Attract butterflies with plants, flowers, and other tips

Attract butterflies to your garden!

Threatened because their natural habitat is dwindling, and because of pesticides, butterflies can find refuge in our very own gardens, provided a special space is available to them and that their favorite plants are grown.

A little wilderness in the garden

• Rule Number One: refrain from using chemical products, and keep a few areas where the grass will grow wild, or a flowered prairie field. Special flower seed mixes designed to attract butterflies are available for sale in horticulture stores.

Butterflies are carried away when there’s too much wind and they need sun. Apart from flower beds, they will rejoice in finding mixed hedges especially in urban spaces where there aren’t any. Include thorny hedges (hawthorn, blackthorn), shrub beds (butterfly bush) and fruit trees.

They will also find a shallow water dispenser refreshing. Toss in an occasional slice of orange to sweeten the water!

Plants that attract day butterflies

• Sweet William, catnip (“catgrass”), eupatorium, lavender, cosmos, masterwort, gaillardia, pincushion flower, mallow, cornflower, Argentinian vervain, thistle, campion, rudbeckia, larkspur, purple coneflower, foxglove, daisy, ragwort, ornamental onion, sage, autumn aster, horseheal, marigold, common hedgenettle, knapweed, cinquefoil…
• Some even grow well as flowers on stone walls: stonecrop, wallflower, ivy, buddleia, helichrysum, valerian, plumbago… Great if you lack space!

Plants that attract night moths

Night moths are twenty times more numerous than day butterflies! Some of them can be spotted flying during the daytime, such as the hummingbird hawk-moth which gardeners recognize after seeing it hover in stationary flight to unfurl its long feeding proboscis. Specifically, the antenna are what helps distinguish moths from their daytime cousins.

• Four o’clock flower, jasmine, dame’s rocket, suncup, petunia and ornamental tobacco.

Important: grow the right host plants!

Remember to mark out some space for plants that feed the caterpillars:

• Nettle for the red admiral, small tortoiseshell, peacock butterfly, anglewing, map
• Grasses for the marbled white, meadow brown, speckled wood
• Clover is for the common blue butterfly
• Marigold and fleawort is for fritillary
• Thistle to feed cosmopolitain
• Nasturtium and all sorts of ornamental cabbage for large white…

Learn to identify them

The Noé Conservation Charity launched a joint project with the National Museum of Natural History (France) called the “Garden butterfly observatory” that citizens can join. To contribute, simply learn to identify a few of the 28 most common species.

By C. Levesque

Read also:

• Impact of using pesticides on butterflies and bumblebees
• Caterpillar control, the natural way