Updated every season!

Butterfly Gardens You Can Make

You can plant a butterfly garden in your own backyard. It's fun, easy and inexpensive. At the same time you will be contributing to the conservation of butterflies. Your butterfly garden will provide needed habitat for butterflies, including food for caterpillars, places to hide from enemies, and nectaring plants for adult butterflies.

Tips to Follow:

1. Sunlight. Plant your garden in a sunny place. Butterflies are attracted to sunny sites because the warmth gives them energy to fly and to search for food and places to lay their eggs.
2. Wind Protection. Use trees, shrubs, trellises, vines on fences or buildings as windbreaks to shelter the garden.
3. Plants.
   1. Select food plants for the caterpillars, as well as brightly colored nectar-producing flowers for the adults.
   2. Plant an assortment of recommended butterfly plants. Butterflies choose plants by scent, taste, shape, and color.
   3. Cluster the plants in large showy clumps, rather than scattering them throughout the garden.
   4. Extend the blooming season from spring through fall. Plant both perennials and annuals.
   5. Stagger the bloom times so there will always be nectar sources and a bright "come on" for passing butterflies.
   6. Layer your plants to provide for butterfly safety from predators. Plant shorter plants in the front and taller species in the rear.
   7. Grow both native plant species and exotics or cultivars (often, non-natives). It's alright to choose only native butterfly plants, but you will attract more butterflies if you include typical garden plants like cosmos, broccoli, parsley, fennel, zinnias, cleome and other backyard garden plants.
   8. Include some "weeds" such as pigweed, lamb's quarters, mustards, cresses, clovers and grasses that you do not mow.
   9. Provide edges of your yard with resting places for butterflies where they can watch for mates. Include trees, shrubs, and patches of unmowed grasses, as well as pathways for the insects to patrol between the plantings.
4. Puddles. Provide a source of water in the form of a mud puddle or a patch of wet sand.
5. No chemicals. Use no pesticides or herbicides. Chemicals like these are death to butterflies!
6. Plan for the Winter. Leave some of your garden plants, leaves, and "trash" through the winter. Many larvae and pupae overwinter in them.

Finish the cleanup in spring and summer of the next year. Provide a woodpile or butterfly hibernation box for the butterflies that hibernate through the winter.

Top Ten Perennials sure to attract butterflies:

• Vervain
• New England Aster
• Butterfly Weed
• Blazing Star
• Purple Cone Flower
• Black-eyed Susan
• Joe Pye Weed
• Hyssop
• Yarrow
• Common Milkweed

Resources to check out:

• www.monarchwatch.org/garden

Where to see butterfly gardens in Three Rivers Park District:

• Eastman Nature Center
• Lowry Nature Center
• Richardson Nature Center
• Noerenberg Gardens

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