Butterfly Garden Landscapes - Gardening Landscape Ideas

Butterflies are some of the most beautiful and graceful insects to embellish our gardens. Luckily, it's easy to attract these gentle beauties to your garden, if you know how to create butterfly garden landscapes that encourage their growth and development.

Color

Different types of butterflies are attracted to different colors, so it makes sense to plant a variety of flowers in your garden to attract the most butterflies. For example, try planting purple cone flowers, yellow black-eyed Susans, red hibiscus, and blue lilacs and lavender to attract different types of butterflies to your butterfly garden. Butterflies love butterfly bush and daylilies, rosemary and marigolds, too, so you see how you can plant a wide variety of blooming plants in your butterfly garden landscapes. The nectar from these blooming flowers will attract the butterflies to feed, but the different colors throughout the garden will appeal to them as well.

Food Plants

Butterflies feed on the nectar from blooming flowers, but they need food plants for their larvae and caterpillars to feed on, and each butterfly prefers different types of plants. For example, if you'd like to attract Monarch butterflies to your garden, and would like them to lay their eggs in your plants, you'll need milkweed, because that's the food plant for the larvae. After they turn into butterflies they prefer nectar from milkweed, butterfly bush, thistle, and mint plants. You can find lists of the most well k

own butterflies and their preferences online.

Water Sources

Butterflies also enjoy puddles in their butterfly garden landscapes. They drink from the puddles, so if you have shallow puddles or birdbaths throughout your yard, you'll attract more butterflies, and they'll stay where they are comfortable and can find the things they like to eat and drink. Fill the puddle with sweet juices, stale beer, or rotting fruit occasionally, as these attract butterflies, as well.

Sun Sources

If you've ever watched butterflies, you know they like to sit and bask in the sun on a sunny day, and they aren't usually out and about when it's cloudy or cool. Be sure you provide some open, sunny areas where butterflies can sit and warm up undisturbed, if you want to attract the most butterflies to your garden.

Shelter

Butterflies like to be safe and secure when they lay their eggs and rest, so planting larger shrubs around the butterfly garden makes it more intimate, but it gives the butterflies the shelter they crave, too. They don't like windy gardens, so a windbreak of shrubs will serve as shelter and a way to keep out gusty winds, too.

Pesticides

It's really not a good idea to use pesticides in the butterfly garden. First, you may harm the larvae or caterpillars of the butterflies your trying to attract, and you could harm the butterflies if they drink from sprayed flowers. Instead of using pesticides, try using natural ingredients to deal with unwanted pests, like insecticidal soaps or items like vinegar or cayenne pepper spray.

Plant butterfly garden landscapes to beautify your yard and enhance your garden, and you'll soon be enjoying the wonders of butterflies throughout your garden!

Wendy Pan is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about butterfly garden landscapes, please visit How to Design a Garden Today for current articles and discussions.