Tips To Let Your Garden Sway With The Butterflies

By Staff

Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 12:50

Tips To Let Your Garden Sway With The Butterflies

Butterfly Gardening Tips

Butterflies are the natural adorning elements of your garden that silently meditate on your well bloomed flowers or just sway lightly with the cold breeze just to add beauty to the tranquil garden. However not every garden is blessed with it as the little fairy friend has its own attraction to bless the garden with its presence. So folks get ready to welcome the most lovely guests to decorate your garden with these butterfly gardening tips.

The basic rule to attract butterflies in your garden is to plant, plants that act like magnets not only to attract them for single visit but also to provide abundant food to the little caterpillars to munch. Make sure to have both food for the larva and food for the adult in your garden if you want to attract and keep butterflies forever. Some of you may hate the sight of the voracious larva munching on your well grown flower. However remember that you have to start with the voracious larva, if you want to own the most splendid butterflies.

The Perfect Location

Butterflies love gardens that is lighted with warm sunlight. So, the perfect butterfly garden will be a place with a sunny location that receives 5-6 hours of sunlight everyday. However make sure to shelter them from winds as they would not prefer a area where they would have to constantly fight with the wind to stay firm on the plant. You can provide shelter by a row of trees or shrubs, a fence or trellis with honeysuckle or other flowering vine.

Some gardeners even prefer placing few flat stones in a sunny location for the butterflies to warm up. Butterflies drink from shallow puddles and dew drops on leaves. So, keep a mud puddle damp in a sunny location, or fill a bucket with enough water and sand to make the area moist. You can also add salt to the water for puddling butterflies such as Swallowtails. Avoid using pesticides and herbicides as most of them kill butterflies, caterpillars, and beneficial insects instead use natural pesticides (/home-n-garden/beautiful-gardens/naturalpesticides.html)

Plants For Butterfly Gardening
Here are some tips on choosing the right kind of plants to attract butterflies.

Plant native nectar plants.

Make sure to plant perennials and annuals so that the plants will be blooming from early spring through late fall. Some of the best Perennials are Aster, Black-eyed Suzan, Chrysanthemums, Coreopsis, Dahlias, Daylilys, Lantana, Mother of Thyme, Nasturtium, Phlox, Primrose, Purple Coneflower, Yarrow and Joe-pye-weed. You can choose annuals from Cornflower, Cosmos, Impatiens, Marigolds, Petunia, Sweet William/Pink and Zinnia. You can also plant Shrubs like, Azalea/Rhododendron, Butterfly Bush, Honeysuckle, Lavender, Lilac, Viburnum and Wisteria.

If you have limited space, plant butterfly-attracting flowers in containers, window boxes or hanging baskets. Grow lot of nectar plants and cluster them together.

To keep the plants flowering abundantly cut of the dead blooms of the plants.

To help them roost well, one should know about their favorite roosting places. Butterflies naturally roost in shrubs, tree crevices, under bark or in log piles. So make sure to have them too in your garden.

Do not forget to grow caterpillar food plants like butterfly weed, dill and parsley. You can plant them in separate area as these are mainly wildflowers and weeds.

So, use these must follow tips and find the flapping fairies in you garden the next season.

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Article Published On: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 12:50 [IST]

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