Creating A Butterfly Garden

In this day and age of fast-paced lives packed with careers, soccer, baseball, and ballet practice, having a garden, no matter how big or small, can be a refuge. A place for rest, reflection, relaxation and a little meditation. It doesn’t have to become a lot of work for you. With a little planning, you can easily turn a little work into something very rewarding.

The Nectar Plants:
Nectar plants are what the adult butterflies feed off of. If you have no gardens to speak of now, my advice would be to start small and go/grow from there. If you have room, I’d start with a Butterfly Bush. These can be cut back every year and will grow fairly large the next season, becoming woodier with time. They come in a variety of purples, a pink, a white and I’ve seen some new colors each season in the catalogs that I haven’t tried or seen in person yet. No matter what else you have, you will attract the butterflies once this starts blooming.

Not all perennials bloom all season, so you’ll want a variety to keep enough nectar around from Spring through to the Fall. The Butterfly blooms from summer through to Fall. Other perennials that the butterflies can’t seem to resist are lavender, coreopsis, coneflowers, columbines, yarrow, sea pink, asters, single-petal daisies, violets, bee balm, lilacs, scabiosa, and liatris. There are many more, I’m sure. These are ones that I have tested and know that the butterflies will visit faithfully while they bloom. If you don’t have a lot of room to work with, you’ll want to choose so that you have something blooming from early spring (i.e. columbine and sea pink), into summer (i.e. lavender, coreopsis, and yarrow), into the fall, (i.e. butterfly bush and asters).

The Host Plants:
If you want a lot of butterflies from early spring through fall, then I would recommend some host plants that your adult butterflies will lay their eggs on. An adult butterfly will lay eggs near or (most butterflies) directly on the host plant. A host plant is what a particular butterfly will eat when it is a caterpillar. Each type of caterpillar will feed on only one or a few different types of plants. For example, the only plant that a Monarch caterpillar will eat is milkweed. If the caterpillar does not have milkweed, it doesn’t eat. Other types of butterflies, such as Giant Swallowtails, will eat dill, fennel, carrot and rue. Some caterpillars feed off of bushes and trees, while others stick to plants. The easiest way to get butterflies in your first season is to concentrate on swallowtails. The cats feed off of common, easy to grow plants, while the adults are also some of the most beautiful to look at. The caterpillars are easy to find (they don’t hide inside leaf nests or in trees) and if you want to try your and at RAISING BUTTERFLIES, the swallowtail would be an excellent starting point.

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