Photographs: Earthly Creations
Butterfly garden is pleasing to the eyes and takes you one step closer to nature. Nectar – filled flowers attract butterfly to fly down to your garden and suck in the nectar and beautify your garden. Harpreet Ahluwalia, founder and principal designer of Earthly Creations offers simple tips on how to attract more butterflies from everywhere to your vicinity.
- Firstly choose a garden bed that gets full sunlight and is protected from winds. Ensure this is near your vicinity to enjoy the view from windows, decks, or places where you can observe the butterflies.
- It is important to provide some feeding for larvae and butterflies in spring and summer season.
- Make sure to have some spring-flowering plants like lilac, viburnum, blueberry etc. as they provide cover as well as nectar early in the season. Ripe fruits of these and others such as raspberry also attract some butterflies later in the season.
- Protect your plants, shrubs and trees from harsh winds by mantling wind breakers around the garden.
- You can also include some summer-flowering shrubs for nectar later in the season.
- Use annual flowers to provide nectar during the summer season, perennial flowers to provide nectar during certain periods when they are in complete bloom. Also, plant shrubs according to the species one is attracted to keeping in mind its availability.
- When planting, place the taller plants at the back and the shorter plants in front so that you can see them easily while they extract nectar.
- Butterflies are near-sighted and attracted to masses of plants and flowers when bloomed all together in close knitted space.
- Eliminate the use of insecticides from your butterfly garden. Learn to bear some damage to the plants. Some of this might be caused by caterpillars (the butterfly larvae that turn into butterflies).
- Add some vegetables and herbs to encourage butterflies to lay eggs in the garden. Eggs hatch into caterpillars and caterpillars need to eat for growth. Caterpillar forage plants include parsley and ornamental cabbage, which are excellent edging plants for the flower garden.
- Leave some weeds or wildflowers as many serve as food sources for both caterpillars and butterflies.
- Use containers, window jars, hanging pots, baskets and other containers because these attract butterflies to your patios, porches, and other visible parts of your landscape.