JENNA OUTCALT
Staff Writer
Part of what captivates botanist Jessamine Finch when it comes to monarch butterflies is their otherworldliness.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a monarch butterfly, just the way they flit around; they have this kind of stumbling, balletic flight pattern,” she said. “When you watch them, it’s hard to imagine that they’re traveling thousands of miles.”
Finch will bring the monarch conversation to Chautauquans’ own backyards at 12:30 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall for the Bird, Tree & Garden Club and Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative.
The lecture will cover Finch’s research on milkweed, a major source of food for monarchs and other pollinators. She has investigated variations among species of milkweed and how they contribute to the environment.
“I’ve looked at this with several different species and answered questions both in the field and the lab, so it’ll kind of be a synthesis talk, bringing together both my research and the broader sphere of milkweed science,” Finch said.
Finch went to Smith College in Massachusetts, where she found her passion for botany.
“I got to actually work as a student at a botanical garden and meet a wide diversity of plants from all over the world, and then from there I found my foothold in the native plant space,” she said.
Finch said it is hard for some people to conceptualize how monarch butterflies can travel vast distances, crossing borders from Canada to Mexico.
“A really important part of that story is these milkweed plants,” she said. “So approaching it as a botanist and a plant ecologist, I’ve been thinking a lot about the diversity in the milkweeds themselves and the differences among them and how that relates to creating monarch habitat.”
However, milkweeds support more than just monarchs, Finch explained.
“It’s kind of a nice story to talk about the monarchs and the milkweeds, but there’s 30 to 40 specialist herbivore insects that also feed on milkweeds,” she said. “There’s an incredible amount of diversity that is supported both in terms of herbivores and nectaring insects.”
Finch emphasized that while the relationship between monarchs and milkweeds is a good entry point to understanding ecosystems, it’s “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“The milkweed-monarch relationship, these are part of a system — a system that’s way more complex than two taxa,” she said.
According to Finch, this means people need to consider variety in their gardens.
“A big piece of gardening for pollinators more broadly is thinking about the entire growing season and having food resources available throughout the growing season,” she said.
Finch said milkweeds are not a monolith, and she hopes to communicate how different they can really be.
“Milkweeds are a group of plants that grow in the U.S., in North America, but they are part of this larger clade that’s found globally, and some of them look very different from our milkweeds,” she said.
Milkweeds can have variations in growth habits and bloom times across different species, according to Finch.
“These factors matter not just for the insects, but also for the gardeners and the people who are enjoying the landscape,” she said. “Some milkweeds are way more amenable to a home garden context than others.”
Finch said she will give advice about how to support pollinators in a home garden during the lecture.
“One of the great things about gardening with native plants is that you can kind of find the right species for whatever space you have to work with,” she said.
Finch said that aside from finding monarch migration “delightful to watch,” she also sees it as a representation of cross-border thinking.
“I see it now as this wonderful symbol of cross-border migration and more global thinking, thinking beyond just our political borders, since this does span all of North America, from Mexico to Canada,” she said.
Finch, who has lectured virtually for the BTG before, said she is looking forward to the engaged and intellectual audience that is “here for the nuance.”
“I think the Bird, Tree & Garden Club at Chautauqua is unlike any garden club I’ve ever interacted with, in a very good way,” she said.
