How to Attract Butterflies to Your Garden and Yard
No matter how cynical you are, you will be thrilled to see butterflies in your garden or backyard. Not only are these colorful insects beautiful, they pollinate plants, attract birds, inspire Mariah Kay , and provide us with a hackneyed metaphor for transformation .
To attract butterflies to your yard, you must ask yourself what the butterflies want . Ask yourself: “Why does the butterfly want to hang around my yard and not the neighbor’s?” Simple answer: butterflies are looking for a soft spot to raise their butterfly colonies. They need a quiet place to lay their eggs, food plants for their larvae, branches on which their pupae can hang, sources of nectar, places to hide and somewhere to relax.
For flowers that attract butterflies, think “stay local”.
Butterflies and flowers go together like Starsky and Hutch. They drink nectar from tons of different flowers, but not all flowers are the same. To increase your garden’s chances of having an abundance of butterflies, native flower species are your best bet. After all, local butterflies and native flowers have evolved together. Visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center website for a state-by-state flower guide that will give you ideas on what to plant.
According to the National Wildlife Federation , adult butterflies are most attracted to the sweet nectar of “red, yellow, orange, pink, and purple flowers with flat tops or clusters and short flower tubes.” For more details, check out this excellent list of butterfly nectar plants .
The place where you plant flowers is also important. Butterflies usually only feed in full sun (which is amazing), so for optimal butterfly attraction, make sure your flowers get plenty of light from mid-morning to mid-afternoon.
Find out where they will want to lay their eggs
Butterflies can drink nectar from a ton of different flowers, but they are much more picky about where they lay their eggs. For example, monarch butterflies only lay eggs on euphorbia, and black swallowtails only lay eggs on rue plants. There are about 750 species of butterflies in the United States, so it’s best to do a little research on the native “flies.” Find out where they want to lay their eggs and plant them. Many states have official butterflies. This list is a good place to start.
Also, remember: you can’t have butterflies without caterpillars. A garden full of plants eaten by native caterpillars is the best choice, but each caterpillar species eats only a small variety of plants. There are 180,000 species of caterpillars, give or take, so you’ll have to research what species live around you.
Think about their safety and how they will spend their free time.
Your new butterfly friends will need a place to hide from predators. While there are butterfly habitats you can buy, they are likely to be more likely to spend time in natural places such as hollow logs, tree branches, or stacked firewood. They love small nooks and crannies to avoid birds, lizards and snakes that might eat them.
Life does not consist only of drinking nectar and changing from one form to another; in their free time, butterflies love to sunbathe and splash in shallow puddles. (Butterflies are so damn cute.)
Install flat rocks in the sunny part of your yard so they can dry their wings and get some sun. Some butterfly lovers report not having much luck with basking rocks, but that doesn’t hurt.
Butterflies also like to “dig in puddles”, digging into wet sand or mud where they can drink and extract minerals from the water. Submerge a few pots filled with a little water and coarse sand into the soil to give them a hole for watering. Keep the sand wet, but don’t add too much water. You don’t make a lake, you make a mud puddle.
Feed them rotten fruit
Some species of butterflies (red-spotted lilac, question mark, mourning cloak, green comma, malachite, red admiral, skeleton and tawny emperors, and viceroy, according to joyfulbutterfly.com ) like to get nectar from rotten fruit. For this reason, you may have noticed butterflies loitering around your compost. If you want to attract these butterflies, you can place a few overripe peaches in a plant hanger and hang it from a branch, or simply place it on a plate on the deck railing. Just be aware that this will likely attract wasps, ants, flies, and other pests.
put off the poison
If you want butterflies, you’ll have to give up insecticides. These poisons cannot distinguish pests from butterflies.