Butterfly Gardening

Before you start with the design of your butterfly garden it might be a good idea to discover which species of butterflies live in your area. Take a hike around and explore your location, probably with a butterfly identification book in your hands. It takes some time as well as effort but you will appreciate the result. After you have discovered the species of butterflies, compile a list and make notes about what these specific species of butterflies use for nectar and food plants.

After you discovered the local butterflies and made a list about the plants and flowers they prefer, you are ready to think about planting your butterfly garden.

But be careful how you organize the colors you select for your flowerbeds. While butterflies do not care about your selection of color, you do not want your garden to be a patchwork of unrelated colors and textures. Butterflies are attracted to those flowers that have nectar instead of pollen, like honeysuckle, milkweed, summer lilac, Valerian, daisies, Purple Coneflower, Yellow Sage, day lilies and lavender.

Some people find it helpful to draw and color a layout of their butterfly gardening design to catch what the finished product would look like. Keep in mind that warm colors like red and orange are flashy and showy. These colors have a greater impact against a strong green background. Cool colors like blue and purple are calming and damped and would work better with a white contrast to make the look of freshness and brightness.

Ensure that your butterfly garden is located in a way that provides a minimum of six hours of sunlight a day. As butterflies are coldblooded creatures they like it more where they are warm and sheltered.

Consider plenty of wind protection in your butterfly garden design as well, wind is the butterflies worst enemy. Arrange for example tall shrubs or other plants in a way to create a wind break, although a location that avoids heavy winds is even better.

Most desirable the butterfly garden would be located on the sunny side of the home with windbreaks on west and east sides or wherever the dominating winds come from in your area. To be able to view the butterflies lingering in your garden from indoors, try to locate it close to a window. Consider to provide some seating outside as well.

In addition and if possible, you can excavate an area in your garden and build a stone wall around it which could make a ideal shelterbelt for your butterflies. To prevent walking in mud also think of gravel or crushed rock pathways around your garden.

Butterflies require little to survive. They need food, shelter, and water. When you provide these necessities to them, they will come to your garden and stay!

Why should you attract butterflies to your garden?
The reasons are multiple and varied. Butterflies provide a perfect way to pollinate others plants. They naturally eat other predators that might threaten the plants in your garden. Most of all, however, they are fascinating creatures that can provide hours of peaceful entertainment and serenity in a sometimes crazy world!
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To produce the kind of surroundings that butterflies find attractive, you will also need some kind of water. A birdbath for example will look attractive and keep the butterflies up off the ground, away from straying cats or naughty puppies. A shallow dish on a post or hung in a tree will do fine as well.

The same as birds, also butterflies are migrating. The butterfly which is best known of all migrating butterflies is the monarch butterfly. The winter it spends in southern areas. In spring the young females lay their eggs on the milkweed plants and the growing caterpillars that hatch from the egg feed on the milkweed leaves.

The adult butterfly flies some distance north where they mate and lay eggs on the milkweed plants that there began to grow with the advance of spring.

And this is what makes this migration so interesting, as within a few months several generations of monarch butterflies move more far north in search of milkweed. By the time of late summer, when they reach their final north destination, they are not the ones that left the southern region but descendants of them.

Now, as autumn comes and cooler weather starts, the surviving monarch butterflies leave the north and start migrating southwards. This happens year after year and always they follow exactly the same route.