Beautiful and Easy Butterfly Gardens

VanDeen's first butterfly plant suggestion is liatris or gay feather. It's a fluffy purple flower with lots of pollen. Staying in the same color family VanDeen also explains how popular lavender is with her butterfly visitors. But don't think that you'll have a totally blue garden, because butterflies also love rudbeckia plants (black-eyed Susan). The wide yellow petals are the perfect landing zone. There's lots of pollen just waiting in the center. Use these rules as you select lots perennial plants and annual flowers for your yard and garden, and you'll always have lots of butterflies to revel in. Vibrant crocosmia will delight your eyes and your butterfly visitors. Even fragrance can be used to attract butterflies. VanDeen reports great success with eucalyptus plants.

To maximize your butterfly population then, you want lots of different host plants. If you're a gourmet with an outdoor herb garden, you might just have lots of Blacktail Swallow butterflies because they lay their eggs on herb plants such as dill, parsley and fennel.

As you can see many different garden plants and perennials appeals to butterflies. But usually you read in garden books to include Buddleia plants in your garden. That's because this pollen is loved by many different species of butterflies. It also comes in many different colors. Because butterflies can see some color, it's a good idea to include a variety of colors in your butterfly garden.

Because butterflies are cold-blooded, they enjoy a warm and sunny spot. But because some of my hostas love the shade, I've created a long butterfly garden that starts off in the sun and then ends up in a partial-shade, hosta-friendly environnment.

If you wake up on a cool morning and you see a butterfly spread out flat on your deck, don't worry you didn't kill him or her. This is a butterfly that's recharging - getting warm again. It's important to give butterflies a chance to do this. So find a few big rocks, even a boulder or two, and use them as landscape features in your butterfly garden.

A water feature is also important as well. Butterflies need water just like every other living creature. So if you live in a dry or drought-prone region, please be sure to leave a shallow source of water for these delicate visitors.

You only have to watch a butterfly for a few minutes to understand what a delicate creature it is. Many expert gardeners and biologists believe that the butterfly population is declining because of our use of pesticides and fertilizers. I believe that this is a warning that these gardening techniques aren't good for us as well. It might just take longer to knock us off. So I love to see butterflies in my garden and landscaping, because I feel if it supports them, then it's healthy for me as well.