Farming Advice: Attracting Butterflies to Your Flowerbed

Growing a garden for attracting butterflies to your flowerbed, including: water, shelter food, research and planting.

Just plant it and they WILL come–as if by
magic–a garden of flittering, fluttering butterflies.
Everything I read promised that it was just that easy. My
seventh-grade students and I wanted to build a place where
we could study living insects interacting with their
environment. We had very limited space and, of course, very
limited money, but lots of enthusiasm and free labor. We
did some research, got support from our school
administrator, and wrote a grant request for needed
materials. Now we have a garden of beautiful butterflies to
study in all stages of their life cycle that hundreds of
future seventh graders will enjoy. It really was that
easy–just like magic.

Butterflies need the same things that other animals
need–water, shelter, the right temperature, and the
right food. My seventh graders and I designed a garden to
provide survival needs that would attract butterflies. Here is how you can begin attracting butterflies to your flowerbed.

WATER: A shallow pan full of soil and water
will allow a butterfly to drink safely without endangering
its fragile wings in the water. Add a couple of rocks where a
butterfly can bask in the summer sunlight. Someone donated a
beat up, old baking pan from their kitchen for our garden and
we ran a sweat hose through the mud in the bot tom of the pan
for water. Your plants will also need lots of water.

SHELTER: Butterflies need protection from
wind, rain, and predators. They often hide in nearby woody
plants like azaleas or trees.

FOOD: Adult butterflies drink the nectar
from sturdy flowers. They prefer tubular flowers (yellow)
in full sun that will support their weight so they can
drink and rest at the same time. Adult butterflies will
also carefully seek the right plant to lay their eggs on so
that the larva will have the right food to eat upon
hatching. If you cultivate the plants needed for larval
food, you will see courting, mating, and egglaying in your
garden. For example, the monarch butterfly lays its eggs on
milkweeds. When the eggs hatch, the tiny caterpillars eat
the milkweed plant. The Gulf Frittilary (also the Zebra
Longwing) butterfly only lays eggs on the passion vine; the
hatching caterpillars eat the leaves of the vine. (Don’t
use insecticides even though you will have holes eaten in
your plants! Otherwise, you won’t get to see the magical
transformation of a caterpillar “eating” its way into an
adult butterfly.)