Grow A Butterfly Garden

One way to add more enjoyment to your garden is to put in plants that attract butterflies, or design a whole garden for them. This is a bit different from just planting plants as you will have to consider the needs of the butterflies as well as those of the plants. One thing you’ll want to do first, however, is to research what kinds of butterflies are native to your area and decide which of those you want to attract.

Deciding upon how to design your butterfly garden is just a matter of personal preference on your part. In reality, butterflies simply do not care about the style of your garden, only the plants that attract them. Typical points to consider for choosing your butterfly gardening plan are the size of your garden and the types of flowers and plants you want to grow. Pick a style of garden that appeals to you and ensure it contains the plants and flowers that appeal to the butterflies you wish to attract.

Here’s some tips on Successful Butterfly Gardening:

- Draw a layout of your proposed butterfly garden to get an idea of how the finished product might look. Keep in mind that warm colors like red and orange are flashy and showy. These colors have a greater impact against a strong green background. Cool colors such as blue and purple are soothing and toned down and would work better with a white contrast to create the look of freshness and brightness.

- Coordinate our flower colors carefully. Although butterflies do not care about your choice of color, it's better to plan ahead. You want to avoid having your butterfly garden looking like a hodgepodge of unrelated colors and textures that could create confusion to you and maybe even the butterflies.

- Be sure that your butterfly garden plan includes a location that provides at least six hours of sunlight per day. Butterflies are cold-blooded creatures and therefore, do better where they are warm and sheltered.

- Wind can be a butterfly's worst enemy so be sure to have plenty of wind protection in your butterfly garden design. You can plant tall shrubs and other plants in order to create a wind break. Know the direction of your area's prevailing winds. The first choice, however, is a nice 'tucked away' location that avoids heavy winds.

- Keeping the above points in mind, choose a suitable location to have your butterfly garden. The best of all worlds would be a butterfly garden placed on the south side of your home with windbreaks on both the west and east sides. You may also wish to be sure that you are able to view you butterfly garden from inside your home as well as provide seating outside from which to observe the antics of the butterflies.

Lastly, here is a brief list of plants and flowers that you can look into when designing your butterfly gardening plan. They are the honeysuckle, sunflower, milkweed, summer lilac, Valerian, daisies, Purple Coneflower, Yellow Sage, day lilies and lavender.