Photo from The Xerces Society
While we humans may like our gardens because of the way they look or the inviting spaces in them, butterflies visit our gardens for their own non-aesthetic reasons: they are looking for nectar sources and larval plant foods. To truly entice these lovely creatures into our yards and gardens, we need to give them a lot of reasons to be there.
Planning a butterfly garden:
What species of butterflies occur in
your area, and what do plants do they use for nectar and larval food?
Butterflies are cold-blooded and need
sunlight to warm the muscles they use to fly. Look at your garden's
orientation and decide if it receives enough sunlight. Will you need
to move some plants to provide enough sun?
How much time do you want to spend
maintaining your garden? Do you want to have only butterfly plants
or integrate these into the rest of your garden? Keep in mind that the
ideal butterfly garden will have no pesticides used in it.
What is the style of the rest of your
yard? formal? informal? You will want your new area to fit in with
the older portion.
Color--Butterflies do not care if the colors in your yard coordinate with each other, but you may. Keep in mind that flowers loved by butterflies may range from whites to cool colors into the hot yellows oranges and reds.
To see a diagram of a typical butterfly garden, click on the thumbnail picture below:
The Xerces Society is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the prevention of human-caused extinction of rare invertebrate populations and their habitats. Visit them online at www.xerces.org
For a wonderful discussion of butterfly gardening, see the amazing book "Butterfly Gardening" put out by The Xerces Society and The Smithsonian Institution. The butterfly garden diagram shown above is one of many from this inspiring book.