"About passionvine...do you know if it spreads so easily like that up north?" Most varieties of passionvine do go crazy, but the cats make quick work of it once the gulf frits find it! Last year, I had dozens of cats at any one time, and most of the summer, they'd eaten every tiny speck green from the vine (they'd sort of crawl around pathetically looking for food... I gave a couple hundred cats over a period of a few months to a friend who grows a ton of passionvine so she could feed them). My vine has recovered and is growing wonderfully right now, nice and lush, but I've seen frits in my yard already, so it's just a matter of time before they devour it again. So, in short, if you're growing passionvine for butterfly gardening, you can never have enough, and I consider it a plus that it grows so well. The first butterflies I ever raised (I'm in Houston, too) were swallowtails--I went to harvest some parsley one day, and discovered cats on it (that's how I got into butterfly gardening, actually--it was a happy accident). Now I grow a bunch of fennel for them, which they prefer over the parsley (they won't touch the parsley until the fennel is gone), and the fennel grows really well in our area and is very easy to find at all the garden centers, so try that, too. I'm also growing frog fruit and blue pea vines this year, and both of those host plants are growing very nicely right now, but no cats yet on either. And, of course, milkweed, but no matter how much I have it's never enough. Good luck!

I have found that the flowers of all the plants in the carrot family attract large numbers of insects including many types of wasps and hover flies, tiny beetles, etc. If you let the parsley and carrots flower in their second year they will be insect magnets too. In my yard the fennel, parsley, and goldenrod flowers attract the greatest number and variety of insects by far. It is fascinating to watch the swarm surrounding them when they are at their peak. If the swarm bothers you, but you still want the foliage for the caterpillars just cut off the flower stalks. The rue flowers are not as busy and it seems to be a last choice as far as black swallowtail eggs at least here. It is an attractive plant though and may get giant swallowtails to lay on it as well. Be careful when working with it though because it may cause some light sensitive skin blistering in people. I would make sure that the peat moss never dries out until the seedlings get a good start because once it dries out it is pretty hard to re-wet.

This probably won't help you until next spring, but I know several of the NJ Audubon centers have periodic (once a year?) sales for wildlife plants. The one I took advantage of was in Bernardsville and required ordering ahead of time. It had some plants which are usually fairly difficult to get, and when I asked if plants were from fairly local sources I was told they were. I bought Dicentra eximia (wild bleeding heart) and Chelone glabra (turtlehead) from them. I know they had many of the other plants you've listed. Depending on where in NJ you live, you might also want to check out the sales put on by the NJ Native Plant Society. Here is a link that might be useful: NJ Audubon Centers

Thanks Cathy, there were a couple of false indigos in there, your wild indigo is now added for the clouded sulphur. I was also able to convert some hyphens, that were displaying in Chrome browsers as gibberish, into dashes in the hostplant list.