Butterfly Gardening - how to create a butterfly garden

Butterfly gardening tips

If you want to have a veritable “Fairy Garden”,butterfly gardening complete with hundreds of visiting butterflies or hummingbirds, you simply need to know the types of butterfly garden flowers to grow that attract them.

When you select plants for your garden look for those that bloom either throughout the season or a varied selection so you always have some blooms in your garden. Since butterflies are most active in the mid summer to late summer months, make sure you have plenty of flowering plants for that season. Most flowers that have heads containing multiple florets attract the butterflies best.

There are about 550 different specie of tiger or black swallowtail butterflies and each has their own personal preference for flowers. In order to get a variety of these different species you can plant an abundant of different types of plants.

Many different varieties particularly love the butterfly bush, butterfly weed, and dame’s rocket. Dame’s rockets are wild flowers that bloom in the spring and once you have them, you’ll understand what attracts the butterfly. The scent of the flower fills the air for several yards with a sweetness like no other.

Other delightful butterfly garden plants that attract swallowtail butterflies are heliotrope, marigold, purple coneflower, verbena, New England aster, liatris and petunias. Wild bergamot, oriental lilies and phlox are particularly attractive to the spice bush butterfly and the Eastern tailed blue butterfly loves creeping wood sorrel, oregano and oregano.

If you want to have monarch butterfly garden visit your garden center and don’t forget to have the butterfly bush that all butterflies simply love, mist flowers, butterfly weed, mustard greens, New England Asters, heliotrope plants, Joe-Pye weed, coneflowers, zinnias and Brazilian verbena.

Bee balm and the purple coneflower are particularly useful after the butterflies drink from the nectar. Also known as bergamot, monarda or Oswego tea bee balm is often used as a healing herb. Like the purple coneflower, whose real name is Echinacea purpurea, it offers many beneficial uses for humans as well as butterflies.

Select annuals too because of their continuous bloom. Most plants that are in the mint family, including lemon balm, are also places that butterflies enjoy stopping for a quick meal. You’ll find that for butterfly garden flowers,hybrid flowers aren’t necessarily the best for your garden since many of them are primarily bred for their showy display.

If you want to supplement your plants with additional feed, you can use a hummingbird feeder or create your own butterfly feeder from a small jar, similar to that of baby food. You simply punch a hole in the lid, fill the jar with a sugar water solution of 9 parts of water to each part of sugar, put cheesecloth over the top of the jar, place a cotton ball in the center and put on the lid. When you invert the jar it creates the perfect feeder. You simply need to dress it up a bit with colorful cloth so it looks as attractive as the garden flowers. Then hang it in your garden.

Your butterfly garden will provide hours of enjoyment for you and those that are allowed into your private slice of heaven. Put a bench in the area under a tree so you can sit and watch as your new friends appreciate your hard work.

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