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The Basics of Butterfly Gardening
The ideal butterfly garden is one with lots of bright flowers and dozens of butterflies flitting from bloom to bloom, sipping nectar. To successfully attract those butterflies, you must provide for their three basics needs: food, shelter and water.
The first food a butterfly needs is one it eats when it's still a larva, or caterpillar. Butterflies will visit any garden to drink nectar, but they will stay in the ones that provide the larval food plants needed for egg laying. Since every butterfly species needs a specific larval food, it's important to include a few of these in your garden or yard. Providing a pesticide free zone with milkweeds, parsley, violets, and other larval food plants will encourage egg laying. Many butterflies lay their eggs unnoticed on common willow, birch, cherry, and ash tree leaves, so you may already have butterfly friendly plants in your yard! It's important to eliminate pesticide use in those areas. Always be sure to identify insects and be sure they are really harmful before spraying.
When planting flowers to provide nectar for adult butterflies, plant to have large areas of color so your garden will be easily visible to the butterflies. Use lots of their favorite colors, yellow and purple, and plant flowers of different heights and sizes. Single form flowers are easiest for butterflies to stand on when feeding. It's also important to have a succession of blooms from spring through fall. Including lilacs or azaleas will provide nectar for the earliest butterflies, annuals like zinnias and marigolds will fill the gaps when perennials aren't blooming, and chrysanthemums and late flowering sedums will feed butterflies well into autumn.
The next essential for butterfly gardening is providing shelter. Using tall flowers, shrubs, and evergreens to the back and sides of the garden will allow butterflies to eat, bask, mate, and lay eggs undisturbed by the wind. Existing walls and fences can provide protection, too. Shelter plants also provide hiding places and shade on hot days.
Lastly, butterflies need access to water. Researchers believe that male butterflies, in particular, need the salts and minerals that leach into water from surrounding soil and rocks. This behavior is called puddling. Traditional bird baths are too deep for puddling butterflies, instead, leave a shallow dish of wet sand on the ground in your garden.
Butterfly gardens don't have to be large to be successful, even a small garden can include larval and nectar foods, shelter and water. Again, the use of pesticides in or near your garden can be devastating to adult butterflies and caterpillars; use them responsibly, and make your butterfly garden pesticide free!
~Kate Marsland, Master Gardener since 1997