Tips to Grow a Butterfly Garden

Tips to Grow a Butterfly Garden: What Do You Need to Attract Butterflies to Your Garden

Butterfly gardening is the art of using flowers and plants that attract butterflies to your home. The beautiful creatures will flutter through your garden, delighting and entertaining you. In return your flowers will provide a safe habitat and abundant food for them to enjoy. You add special importance to your flowers by using them in a butterfly garden.

What Flowers Should You Grow

It is important to find out what flowers and plants will attract butterflies in your area. Colorful flowers that are native to your area are a good first choice. Checking with your local greenhouses and gardening supply stores will help you to find what flowering plants are native to your home and will be the best attractors for butterflies.

If you cannot find local plants there are many types of flowers that grow in many environments and will attract a wide variety of butterflies. The aptly named Butterfly Weed and Butterfly Bush are two beautiful flowering plants that butterflies love. Asters, Daisies, and Marigolds are also easy to grow flowers that provide food and homes to many butterflies as they travel through. Flowers that have nectar rather than pollen will provide plenty of food for butterflies. Honeysuckle, lavender, and lilacs are beautiful nectar flowers that will enhance any garden.

Watering Your Butterflies

Butterflies need more than just flowers in your garden. A water source is just as important to caring for butterflies around your home. Water dishes should be shallow, clean, and kept high enough above the ground to discourage cats from attacking the fluttering creatures. Birdbaths are often good choices for butterflies, however a shallow dish hanging from a tree will also work well.

Be sure that their water is kept clean and free from stagnation. A butterfly water station also needs to be out of the direct sunlight to ensure it does not get too hot during the day. Placing it in a shaded area near your butterfly garden will make sure your butterflies can find water and quickly return to their safety.

When planting your butterfly garden you can add to the colors of your flowers by using a good layout. Flowers with warm red and orange tones looks best against a dark green background. Green ground vines or short grasses wold be a great background choice. Cooler blues and purples need a bright white background to help them stand out. Small white flowers such as the Greek yarrow or the Mountain sandwort would be a good background plants for your cooler toned flowers.

Creating a beautiful butterfly garden will enhance your home and bring hours of joy during the day as you watch the fluttering beauties travel by. By selecting plants that provide safety and food for butterflies, keeping water nearby, and staying out of their way you can fill your yard with color and elegance.

Ideal Butterfly Garden

Features of the Ideal Butterfly Garden

Meeting the Day-to-day Needs of Butterflies

Jan 2, 2010 Shirley Hollis

With an increasing interest in butterfly gardening much has been written on the topic. But It is important to understand that butterfly gardening is more than flowers.

Because of the growing interest in butterflies, one can find plans for and pictures of butterfly gardens online and in various publications. With planning, the ideas they offer can be incorporated into almost any landscaping project or existing landscape design. To start on your way to building a garden that will attract butterflies, you need to answer these basic but specific questions:

• Which butterflies have been spotted in your area?
• Which plants provide nectar to those particular butterflies’ adults?
• Which plants do those butterflies lay their eggs on?
• Which plants do their caterpillars use as food?
• Which features other than plants need to be included?

Attracting Butterflies

To start, you will need to identify which butterflies you can reasonably expect to attract to your butterfly garden. Your choices may be limited by the realities imposed by nature--for instance, it will not matter if you want to attract glasswing butterflies if they never come to your area. Begin by visiting the North American Butterfly Association website and familiarize yourself with the regional butterfly gardening guides that NABA developed specifically for various regions of the United States. Visit the one for your area and then familiarize yourself with Butterfly Gardening by Area to further your knowledge of butterflies in your local area. These sites will identify for you the butterflies you can expect to see in your garden and yard, along with information about the needs of those butterflies. Attracting butterflies is relatively simple if you know which butterflies you will likely be attracting and what their needs are.

Selecting Plants for Nectar

Read more at Suite101: Garden Plants to attract Butterflies: A Selection of Nectar Plants that Feed Butterflies Around the Year

Read more at Suite101: Creating a Butterfly Garden: How to Design a Garden to Attract Butterflies and Help Them Breed

Selecting Host Plants

Read about Butterfly Host Plants: Selecting Plants where Caterpillars Feed

Read more at Suite101: Features of the Ideal Butterfly Garden: Meeting the Day-to-day Needs of Butterflies http://wildlife-reserves.suite101.com/article.cfm/features_of_the_ideal_butterfly_garden#ixzz0bhvMYWCq

Planning Your Butterfly Garden

by webmann on June 6, 2009

Image by Chris & Lara Pawluk via Flickr

When creating a butterfly garden, the possibilities of what to include in your butterfly garden designs are endless. Below are some suggestions to help get you started when designing your butterfly garden plan. They are designed to spark the creative process of your mind and get you started on your way to creating a lovely and well-suited butterfly garden.

- First, before you even begin your butterfly garden, find out which species of butterflies are in your area. Consider taking an exploratory hike around your location with a butterfly identification book to find the butterflies that dwell close to your property. This may take a little extra time and some research on your part but the results will be worth the effort. After you have compiled your list of local butterfly species, be sure to write down in your butterfly garden plan what these particular species of butterflies use for nectar and food plants.

- Be sure that your butterfly garden plan includes a location that provides at least six hours of sunlight per day. Butterflies are cold-blooded creatures and therefore, do better where they are warm and sheltered.

- Wind can be a butterfly’s worst enemy so be sure to have plenty of wind protection in your butterfly garden design. You can plant tall shrubs and other plants in order to create a wind break. Know the direction of your area’s prevailing winds. The first choice, however, is a nice ‘tucked away’ location that avoids heavy winds.

- Keeping the above points in mind, choose a suitable location to have your butterfly garden. The best of all worlds would be a butterfly garden placed on the south side of your home with windbreaks on both the west and east sides. You may also wish to be sure that you are able to view you butterfly garden from inside your home as well as provide seating outside from which to observe the antics of the butterflies.

- If your area permits, a possible suggestion for location of a butterfly garden is provided by Barbara Damrosch in her book Theme Gardens. She suggests the use of an old basement or home foundation if such is available around your home or the place you wish to have your butterfly garden. As an alternative, you can excavate an area and build a stone wall around the excavation to simulate an old construction foundation. Remember to covered the bottom of the excavation with several inches of gravel where you do not intend to plant your nectar and food plants for the butterflies. This will save you from a muddy walk through your butterfly garden after a rain.

There are many creative ways for constructing a butterfly garden. Take your time to design a garden that you will enjoy and be proud of later when all is said and done.

Source: http://www.backyardgardeningtips.com/backyard-garden/planning-your-butterfly-garden/

Students turning park into butterfly garden

 KTIV NewsChannel 4 Sioux City IA: News, Weather and Sports

Posted: June 2, 2009 06:12 AM

Students turning space into butterfly garden

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KTIV) -- It started with an idea to make a change, and now it's a reality for some middle school students.

Back in October, East Middle School students joined a club called "We Can Change the World Challenge". The students met twice a week after school planning to make-over a green space in Sioux City.

The students worked with the city of Sioux City, planning and organizing their project to make-over Macomb Park in Morningside. Now, they are seeing their hard work come to life.

"We have a butterfly garden and there are some little stones that you can walk through and benches and we're going to put up a fence around it and we have a spot where we're going to put the sign in and there are flowers all around that," says Courtney Uhl, East Middle School student.

The students and other volunteers have transformed the space over the last three days. The Junior League gave them a $2,000 grant to help pay for flowers and they will be installing a playground.

Students say despite the hard work and the initial challenges, it was worth all of the hard work.

"We hope to be an inspiration to other young adults. Just because you are told no, doesn't mean you should give up," says Shelbie Uhl, East Middle School student.

The students and other volunteers will be taking care of the garden the rest of the summer.

Butterflies use wings to send both 'sexy' and 'repulsive' signals

DNA: Sci/Tech: Butterflies use wings to send both 'sexy' and 'repulsive' signals

Butterflies use wings to send both 'sexy' and 'repulsive' signals
ANI
Thursday, April 2, 2009 17:47 IST

Washington: The eyespots of some butterflies serve to both attract mates and ward off predators, according to new research by Yale University biologists.
Pankaj Shukla / DNA
The eyespots of some butterflies serve to both attract mates and ward off predators

The researchers say that butterflies seem able to both attract mates and ward off predators by using different sides of their wings.

"You want to be noticeable and desirable for mates, but other onlookers, including predators, are paying attention to those signals as well," says Jeffrey Oliver, a postdoctoral associate in Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Oliver joined forces with Yale biologist Antonia Monteiro to study whether the eyespots on the upperside of butterflies' wings -- specifically, those of bush brown butterflies -- serve a different purpose than the ones on the underside.

The researchers used different evolutionary models for their study.

They found that the eyespots on the upperside of the butterflies' wings appeared to evolve much more quickly than those on the underside, meaning they appear and disappear frequently through the course of evolution.

According to them, the finding is consistent with the theory that these are used to attract mates, as signals used for sexual selection tend to evolve faster than others.

Oliver claims that his group's study is the first to employ evolutionary history models to show that a species can use the same signal on different areas of its body to communicate different messages.

He says that butterflies can flash hidden eyespot on their forewings to confuse predators and give themselves time to escape.

While the researchers have yet to find out how the upperside eyespots communicate with potential mates, it is thought that they might help butterflies identify each other and thus would help keep different species from cross-mating.

Oliver has revealed that his team next plans to use longer evolutionary timescales to study where and how eyespots evolved, as well as whether they developed all at once, or independently over time.

The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Yeoor to be a better home for butterflies

Yeoor to be a better home for butterflies-Thane-Cities-The Times of India

Printed from

THE TIMES OF INDIA

Yeoor to be a better home for butterflies
20 Feb 2009, 0404 hrs IST, TNN


THANE: Were you aware that the world's largest Atlas Moth - having a wing span of ten inches to a foot is frequently seen in the Yeoor range? Well it is true that not only this, but some 72 known species of butterflies with about 127 to 130 sub-species are found in and around this area. The forest department is taking initiatives to attract more butterflies to this area so that the people get to know more about them.

V P Patil, the Assistant Conservator of Forests (Yeoor), said, "The landscaping which will be done will enhance the appearance of the Nature Interpretation Centre. The plants will be grown near the Centre and tourist cottages. The local public will be treated to a breathtaking sight of many colourful butterflies. We are sure that people will get to know more about these beautiful creatures. It will be especially informative for the children visiting the Centre."

The wildlife wing of Maharashtra had created Nature Interpretation Centers around the state, educating people on the importance of interaction between wild animals, plants and importance of conserving forests.
Y R Masurkar, the Range Forest Officer, informed, "To attract the butterflies that are visible in the Yeoor Hills closer to civilisation for sensitising us, some special plants are being grown. Many varieties of plants such as Khulkhula, Peru, Marigold, Lantana and Pudina will be planted so that more and more people can see these colourful butterflies. We believe that with increased number of butterflies visiting this area, people will get to view them closely. Moreover little children will be very happy."

According to Dr Minal Vaidya, who has done her PhD in Horticulture, "The flowers, smells, colors and nectar of these plants attract more butterflies in comparison that other plants do and I have incorporated this system successfully elsewhere."

Butterfly Peace Garden in Sri Lanka

Hivos Butterfly Peace Garden

Allowing traumatised children in Sri Lanka to once again be ‘butterflies’

Children should be able to play, to laugh, to enjoy life. But for years now in eastern Sri Lanka they have not been able to do that. Countless children there have been victim to horrifying experiences. The main cause for this is the armed conflicts between the country’s different ethnic groups. Trauma centre Butterfly Peace Garden hopes to help these children regain their zest for life.

Butterfly Peace Garden wishes to allow children to crawl out of the cocoons in which their war traumas hold them – in order to make ‘butterflies’ of them again. To that end, this Hivos partner uses a special method. Each year it selects, together with parents and teachers, fifty traumatised pupils between 7 and 15 years of age. These children are invited to a special garden two days during the school week plus weekends. There, in a green and safe environment, they can play games, cuddle animals, take care of plants, make music, paint, draw, sculpt, put on stage performances and tell stories.

‘That is not only fun, but it also helps them to process their traumas calmly and to heal,’ says the Canadian Paul Hogan, instigator and advisor of the centre. ‘For nine months the children are coached by creative therapists. These therapists have often been traumatised themselves. Many even spent time in the Butterfly Peace Garden as children. They know from their own experiences that art and play are elements of a healing therapy.’

Hivos has been supporting the Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa since its founding in 1997. ‘If children overcome their traumas and heal, they are much stronger for it and are able to then console traumatised family members or neighbours,’ says Hivos staff member Artien Utrecht. ‘That stimulates peace.’ She visited the trauma centre several times and saw with her own eyes how children’s creations helped them learn to talk about their pent-up experiences. ‘A wonderful thing about this is that they also learn to interact with peers from other ethnic groups,’ she says. ‘Tamil, Muslim and Christian children play side by side in the garden.’

The support for Butterfly Peace Garden is part of the Hivos programme Human Rights and Democratisation. In conflict-prone Sri Lanka, Hivos gives special attention to initiatives that stimulate peace and inter-ethnic relations.