Butterfly Garden

You have noticed that not all gardens attract the same amount of butterflies. This is not as much because of the amount of flowers that garden may contain, but the right amount of flowers that are rich with nectar that the butterflies love to drink. It can also be from a greater presence of plants in the area that caterpillars like to feed on.

By choosing the right plants for your garden you too can have a butterfly garden at your home. In doing this, you may also learn that you have a new hobby that will forever change the way you look at insects in the garden.

To make a butterfly garden, you should first decide just how much effort you would want to put in it. If your goal is to simply attract a few more butterflies, that it may be as easy as planting a few more plants which produce the nectar flowers which are popular with the adult butterflies.

However, if you want to attract many diverse species of butterflies to your garden than you will want to provide a variety of food for both the butterflies and their caterpillars s well. This is especially the case if you live in an urban or suburban area where pastures and woodlands are less common.

Ideally, the perfect butterfly garden would cover a very large area, acres actually. But in a realistic back yard plan we will be focusing on a small butterfly garden. If possible, it would be helpful to let as much of the yard be as wild as possible or at least have a variety of fauna that can attract caterpillars.

Butterflies like protection from the wind. So if possible, plan the garden within the L shape of a house or consider planting a living hedge of a shrub like blueberries or lilacs to protect the enclosure.

The butterfly garden itself should be a mixture of annuals, perennials and shrubs. They will surround a circle of lawn. You can place a bench or a table in the center so that when you sit you will be surrounded by flowers and butterflies. When planning the lay out of the garden make the grade of the beds be slightly higher around the edges slowing gradually inwards to the center of the garden. This slope combined with the planting of the plats should bring about a graduation of the heights from high to low in the center which will give you a feeling of being in the center of a bowl of color and life.

If possible, plan on creating a small pond in the center for the drainage to feed into which will also provide some water for the butterflies to drink from. If you do create the pond, plan on it to be closer to a puddle than a pond and line it with smooth rocks. This will be more appealing to the butterflies than a large mud pit.

The shrubs that I will be suggesting will bloom at different times of the seasons as will the annuals and perennials which will combine to make a variety of nectar flowers and larval foods.