Scout's garden helps students learn butterfly's life cycle

Each spring, second-grade students at Meadow Glens Elementary School in Naperville tend to a caterpillar all their own, learn about its life cycle, watch it grow into a butterfly and set it free.

Next spring, 90 such students will have a specially designed place to set their butterflies in flight thanks to the Eagle Scout project of 16-year-old Naperville Central student Cameron Hayes.

But since the kiddos who attended a recent dedication for the new butterfly garden haven't begun their butterfly unit yet, their questions were as innocent as can be.

"Will they fly away?" one girl asked teacher Barb Hunt.

"They will," Hunt replied. "But they'll come back and visit."

Cameron said he decided in May to build a butterfly garden as his Eagle Scout project because he wanted to help out at Meadow Glens, where he and fellow Scouts in Troop 222 hold their meetings. He didn't attend the school, but went to nearby River Woods Elementary in Naperville Unit District 203, where he has vague memories of releasing a butterfly himself as a youngster.

At Meadow Glens, Cameron learned Hunt and fellow second-grade teachers could benefit from a place with native plantings that attract butterflies, give them food and provide a place to lay eggs.

"I've always wanted a butterfly garden," Hunt said. "So this is perfect."

Cameron said he raised $1,000 and enlisted the help of 20 people to design the garden, get the flowers, plant them in July, then add pavers (so students won't stomp on the plantings) and a rain barrel as finishing touches.

Tucked into the southeast corner of the school on Muirhead Avenue, the triangle-shaped garden is a colorful oasis of red, white, yellow, pink and purple flowers, with plenty of green foliage. Inside it are black-eyed susans, hostas and plenty of milkweed - otherwise known as butterfly food, Hunt says.

This year's second-graders will release their painted lady butterflies, a variety native to the region, from Cameron's garden in the spring. A few honeybees already buzzed around as students took their first look.

The project was a new endeavor for Cameron, who said his previous gardening experience involved helping his mother, Cheryl Hayes, with the yard. But his work got the approval of Hunt, an avid gardener who loves working with native perennials, and of his mother, too.

"It's amazing," Hayes said about the garden for butterflies, students and growth. "It turned out beautifully."