The buddleia provides a rest stop for a migrating butterfly

A very large buddleia (butterfly bush) grows in the front garden with its upper branches as high as the house. Every year around August, I give it a haircut and it responds by putting on an encore show of lovely sweet blooms late in October or early November.

This year the blooms provided a meal for a Painted Lady butterfly. The sweet nectar must have been a welcome rest stop snack for this tattered and tired lady as she was flying by during her autumn migration. Painted Lady butterflies migrate in the spring and again in the autumn.

When I see one of these beauties in its post-summer migration south I wonder where it must have spent the summer months. Did this lady enjoy breezy summer afternoons flitting over meadows of wildflowers in the Sierra Nevadas so dear to my heart?

I hope she did.