How to Make a Butterfly Garden Habitat

Butterflies are attracted to pink blossoms.

A butterfly garden lets you enjoy watching these colorful insects, but it also gives the butterflies a habitat where they can thrive. Creating a butterfly garden isn't complicated -- it's simply a part of your landscape that offers butterflies the food, water and shelter they need throughout their life cycle.

Things You'll Need

• Flat stones
• Nectar plants
• Host plants
• Shallow dish or pie pan
• Coarse sand

Instructions

1. Develop your butterfly garden in a part of your yard that gets at least six hours of sun each day. Butterflies are cold-blooded, so they depend on the sun's warmth to keep them active. Place flat rocks around the garden to absorb heat and give the butterflies a place to rest and warm themselves -- called basking.

2. Position the butterfly garden where it will be sheltered from breezes. Plant shrubs to provide a windbreak if necessary.

3. Plant groups of colorful, nectar-producing plants for adult butterflies. Butterflies are attracted to plants with pink, purple, orange, red and yellow blooms, with short flower tubes or flat tops or clusters. Examples of nectar plants include butterfly bush, lilac, purple coneflower, lavender, snapdragon, sweet William, goldenrod and milkweed. Choose plants with a succession of bloom times so the butterflies have something to eat all summer and into fall.

4. Provide "host" plants -- food sources for the caterpillars when they hatch out. Some recommended host plants include dill, parsley, anise, verbena, marigold, violets and hollyhock.

5. Add a mud puddle or shallow, moist area of sand to your garden. Butterflies prefer drinking from mud or sand pools, where they get moisture as well as needed minerals. Dig down and place a shallow dish or pie pan into the soil, then fill it with coarse sand or dirt and keep it moist.

Tips & Warnings

• These are just the basic requirements for starting your butterfly habitat. As you learn more about the species of butterflies found in your region, you can tweak your garden to provide the plants they prefer.

• Don't use pesticides in your garden -- they can kill the butterflies and caterpillars.

• Butterfly bush is considered invasive in some parts of the U.S.

References

• National Wildlife Federation: Attracting Butterflies
• University of Minnesota Extension: Creating a Butterfly Garden
• Ohio State University Extension: Butterfly Gardens