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In a perfect world, elementary schools might look like something out of the pages of a bucolic children’s book: rabbits and ducks would gaze in benevolently at the windows, and clouds of butterflies would drift down the corridors, carried in from peripheral gardens by a sweet-scented wind. 

Nice sentiments, but hardly something to be squeezed into a perennially strained school budget, between textbooks and computers. 

Well, don’t tell that to the folks at LeConte Elementary School. 

Next to the playground for upper grade students sits a lush vegetable garden, where students harvest their favorite organically grown delicacies every day.  

Deep inside the school a courtyard garden is home to rabbits, ducks, chickens and goats – part of a 15-year-old program to teach kids growing up in an urban environment that their food doesn’t just magically appear on supermarket shelves. 

As for the perimeter of the school grounds – a chain link fence that appears to be overgrown with weeds – that’s actually a green universe of butterfly eggs whose progeny will soon flap around the LeConte playground equipment like so much May Day confetti. 

“Every time someone comes to look at (the LeConte Butterfly Garden) they say it’s full of weeds,” said LeConte parent Susan Fischer, who helped apply for a recently awarded $3,000 grant from the city’s Parks and Recreation Department to expand the school’s Butterfly Garden. 

“But, butterflies like a lot of the things that we think of as weeds.” 

Take the common plantain plant for example, the sort of angry-looking weed you might expect to find widening a crack in the sidewalk in front of your house. Buckeye butterflies wouldn’t think of laying their eggs on anything other than a plantain. 

Pull out all your weedy mallow plants and you can forget about ever seeing the Westcoast Lady, Gray Hairstreak or Checkered Skipper butterflies. 

Pretty flowers are good because butterflies feed on their nectar, said Andy Liu, a landscape architecture student at UC Berkeley who volunteers his time to maintain the garden and teach LeConte students. But it’s the glamour challenged “larval host plants” that draw the butterflies on a Biblical scale, Liu said. 

“Flowers are like a gas station and larval host plants are like a bed and breakfast,” Liu said. “Of course you’re going to see cars around a gas station, but what we want to provide is subsidized housing.” 

Of the 21 species of butterflies known to dance over Berkeley lawns during late spring and summer, Liu has designed the LeConte Butterfly Garden to lure the nine most common varieties. At this very moment the plants clinging to LeConte’s playground fence could be covered with countless thousands of butterfly eggs about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Eggs lead to caterpillars, caterpillars form cocoons, and cocoons, finally, give way to the miracle of butterflies.  

For LeConte teachers, the butterflies are the world’s greatest natural occurring teacher’s aid. Kindergarten and first grade teacher Judy Maynes takes her students out to search for eggs – right around Easter, of course. The students collect a few egg-laden leaves to take into the classroom so they can witness each stage of the butterfly life cycle. The learn about the critical relationship of each species to its natural habitat. Through art projects, they depict the butterflies’ transformation. And when the day comes to release the hatched butterflies back into the air, they read poems that meditate on the importance of freedom and escape from captivity. 

After the experience, “Kids are much more observant of nature around them,” Maynes said. “They are much more respectful of natural space.” 

Whereas before kids might have stripped leaves from a plant to throw playfully at a friend, they now recognize that those very leaves might house butterfly eggs that depend on the health of that plant, Maynes said. 

“It’s an attempt to engage kids in learning about their natural environment, and learning how things are all connected,” Liu said. 

A feature of the LeConte school for nearly 10 years now, the butterfly garden has traditionally been maintained through the labor and money donated by LeConte parents and neighborhood residents. The recent grant will allow the school to build out the garden over the next year in a truly systematic way, Liu said. They even plan to put up all-weather signs to identify plants and the butterfly species they host to passersby. 

The school, after all, should be an asset for the whole neighborhood, Fischer said. 

“It’s sort of the thing that sits right in the middle of their neighborhood. It’s used in many respects as a neighborhood park.” 

Karl Reeh is president of the LeConte Neighborhood Association, which will manage the implementation of the grant for the school. He said he gets comments from other residents in the community any time there’s a change in the school’s appearance. 

“It is important for the aesthetics of the whole neighborhood that the school look as good as possible all the time,” Reeh said. 

This Saturday, volunteers are invited from 9:30 a.m. to noon to help weed out unwanted vegetation and replace it with plants preferred by butterflies . For more information call Susan Fischer at 644-4480. 

For a complete listing of California butterflies click on: http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/lepid/bflyusa/ca/toc.htm.