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Butterfly Gardening

By C. Thomas Wetherald

What is butterfly gardening?

Simply put butterfly gardening is the art of growing flowers and plants that will attract these colorful and dainty creatures to your garden. Butterfly gardening is often aimed at inviting those butterflies and moths to lay eggs as well. Delight your family and visitors with beautiful butterflies, but be sure to create a safe habitat for them. If you own cats rethink your plans, because it would be a shame to attract these lovely insects to their death.

Gardening is a wonderful and stress-relieving hobby and by butterfly gardening you take it a step further by attracting these flying beauties to your yard. The design your butterfly garden is a matter of your personal preference. Fortunately, a garden for butterflies is not radically different from what you already have. Typical points to consider are the size of your garden and the types of flowers and plants you want to grow. Pick a style of garden that appeals to you, but ensure it also contains the plants and flowers that appeal to the butterflies you wish to attract.

It is important to find out which plants and flowers will attract the species of butterflies. that live in your area. This information can be found at the local library. Butterfly gardens can range in size from a few containers placed in a sunny spot to several acres. To create the kind of environment that they find attractive, you will also need water of some kind. A birdbath will look attractive and keep the butterflies up off the ground, away from stray cats or mischievous puppies. A shallow dish on a post or hung in a tree will do just as well. Some shady areas in a butterfly garden give butterflies a place to cool off when the weather gets very hot.

When planting your butterfly garden be careful how you coordinate the colors you choose for your flowerbeds. Although butterflies do not care about your choice of color, you don't want your garden to be a hodgepodge of unrelated colors and textures. Butterfly gardens are best planted in the spring with younger plants or in the fall with mature plants that will become dormant quickly and re-emerge in the spring. Butterflies are attracted to those flowers that have nectar rather than pollen, like honeysuckle, milkweed, summer lilac, Valerian, daisies, Purple Coneflower, Yellow Sage, day lilies and lavender.

Research should be conducted as to what species are prevalent in your area, and  what plants they prefer to nectar on. Some people find it helpful to draw and color a layout of their butterfly gardening plan to see 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 such as blue and purple are soothing and toned down and would work better with a white contrast to create the look of freshness and brightness. Keep this in mind, the more natural the area the greater the number and diversity of butterflies attracted.

I’m glad you have read my article, I hope you found it useful. Good luck putting this information on butterfly gardening to good use. Once again thanks for reading.

Be sure you pick up your copy of the Free Report Container Gardening.

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