Attracting Butterflies

Attracting Butterflies to Your Garden

By Barbara Fix, Researcher & Writer for Lipscomb Enterprises Inc.

Bees aren’t the only insects that pollinate gardens. Butterflies are great contributors to pollination as well. But first you must attract them to your garden. Butterflies are drawn to vibrant colors such as purple, red, orange, pink, and yellow. In the vegetable garden, planting anise-hyssop, which is a member of the mint family, will attract butterflies to your garden with its tall spikes of purple flowers. Another popular plant that attracts butterflies are Monarda, also known as bee balm. It has tall mop-headed bloom that will dazzle butterflies and jazz up the garden with its hot pink and red blooms.

The butterfly has a unique adaptation. They can taste through their feet. This likely evolved for the butterfly to detect nectar, and when they find this sought after food source, their proboscis naturally uncoils to feed.

Butterflies are not finicky except when it comes to insecticides, as they are lethal to the butterfly. Even “benign” insecticide will kill the developing caterpillar.  Other than that, they require only a few basic things to be happy in their habituate: a place to lay their eggs, food plants to feed their larva, a place to form a chrysalis and nectar for the adult butterfly. If you want to provide the “Hilton” of accommodations, place flat stones in a sunny location for butterflies to visit to soak up some sun and warm their wings. You could go a step up and provide a “spa”. Butterflies enjoy puddling, which is butterfly vernacular for gathering in a group on wet sand or mud to drink and extract minerals from the water. You can replicate natures “puddling” by placing a shallow pan filled with moist sand on the soil of your habitat.

Once you have provided a livable habituate, be sure to enjoy the butterflies’ graceful beauty while you can, for most butterflies live for only 10 to 20 days. The exception is the monarch, which lives for six months.