Home Topics ...Garden TypesButterfly Garden

Butterfly Gardens: Attracting Butterflies

The point of planting butterfly gardens is to attract butterflies. The concept is simple: if you know what butterflies need, then you'll attract them quite easily.

The butterfly's needs are modest: it requires nectar for sustenance and a host plant for laying eggs. Knowing the types, arrangements and colors of the flowers that butterflies favor is the first step in attracting them.

Garden Designs to Tempt Butterflies

You don't require an enormous garden to create a haven for butterflies. A key element for any butterfly garden is to ensure that you have the correct amount of exposure and shelter. Butterflies are very sensitive creatures and they hang around only in gardens that meet their basic needs.

Sun is fundamental to the success of your butterfly garden. When deciding on the design of your butterfly garden, you should ensure that you have a southern exposure and that your garden receives at least six hours of sunlight on a daily basis.

Butterflies also require considerable shelter if they are to feel safe enough to lay eggs, so incorporate some large plants or well-placed walls in your design.

Butterfly Garden Layouts That Really Work

Butterflies require a good dose of sunshine before they can become active, so you should provide places within your garden for your butterfly visitors to absorb the sun. A great way to achieve this is to add some large flat stones to your butterfly garden, preferably with a reflective surface so that they can spread out and gain the warmth from the sun.

Butterflies prefer to land in areas where showy flowers are massed in a single color, rather than in gardens featuring clumps of mixed colors.

Since butterflies will be laying eggs, they expect their baby caterpillars to feast on plants as they grow. If you're wary of visible holes in your host plants, locate them behind plants that can mask the damage.

Using Water In Your Butterfly Garden

Like any living creature, the butterfly needs access to water. A common misconception is that butterflies congregate around water puddles for the water alone; this is not actually the case. Butterflies tend to appreciate the salt and amino acids contained in the water.

Any butterfly garden design should incorporate at least one water puddle. To create a water puddle, sink a container into the ground and fill it with some moist sand and pebbles. As butterflies enjoy salt, add a half-cup of salt to every gallon of water to really tempt the butterflies!

Butterflies also land on moist soil as they need the minerals found in soil to thrive. Create inviting puddles with a drip hose so that your guests can lounge on the mud or wet sand.

Perfect Butterfly Garden Accessories

Some experts believe that a hibernation box is an essential part of any butterfly garden design. Recent evidence suggests, however, that hibernation boxes serve little useful purpose, as butterflies prefer naturally occurring areas of shelter.

Instead, use carefully placed shrubs to create a sheltered area—perfect for butterflies to hibernate in during the winter months.

Fruits are another excellent way of attracting new and interesting butterfly species to your garden. Particular favorites include soft banana and watermelon. In fact, some species of butterfly eschew nectar in favor of rotting fruit or manure. Wasps also love these treats, so plan to keep them in well-protected areas.

Flowering Plants That Butterflies Love

Most butterflies are attracted by flowering plants. Bright colored, sweet smelling flowers should be a staple for any butterfly garden. Butterflies use nectar flowers as their main source of food, so a range of these types of flowers should be used to attract them.

Different flowers attract different types of butterflies, so if you want a wide range of butterfly inhabitants, you'll need an equally wide range of flowers.

Flowers and plants for your butterfly garden might include the following:

Lavender is a wonderful purple flower with dense clusters that offer vast amounts of nectar and cope well with dry or arid conditions.
Lilac is a winner with butterflies, although it usually flourishes only in the spring. The clusters are very fragrant and come in a variety of colors including white, blue, pink and purple.
Germander is an evergreen shrub that can cope with arid conditions and makes a wonderful plant to provide shelter for hibernating. Germander grows to approximately one foot tall, but its permanency as well as the colorful summer blooms of purple, red and white make this plant a must-have for any butterfly garden.
Privet is another, larger hedge plant that can grow up to fifteen feet, providing a wonderful windshield for your butterfly garden. Privet is not as colorful as many of the other butterfly attracting plants, with green and white colors dominating the springtime bloom.
No butterfly garden is complete without at least some honeysuckle. Honeysuckle is incredibly sweet smelling and offers a wealth of colors such as yellow, pink and white to attract even the most hesitant of butterflies.

Maintaining A Butterfly Garden For Best Effect

Butterfly gardens largely maintain themselves. If you have a man-made water puddle, then ensure that the water level is kept adequately high with sufficient salt content. Keep flowers and plants well pruned so that they regularly bloom with nectar rich flowers.

Other Topics in this Section

Add a Comment

Print this Article

Email to a Friend