I'd bet everyone has a different 'best', Rhonda. I've had three rue towards the back of the yard since May, and have neither seen a Giant interested nor have I ever found any eggs. As of last week, I had two eggs (now cats) laid on my Moro Blood orange tree-let. I find the Giants tend to lay their eggs on the newer growth. Has your grapefruit or the Meyer lemon put out any new growth to speak of?

My wafer ash is the best, but they also use my rue on occasion. However, this is only the second time I've ever had them, so who knows why they choose to lay there eggs where they do!

If you ever do get them, know that they are pretty boring to raise, haha. They just sit there all day, unlike Black Swallowtails, who you can watch munching. The Giants eat at night.

Wafer ash/Ptelea trifoliata is their absolute favorite, but rue is good, they'll lay eggs on that one, too. They never laid eggs on my orange tree except on the new growth - no new growth, no eggs.

Sherry

Nice, Iris! Your rue plant/leaves appear much larger than mine (4" pots put into the ground in May). I wonder if mine are just too small to be spotted by the Giants cruising through.

Virtually no Ptelea in my area of SE Michigan, but lots of prickly ash (Zanthoxylum) here, and giants are fairly abundant.

A plant related to prickly ash (that you may be able to grow outside in FL) is curry tree (Murraya koenigii). Last summer I transferred a young giant caterpillar from prickly ash to a potted curry tree and it took to it immediately. Kept the chrysalis over winter and the adult hatched earlier this summer. Here's a photo of that larva on curry tree:

Thanks everyone! Based on your recommendations, I'm going to try common rue since I don't have room for another tree. Where are you buying your rue plants? I can't find it for sale at any local nurseries or online (except for a few selling at very high prices on Amazon). I can buy seed but since I have butterflies year round, I'd like to put in plants. Thanks!

I think I got them from butterflybushes.com before (Rose Franklin perennials)

Thanks Iris! I'll check them out. Annie's Annuals and Perennials who I like carries them too but are out of stock now.

Several local nurseries here carry rue. I only buy the organic kind to make sure there are no pesticides. At this time of year, they have none - they start selling herbs in Spring and stop around end of June, probably because everyone has already bought what they need.

I get a TON of Black Swallowtail eggs on my Rue - they are buttery yellow, and 99% of the time, laid on the underside of the leaves. The Giant eggs are orange, and laid on the top of the leaves.

Here is one of my favorite pictures of Black Swallowtail eggs - usually it's only one egg per leaf. On occasion, two eggs. Then one day I found these! Still amazed!

H

Great picture of those eggs!

Sherry

Rhonda, I think you'd be able to get some from Rose Franklin on her host plant website. They probably aren't real big, but I've gotten plants from her before and was always happy with them. I don't know if she'll be selling them next year because it says on her website that she and her husband want to sell the bigger part of their business as they're retirement age, so you might want to hop on getting the rue from her this year yet if that's what you decide to do.

http://www.butterflybushes.com/butterfly_host_plants.htm

I used to have lots of rue plants but developed a sensitivity to them over the years. My hubby had to go to the dr. for meds because he was deadheading it for me a couple years ago and it turned out he was even more sensitive to it than I was. He had really bad blisters on the bottom half of his legs. Now, not everyone is allergic to it, but you should be aware of that.

I know you said you don't have room for wafer ash, but I thought I'd mention that the Giants like it best here. The only thing is that it doesn't hold up all that well in water. The rue does much better. I put it in florist tubes to feed the cats.

I also have gas plants, which the Giants lay on a lot, but they dry out pretty fast too. They used to lay on the rue pretty often (first host plant that I had for them) but since putting in the gas plants, they started laying on those more. Then, after putting in the wafer ash trees, they really liked those the best.

I live in PA so I can't have orange, lemon, lime, etc. trees here for them, so I can't say how much they would prefer those in comparison to what I have here. We've raised close to 50 Giants this year and some of them are still eating, but most are in the pupae stage.

Giant Swallowtail and Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies are my and my daughter's very favorite cats to raise. We started out with Monarchs in 2005. We're up to about 600 for the year, I think. We figured out that these small bugs that are coming out of the containers must be what has been killing them for the past week. We bought more shoebox-sized containers at Walmart so we could keep the solid lids on them instead of the ones that I had cut up years ago and attached screen to the tops of; I think that's our solution for the problem of the die-off, but I just don't know what the insects are. I must be the first one on the forum to encounter this, as nobody else knew what I should do.