Butterfly Gardening: Create a Living Sculpture of Color and Movement

After laying out a landscape—pavers, edging, mulch, plants—we sit back and admire the vista. But there's a fourth dimension just below the surface that thrills senses and brings us fully into the place. Butterflies add color and movement echoing flowers, grasses, and stone walls—delighting and surprising. Gardening for butterflies is perhaps the simplest landscape action—you likely already have the basics to help them thrive.

Start With What You Plant

First step: plant flowering plants—perennials, shrubs, even trees. Masses, drifts, or random cottage style—formal or informal, butterflies don't care.

What they do care about: flower type. Greater diversity = better. Less complicated flowers = better. New coneflower cultivars with double frothy petals confuse butterflies and pollinators—they ignore the bloom. "Simpler" flowers—purple/yellow coneflower, black-eyed Susan, Joe Pye Weed, mountain mint, blazing star, aster—are perfect, especially straight species (not named cultivars). Straight species often have the flavor butterflies prefer and evolved with, unlike cultivars bred for growth habit or petal color.

Certain butterflies prefer certain flowers—monarchs go especially nuts for blazing star (Liatris ligulistylis).

Finding what works for your location requires trial and error. Good starting points: local university extension offices, arboretums, native-plant nurseries specializing in wildlife. You'll favor yourself by finding regionally native plants.

For maximum butterflies, use host plants—where butterflies raise young: milkweed for monarchs, fennel/parsley for black swallowtails, plantain for buckeyes, baptisia for sulphurs. Many trees are crucial: oak, black cherry, willow.

Gardens With Wings lists plants and their butterflies.

Add Water

Water is necessary for butterflies—not sipping from ponds like birds, but slurping droplets. Fountains or water features that splash create butterfly-size mud puddles and drops for easy drinking. Incorporate in any landscape design.

A disappearing fountain with rock base works well for quenching butterfly thirst. Place among plants so water reaches leaves. Use cupped-leaf plants to hold rainwater: sedum, prairie dock. Even create a damp mud puddle in a shallow birdbath—particularly attractive (butterflies use long proboscis to pull nectar; they like doing the same with water from mud globs).

Create a Habitat

Winter picture? Yes. Count the butterflies—could be dozens. Many overwinter as adults (mourning cloak), caterpillars (viceroy), or chrysalis (swallowtail).

Big reason not to cut down or clean up in fall—butterflies snuggled in dead plant life, waiting for spring. Leaving the garden up adds architectural interest over winter. Wait until spring to clean up; walk gently over fallen leaves and twigs.

A pristine lawn in a clean modern landscape suits a house's design but is a butterfly desert. Lawns maintained with pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers harm butterflies at every life stage.

If you want butterflies, simply don't spray anything in your garden (or your neighbors'). If you must spray after exhausting alternatives and thorough research, spray late evening when insects are least active.

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Enjoy the Experience

Nothing more pleasing than pride in a designed landscape complementing home and lifestyle. For many, that experience elevates by creating a fourth garden dimension—insects like butterflies.

Ranging in size and color spring through fall, healthy butterflies echo landscape design and bring us home in unimagined ways. Perhaps butterfly gardening draws out childhood's simple wonder, recalling peace and health missing in hectic lives.