample supply of fresh seedlings to every sunny sidewalk crack, and unlike buddleia, which does the same thing, won’t grow into an inconveniently sited 8-foot shrub.

I let them do their thing — even buddleia, within reason — for the same reason I grow a forest of fennel. When it comes to feeding butterflies, I garden for the boom years.

Kristin Green is the horticulturist at Mount Hope Farm and author of 'Plantiful: Start Small, Grow Big with 150 Plants that Spread, Self-Sow, and Overwinter'. Follow her blog at trenchmanicure.com.