The warm, sunny days of spring bring butterflies back to the garden. Luring these lofty beauties to stay in your landscape is well worth the effort. Butterflies add an unmatched ethereal sense of movement to the garden.

Plant a butterfly garden and you can enjoy a confetti display of multi-colored, winged visitors floating about your yard throughout the spring and summer. Even better, you’ll be doing good things for the planet. These graceful beauties might seem like pretty “airheads,” but they’re actually environmentalists.

Butterflies are one of the world’s top pollinators. They pollinate many species of flowering plants, and without them many crops wouldn’t get fertilized. These winged beauties aren’t as productive as bees, but they are often the main insect flying around flowers, and that means they do a lot of pollinating.

In their adult and larval stages, butterflies also make a good food source for other animals—especially birds. As a matter of fact, mother birds must feed their nestlings a steady supply of hundreds of caterpillars in their first weeks of life.

Lure butterflies to your garden with these tips:

Create a place for butterflies to lay eggs that shields the resulting chrysalis from predators and provides food for the adults and larvae. Good choices for this include what are known as host plants. For instance, shrubs like spiraea and trees like ash. Other good host plants include aster, birch, broccoli, cassia, dill, elm, lupine, mallow, milkweed, mustard, parsley, passion vine and Southern Magnolia.

Provide a basking area. Sunning is the key to butterfly flight. The insects must keep their body temperatures above 70 degrees or they can’t fly. Sunny spots with flat stones or stone walls make good places for butterflies to get warmed up for flying.

Offer shallow water. Butterflies require puddles of mud or sand in which to draw out water, salt and nutrients. This behavior is known as puddling. Place the puddles in sunny areas.

Serve up nectar plants. The more items you have on the menu for butterflies to sample, the better your chances for attracting them to your yard. Some good nectar plants include sunflower, columbine, butterfly bush, Mexican plum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, lantana, yarrow, milkweed, purple coneflower, daylily, honeysuckle, petunia, salvia, marigold and zinnia.

 

Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com.