Caterpillars in Parsley Heaven

I have a parsley plant that is flowering.  Parsley is a biennial which means that you plant it in the spring of one year and it survives the winter to flower the next summer.  The flowers will produce seed and the plant's life cycle starts over again. 

Here is a picture of the flowering parsley plant.  It is huge compared to the small plant that I harvested parsley from last year.

You can't see them very well in this picture, but there are hundreds of very small flowers that grow in clusters.  If each of these flowers produces a seed, then I'll have plenty of seed to start new plants from next year.

But this blog entry is not just about parsley.  If you look closer, you will see that a secret world exists inside the plant and the Black Swallowtail Butterflies love it. 

This is a the caterpillar of a Black Swallowtail Butterfly.

There were several of these caterpillars on the plant that ranged in size from small to large.  I even found a chrysalis that one of them had formed.

 You can read more about the life-cycle of the Black Swallowtail Butterfly at this site:
http://www.pbase.com/rcm1840/lifecycleofblsw

The caterpillars share the parsley with a wide variety of other insects.  In fact, this plant is a hive of activity. There are tiny flies and grasshoppers like this one that frequently visit it.

There are also a variety of wasps that use the plant for food as well.  Here is one of them.



I enjoy watching the life cycles of the plants, like this parsley plant, and of the insects, like these Black Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars, that inhabit my garden.  I hope by sharing them with my blog friends that you can enjoy them too.