Set the Stage for Butterflies!

I could spend hours watching butterflies. Butterflies are truly nature’s beautiful garden dancers; attracting these dancing pixies requires a bit of butterfly knowledge and garden planning.

Understanding Butterflies

It doesn’t take much to lure butterflies to dance in your garden. Nectar rich flowers with areas to rest and drink will produce a wide variety of butterflies, fluttering and floating around your yard.

Mud!

Butterflies and kids share an affinity for mud puddles.  It’s a fact. Butterflies like mud. After a rainy day you will find butterflies gathered at the edge of mud puddles to take in moisture, rich in salts and minerals. This ritual is known as puddling. Shallow pools or saucers of mud placed in your gardens will provide the right stage for butterflies to appear and puddle.

Rest Stops!

Butterflies like sunshine. They are cold-blooded creatures so having a sunny location to rest, feed, and warm is essential for their well-being. Flat rocks, lawn furniture, and even your BBQ become warming stages for cool butterflies.

The Flowers!

“Butterflies landing on a flower could be compared to landing a Boing 474 on a very short runaway”! Bearing in mind butterflies have big wings and short legs, flower size and shape are an important consideration to being able to land. It stands to reason small butterflies can land on delicate blooms, while large butterflies need big blooms. Having a selection of bloom sizes in your garden will attract a wide variety of butterflies. Flat-top blooms are the best shape for butterflies as they make great landing pads, while short tube-shape blooms are perfect for feeding. If we bundled bloom characteristics with a bright colour palette like orange, red, yellow, pinks and purples, we’ve set the perfect centre stage for butterflies.

Set The Perfect Stage!

To make it easier to choose the right plants, we’ve put together a few pictures of plants to grow in your yard.