Beautifully patterned wings, maze flight patterns,and its distinct colors are some of the things to love about butterflies. But Butterflies do more than just look pretty, and they have a stronghold on our environment and its ability to reproduce. The majority of plants require cross-pollination to reproduce, and that’s where bees and our darling butterflies come in to help. To make things easy here we have some butterfly garden ideas.
All these benefits but butterflies are going extinct because of the continued destruction of their habitats for other activities. Planting butterfly-friendly gardens will help in repopulating the butterfly species. It doesn’t matter if you have a small yard or live in an apartment with no garden space at all, you can still enjoy the beautiful scenery butterflies bring. Before you think of setting up a butterfly garden, you first need to research and know the species of butterfly common to your area as that is the butterfly you want to attract first before moving on to others.
Your dream of sitting in your reclining patio seat, while watching butterflies fly around your garden area can be actualized by adopting any of these butterfly garden ideas I’ll show you in a bit.
1. Fill Up Your Hedges
Have you formed a barrier with regular flowers? Spice up the fence with colorful butterfly-attracting plants. It is normal to find empty spaces in hedges formed with plants.
What better way to fill up those spaces and brighten up your yard than by incorporating some butterfly-attracting plants in those spaces.
This is a unique idea as it both brings butterflies and adds extra colors to your garden.
2. The Fruit Garden
You do not have to disrupt your garden plan to make it a butterfly garden. With this simple idea, you can attract adorable butterflies to your garden. Butterflies love tasty fruits and can be invited to your yard by leaving out freshly cut fruits like oranges, mangoes, and berries.
Just leaving out these fruits can be boring and uninteresting, that is why this idea uses an earthen vessel held by a tripod stand and filled with pebbles and small rocks. The fruits are then left on top of this platform so they can be easily accessible to the butterflies.
Using this idea will attract squirrels to your garden, so you have to adopt squirrel elimination techniques to keep them out. Remember to change the fruits frequently before they rot and start smelling.
3. Add a Sugar Water Solution
This is similar to the preserving idea but a lot easier to make and maintain. Butterflies like to sip sugar water and by keeping sugar water in your garden, you can attract them without stress.
To make this idea in your garden, you need a small bowl, sugar, and water in the proportion of ¼ cup of sugar for 1 cup of hot water.
Pour this combination inside your container, drop sponge or two into the water so the water can slowly sip into it.
Place this bowl in your garden and watch butterflies fly in. You can put smooth river pebbles in the water for added aesthetics.
4. Add Butterfly Houses
Butterflies require a place to hibernate during the winter, and creating a home for them in your garden will not only help preserve their dwindling population but will also make your garden their first point of call in the summer.
However, adding a butterfly house to your yard requires a lot of preparation. You need to know the type of butterflies that seek out houses during the winter period.
Butterflies love bright colors, so painting their houses with colors like blue, yellow, and red will be a wise choice.
5. Mix Aruncus, Salvia and Nepeta Racemosa
A blend of the Aruncus, salvia, and Nepeta racemosa flowers in your garden creates a unique color and structure combination you’ll surely love.
The white from the Aruncus combines effortlessly with the different shades of purple of the salvia and Nepeta flowers.
These are perennial plants that attract a lot of butterflies when blooming. They require an average soil moisture content to blossom. You can even make your potting soil and grow these flowers in containers.
6. The Butterfly Magnet Garden
This is the perfect front yard garden idea for butterfly lovers. It is small enough to sit pretty in your walkway flower bed but large enough to contain a lot of butterfly attracting combinations.
This magnet butterfly idea offers blooming flowers as nectar to butterflies, rocks for them to perch on, leafy butterfly larvae food and a water source. This idea is a fairly complex one and would require a lot of effort, but the reward is worth the stress.
7. Plant Perennial Sunflowers
Sunflowers are an absolute delight to butterflies, and they’ll flock your garden if you dedicate an area to sunflowers. Not only are they brightly colored, but they also create a calming scenery in your garden.
Annual sunflowers are common, but planting a perennial species means you’ll get to enjoy the bloom for longer and reduces the stress of planting every season.
8. Incorporate the Solid-ago Flower
If you’re looking for an easy to grow butterfly garden idea, then this is the one for you. The Solidago plant is a drought-resistant plant that can grow in the toughest of conditions while still attracting a good number of butterflies to your garden area.
What’s even more fascinating is that the Solid-ago plant is also medicinal and can be used to treat ailments like sore throat and eczema. This flower blooms by spreading its leaves, thus creating shade under it where you can grow other smaller shade-loving plants.
9. The Lantana Idea
If you live in an area prone to deer attacks, then you should consider this deer-resistant butterfly-attracting flower. The lantana plant can withstand salt, drought, and harsh conditions once it is established.
So it is essential to plant this flower well ahead of the winter periods. Butterflies come to feed on the nectar of this flower, and its combination of green leafy structure and yellow-red flowers will brighten up your garden.
10. Fill Up Your Garden With Butterfly Bush
This is the leading butterfly-attracting plant you can grow and attract a lot of butterfly species. Filling up your garden with this flower will lead to butterflies making your yard their home. One of the butterfly bush’s strongest attributes is its ability to support the feeding of a lot of butterflies at the same time. The long bloom time of this flower makes it an attractive choice for butterfly lovers.
The dwindling butterfly numbers and species is a cause for concern as our environment heavily depends on pollination enhancing agents like them. To join in the fight to preserve this species, you can add these butterfly ideas to your garden. Enjoying your beautiful garden idea while saving the world is a win-win situation for all.
