VILLAS — Gardens in Lower Township offering a friendly habitat for hummingbirds and butterflies are featured on upcoming backyard tours.
Pat Sutton, a backyard habitat educator, has been leading tours focusing on wildlife gardens for 22 years. Tours in July focused on butterfly gardens with upcoming Aug. tours focusing on hummingbird gardens.
“We visit the same gardens each month but they look different, completely different every month because we’ve all mastered perennial gardens so we have nectar spring through fall and as some things fade away as a perennial and stop blooming, others come on,” she said.
Aug. is the peak of hummingbird migration.
“Each of our gardens because of what’ve planted are kind of a blizzard of hummingbirds,” said Sutton.
Some females are on nests at this time raising their second or third batch of young.
Hummingbirds that nested in the Gaspe Peninsula in eastern Canada are migrating through gardens in our area. Hummingbirds migrate as far south as southern Mexico and Costa Rica, said Sutton.
Tours are offered Aug. 20, 21 and 22, visiting 18 gardens over three days. Participants may tour one day or all three days.
The Aug. 22 tour takes visitors into backyard wildlife gardens from North Cape May to Miami Avenue in Villas.
The Aug. 20 tour includes a garden on Seagrove Avenue, south of the Cape May Canal, along with Cape May Point and Cape May.
The gardens are all unique. Some gardens feature wooded areas or meadows with properties large and small, said Sutton.
“I see the garden tours as a great opportunity for people to learn how they can enhance their own property with plants that will really flourish here…” she said.
Gardens that are friendly to hummingbirds can also be enticing to butterflies.
Sept. tours focus on the migration of monarch butterflies. Sutton said gardeners have planted milkweed which is the only plant monarch butterflies lay their eggs upon.
“It’s a real eye opener for people as they attend these tours realizing that they too can just walk out the door and have something like this in their own backyard,” she said.
A garden can be made wildlife friendly in as little as one year. One of the most spectacular gardens on the tours was planted last fall, said Sutton.
Neither pesticides nor herbicides are used in wildlife habitat gardens.
To register for a tour, call the Nature Center of Cape May: (609) 898-8848.
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