Ferriday and butterfly gardens. What do they have in common? This is not some weird word game that I recently discovered.

I thought of the idea last week while I was driving down Louisiana Avenue. Looking out my car window, it came to me &8212; Ferriday is a lot like the butterfly bush in my front yard.

Let me explain.

For the past two years, my wife and I have had a beautiful green butterfly bush accented with tiny red and yellow flowers.

One October day, I looked out my living room window and there they were. Yellow, black and white striped creatures were covering the limbs of the butterfly bush in our front garden.

From my days of watching Mr. Roger&8217;s Neighborhood as a kid, I remembered that these unusual creatures were monarch butterfly caterpillars.

But there was not just one of these things hanging around the bush.

Suddenly, out of nowhere 10, maybe 20, of these caterpillars decided it was time to sit down for a feast in my garden.

Fascinated at first, I soon was horrified to see my beautiful plant being reduced to a mass of bare twigs in less than a week.

It wasn&8217;t until there were a handful of nibbled-on leaves left on one branch that I decided it was time to act before the whole plant would be destroyed.

&8220;We have got to do something about these caterpillars,&8221; I said to my wife.

I was ready to pull out my equivalent of weapons of mass destruction to take out these beasts.

But before I could amass my arsenal of chemical pesticides, the caterpillars had eaten every last bit of green and disappeared.

All that was left was a mass of brown sticks poking some 36 inches out of the ground.

Now what?

&8220;Do you pull the plant up and start all over again or do you leave the ugly mass of brown sticking up from the center of the garden?,&8221; I asked myself.

And that is where Ferriday comes in.

Too often people look for easy answers and quick fixes to many of the problems we see in life.

Recent trends in landscaping have been about getting rid of flowers at the first sign of age and replacing them with new beautiful flowers. Millions of dollars is spent each year keeping up appearances.

In the past few years, a drive through downtown Ferriday might have elicited the same desire to wipe the slate clean and start all over again.

Like the ugly mass of twigs sitting in the middle of my garden, it is tempting to remove the blight in one quick stroke and forget about it.

Only towns are not like gardens that can be quickly changed with the seasons.

Because of my procrastination and my wife&8217;s faith in the natural order of things, we left our twigs in the ground.

Miraculously green leaves began bursting forth from its branches. The plant is slowly being reborn.

In downtown Ferriday, a similar thing is happening.

In an area that is filled with blight and dilapidation, shoots of color and life have been springing up.

In preparation for the town&8217;s Centennial Celebration, citizens cleaned up sidewalks, spruced-up storefronts and picked up litter.

On that Saturday morning, interest from property owners and residents was piqued.

According to Teresa Dennis, who was in charge of the event, just seeing the work has raised the level of excitement in the town.

&8220;People came up to us Saturday and asked if we were starting a business,&8221; she said.

&8220;I think that is the key,&8221; Dennis said. &8220;Once you get something started people get excited. It&8217;s contagious.&8221;

Soon, the butterfly bush in our garden will once again be bright and vibrant.

Hopefully, the same will be true of downtown Ferriday too.

Ben Hillyer

is the visual editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3552 or

ben.hillyer@natchezdemocrat.com

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