The Desert Botanical Garden will break ground on a new, expanded butterfly exhibit on November 16, 2016.
Opening in March 2017, the new Butterfly Pavilion will be located on the Harriet K. Maxwell Desert Wildflower Loop Trail and will feature hundreds of live butterflies, as well as a caterpillar nursery and emergence chamber. The Garden’s newest exhibit will provide visitors an opportunity for up close interaction with butterflies while learning about their role as pollinators, characteristics of the butterfly in different lifecycles, and conservation efforts to protect them.
“The Garden’s first butterfly pavilion opened in 2002. It was intended as a 5-year pilot project to see if our visitors would enjoy butterflies. After just a few weeks we knew the answer to that question was a resounding “yes,” and the first butterfly pavilion went on to operate for more than 12 years,” says Ken Schutz, the Dr. William Huizingh executive director. He continues, “When it was time to “retire” that exhibit, we knew that we wanted to replace it with a permanent facility that was even more special – one that incorporated all phases of a butterfly’s life cycle and one that was architecturally consistent with the rest of the Garden’s unique structures.”
The seasonal pavilion will preview to Garden Members on Monday, February 27 – Friday, March 3, 2017 and opens to all Garden visitors on Saturday, March 4, 2017. The Butterfly Pavilion will be open daily through May 6, 2017 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The new butterfly exhibit is generously supported by the APS Foundation, Diane Abe & Linda Heppe in memory of Bing & Mary Heppe, J.W. Kieckhefer Foundation and Margaret T. Morris Foundation.
