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