Butterflies and other pollinators have a new place to call home in Amazon HQ2’s 2.5-acre Met Park.
To attract the winged powerhouses, professional horticulturists and volunteers spent last week planting swamp and butterfly milkweed, echinacea, coreopsis, and seven other species of native and native-adaptive plants in a 250-square-foot bed. A bench and a dozen tables and chairs are nearby for people to sit and enjoy the garden, which is free for the public to visit.
“Obviously, we want to enjoy them, but the real reason for doing it is to benefit the pollinators and provide as many sources of flowers and plants for them as possible,” says Dillan Clark, landscape operations manager at Amazon HQ2. “Our main goal is to provide nectar and pollen sources for the butterflies.”
June 17-23 is National Pollinator Week, an annual event designated by the U.S. Senate 14 years ago to address declining pollinator populations. The monarch butterfly population fell by nearly 60% between 2023 and 2024, potentially earning Endangered Species Act protection, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide its status by December.
Concern about habitat loss—a major contributor to the population’s peril—inspired Amazon employee Tricia Wines to contact Clark about designating an area in Met Park as a riparian garden.
“As soon as I heard that we could turn an area into a dedicated butterfly garden, I had the perfect area [in mind] that was underwhelming to begin with,” Clark says. “We laid out a good plant palette of solid native plants that provide nectar sources for butterflies and other pollinators throughout the season, and also offer beauty that people can stop by and take pictures with and really admire.”
The space already had native shrubs, but they were cramped, Clark says. “This particular bed is on the smaller side, and it was going to be more sustainable to transplant the plants that were there into a larger bed and incorporate that bed to a butterfly garden that’s going to have smaller plants that can maintain themselves in a smaller area over time.”
The garden earned the space a certification from the North American Butterfly Association, which requires the presence of at least three caterpillar food plants and three butterfly nectar sources, plus a pledge not to use insecticides and pesticides.
The Butterfly Garden is part of Amazon HQ2’s overall agricultural sustainability efforts, Clark says. “That’s the core of what Amazon does when it comes to horticulture, and we accomplish that by planting all native plants and native-adaptive plants in our two-and-a-half-acre park,” he says. “That couples with smart and low-flow irrigation and an engineered soil that helps retain the moisture.”