Garden Green
 

Butterfly Gardens

Everyone loves butterflies. With their wide variety of colours and graceful movements, butterflies are a joy to watch. Attracting butterflies with a butterfly garden is a great way to increase the enjoyment of your garden.

When you are planning your butterfly garden, make sure you plant it in a place that you can easily see, even from inside. There is no point in attracting butterflies if you will never see them.

Choose flowers that produce nectar that butterflies like to eat. Asters, day lilies, cosmos, coneflowers and marigolds are just a few of the choices available to you. Plant groups of these flowers together, don’t just scatter them throughout your garden. Also, choose a variety of flowers so that you will have blooms all through the growing season. This way you will have a greater chance of attracting butterflies and having them come back throughout the whole spring, summer and early fall.

Your butterfly garden should also have some shallow water or mud puddles for butterflies to drink from. You can add butterfly feeders that use a sugar water solution that butterflies like to eat. Just make sure you clean this thoroughly every day or two so that the solution doesn’t go bad and poison the butterflies. Butterflies also like to have rocks placed in the sun so that they can lie down and warm themselves.

As an added bonus, these nectar rich plants and butterfly feeders may also attract hummingbirds. And remember, never use insecticides on your butterfly garden. These chemicals will kill the butterflies that you are trying to attract.