Recently, I visited Tilden Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley. I remembered seeing California pipevine, Aristolochia californica, when I had visited before. I asked a gardener who was doing some hand-watering if he knew where it grew. He told me where I could see the plant and its caterpillars and butterflies.<\/p>\n
The plant is a large, sprawling vine with saxophone-shaped flowers. The caterpillars (larvae) are hairy, red-orange and black and 2 inches at maturity. The beautiful butterflies (Battus philenor hirsuta) are blue and black, with a wingspan of 2.75 to 5 inches.<\/p>\n
The caterpillars will feed only on the Aristolochia plant. This trait is called being \u201chost-specific.\u201d<\/p>\n
A visit to this park would be a great Mother\u2019s Day excursion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recently, I visited Tilden Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley. I remembered seeing California pipevine, Aristolochia californica, when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[764,7,967,7997,7726,971,992,180,266,143,145,144,420],"class_list":["post-307013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-berkeley","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-garden","tag-home-garden","tag-lifestyle","tag-marin-county","tag-newsletter","tag-northern-california","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-things-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}