As butterflies emerge in our habitat, lawn care and mosquito control companies flood our mailbox with propaganda. If you want to make your own garden a safe place to land, don’t believe the hype.

I’ve been walking under the shadows of butterflies. They fly over kids riding by on bikes and singing songs about evil viruses. They fly over parents sharing tips from a safe distance about where to get toilet paper and bread. They fly over me as I transplant asters and check my phone to see the latest update: The governor has issued a stay-at-home order as cases of covid-19 rise exponentially in Maryland.

The butterflies continue to fly, to chase each other, to land near the sap still oozing from the sickly elm I’ve nurtured for years just for them, the one whose bark they hide in each winter and whose sugars they drink from each spring. They fly to the logs lining the pathways, to the concrete blocks surrounding the front garden, and to the bits of dead grasses I’ve pulled and left in piles for birds to use as nesting material. They spread their sun-soaked wings and beckon me to find my camera, even though I know that by the time I come back, they’ll be up in the air again, floating above us and the earthly messes we’ve made.

On Monday the butterflies flew over the mailman stopping to deliver five pieces of mail. Four were postcards from Lawn Doctor, proclaiming that “kids love butterflies, not ticks or mosquitoes” and encouraging me to “battle back” to protect my family and pets. Legal definitions of false advertising may or may not apply to the statement at hand, but the implication that mosquito spraying is safe for one kind of insect while decimating others is untrue. The photos are equally dishonest, depicting kids looking through a lens while a blue butterfly of unknown origin perches on the jar in their hands.

It’s not surprising that the insect looks superimposed onto the scene. Real butterflies aren’t likely to survive the onslaught of pesticides, leaf removal and incessant mowing wrought by conventional lawn care and pest control companies. Mosquito “barrier treatments” are touted as targeted and safe, but the pesticides typically used — known as pyrethroids — can kill all insects. “Fireflies, butterflies and bees are just as likely as mosquitoes to encounter fine drops of insecticide in the air or on foliage treated with barrier sprays,” writes conservation biologist Karen Oberhauser in the Wisconsin State Journal. “Treated foliage is toxic to adult insects that land on it and any insects that eat it.”

In her research, Oberhauser documented a high mortality of monarch caterpillars who’d been fed pyrethroid-treated milkweed leaves up to three weeks before. A five-year Florida study revealed similar impacts on several more butterfly species exposed to common mosquito control products.

Mosquito predators like dragonflies and damselflies can help provide natural controls, but they, too, are harmed by spraying. A study conducted on pesticide-treated plantations in Costa Rica found that mosquitoes developed resistance and proliferated while their main predator, a damselfly species, vanished. Such facts are absent from the glossy materials of mosquito control and lawn care companies, which focus instead on exacerbating fears. “With all the media talking about Zika and those kinds of things,” a Lawn Doctor executive told a trade journal in 2016, “our Yard Armour business is up almost 100 percent.”

Aside from mosquito  sprays, lawn care companies use many other pesticides that wreak havoc on wildlife. In an online document, the mailer of the postcards I received this week lists dozens of products used “with different services, at different times of the year, on an as needed basis.” The labels read like a house of horrors for any living being: “toxic to fish and wildlife,” “extremely toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates,” “highly toxic to bees,” “may result in ground water contamination,” “do not plant any food crop within one year of a treatment,” “do not feed clippings from treated areas to livestock or poultry,” “may kill honeybees in substantial numbers.”

Lawn Doctor is just one of many companies whose messaging takes advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge about the natural world. Recently I learned that a local franchise of Mosquito Joe even tries to use guilt-by-association to scare people into hating mayflies. As sensitive insects who can’t tolerate pollution, mayflies are indicator species, helping us assess water quality. When I volunteer to monitor local stream health, we’re always excited to find mayfly nymphs. But in a mass email about “a few nuisance pests that are often mistaken for mosquitoes,” Mosquito Joe tells consumers that mayflies “can be very annoying as they tend to swarm on windows and sidings. They also have a different flight pattern than mosquitoes. Our product is effective, but it’s harder to eliminate them because they tend to be carried with the wind. Luckily, these are also usually only a short-term menace.”

For hours I watched the butterflies chase each other through the front gardens, stopping just long enough to give me a quick peek of their brilliant orange wings. They landed on bark, among leaves, in grasses, and under branches. These are the places that help them negotiate their shifting needs for sun and shelter. They are also the places least safe from a sprayer in a more conventionally managed yard. As a New York Times article noted, “Employees of mosquito control services generally blow an insecticide from a backpack-style tank, targeting the underside of leaves, vegetation, ground cover and other cool, dark areas where mosquitoes lurk.”

Countless other animals, including bees, tree frogs, snails, and firefly larvae “lurk” there too. Slugs love rich layers of fallen leaves and help decompose organic matter; if you have an abundance of leaves, you’ll rarely see the slugs on your plants. I was reminded of these misunderstood and helpful creatures as I sat on the front stoop the other night to read the fifth and final piece of mail, a welcome change from the pesticide propaganda. It was a letter from Florida addressed by a careful young hand:

Dear Ms. Lawson,

My name is Brice. I am a twelve year old boy. I live on Longboat Key in Florida. I love wildlife and gardening. I have been using native plants more and more lately because of their benefits to wildlife and the ecosystem. After reading your book, The Humane Gardener, I have decided to use nearly all natives and start collecting tree branches when people throw them out to pile in our backyard for wildlife. I also just convinced my mom to let me grow a patch of Virginia Creeper which I had been ruthlessly killing for years just because it is a little exuberant. Thank you for including Spanish Needle in your book. I have let it overrun a lot of our yard and from the time the bees come out in the morning till the sun goes down I have yet to see less than ten bees of all kinds flying happily around the Spanish Needle at any given time. It also attracts tons of butterflies. Yet I have never seen it mentioned in any other book even books of plants for wildlife as much more than a “weed”. Thank you also for acknowledging the importance of slugs and other native insects commonly known as “pests” and that they have as much right to live as any other animals.

Yours sincerely,

Brice

I folded the letter, and a butterfly unfolded her wings, having finally come in for a long landing at the tip of an elm branch. She held tight in the strong winds and eventually grew still enough to reveal the markings that would pinpoint her exact identity: a species known as the question mark butterfly. She’d had a long day of eating and mating. Maybe she’d even laid eggs on elms, hackberries, and false nettles — the plants her caterpillars need to eat to survive. The lawn care companies would likely not approve of these species or of the butterfly babies who make holes in their leaves. But in Florida, there’s a young boy who does, who is aware of the connections between plants and animals and is actively nurturing them. As my little wild friend left me in her fleeting shadow one last time that night, I held onto the promise of a new generation of butterflies and of boys who refuse to spray and mow them down.

Photos by Nancy Lawson/Humane Gardener