Drawing Butterflies To Your Garden
Today's hectic lifestyles make many yearn for the peace and quiet that can be found in a garden. To enhance the experience, why not try and attract butterflies to your corner of the world? Because of the decline in the use of pesticides in recent years there has been a resurgence in the caterpillar population - and caterpillars gaining adulthood, they can eventually grace us with the beauty of a butterfly once they have made their transformation.
If you'd like to lure the silent beauties to your corner of the world - be it a backyard, patio or balcony, all you need to do is plant some blossoms to attract them. There are more than 700 species of butterfly in North America and with numbers that large, there are enough to go around if you're willing to plant the seeds necessary to grow the blossoms to attract them.
Whether you live in the city or the country, if you provide butterflies with the habitat they crave, you can help them survive and flourish in your own backyard. To have a successful butterfly garden, you need to first provide food for the caterpillar as well as plants that cater to the butterfly. Butterflies feed on nectar, but caterpillars need plants on which to feed.
Many herbs including dill, fennel and parsley as well as most plants in the mint family are attractive to the growing caterpillar. A caterpillar will eat more than 1,000 times its own size before it's full grown.
Clumps of flowers in various colors and heights will attract butterflies. Some plants to harvest in your plot of earth include Sweet Williams, Echinacea - a tall cone-shaped flower - and bee balms. Wild and cultivated plants, of varying heights and blooming times are necessary to attract the butterfly. They also need windbreaks which can be made of tall, flowering shrubs, evergreens or fencing. The taller plants provide butterflies with shade on a hot day and a canopy of leaves in the event of a summer rain.
While not impossible, investing in a butterfly house will not offer many returns. Butterflies seek shelter at night or in bad weather under leaves or other natural locations, not man-made shelters. Butterflies are not demanding insects but they do need plants in sunny places because they need to be warm in order to take flight. They fly best when the temperatures range between 75 and 90 degrees so providing your butterfly visitors with a large flat rock offers them a place in which to bask in the summer rays.
Some of the best plants for attracting butterflies include: sweet alyssum, heliotrope, yellow marigolds, the bushy clover-like flowers of the globe amaranth, tall, flowering cosmos, shasta daisies, cornflowers, butterfly bushes and red asters.
Alan Greene is a professional writer and editor with many interests. Among them are gardening, online degrees for adults, self-improvement, financial aid for online university study, and world affairs.