How To Attract Butterflies To The Garden?

The sun, heat, warm colors, as well as flowers and puddles, are elements that will attract butterflies to your home’s garden. Want to know more? Come with us!

Although they are most active in spring and summer, we can attract butterflies to our garden throughout the year, if we offer them what they like best. That is, flowers!

In the following article, we give you some tips for receiving visits from these colorful friends at home.

Tips for attracting butterflies

Some legends say that butterflies are the souls of those people who are no longer there, but who come to take care of us and protect us.

These colorful insects that we love so much can appear in our garden if we provide them with everything they need. Pay attention to these tips for attracting butterflies:

1. Choose yellow and orange plants

Butterflies are attracted to these colors (also red), which is why we recommend you to plant scallops, sunflowers, geraniums, daisies and chrysanthemums. These are your favourites!

2. Create a ‘sunny’ space

Another thing butterflies like is sun and heat.  So find a place in your garden where they have plenty of daylight to interact with plants and other natural elements such as stones and wood. They love to sunbathe at midday.

3. Protect from the wind

If you want to attract monarch butterflies, keep in mind that they will not land in windy or shady areas.

So try to build a kind of “natural curtain” out of bushes or any other material. In this way, the flowers that attract attention will be in excellent condition for these colorful insects to arrive.

4. Scale plantations

In order to have butterflies year round, or at least a large part of the summer season, there must be continuously flowering plants in your garden.

You can achieve this by staggering the planting. What does that mean? That you should n’t plant all the seeds, bulbs or seedlings at the same time.

5. Build an airstrip

While it’s true that butterflies use flowers and plants to rest, they also like other surfaces for that.

For example, you can place tree trunks in the sunny area, protected from the wind or predators such as cats.

6. No chemical fertilizers

To attract butterflies, one of the main “requirements” is not to use any kind of fertilizer or chemical pesticide. These insects, like birds and bees, are very sensitive to certain products.

For that reason, if they notice that you’ve watered the garden with some toxic liquid, they won’t want to approach you for anything in the world.

You can fight aphid pests with homemade products. They offer less risk and do not harm the environment.

7. Allow the ‘puddles’

Taking special care that the water does not become stagnant, as this can cause disease-spreading mosquitoes, you should offer certain areas that are wetter. For what? So that the butterflies can drink water without problems.

They love puddles, mud and wet sand as they allow them to drink without the danger of drowning or falling to a certain depth from which it is difficult to escape.

8. Cultivate flower areas

In addition to choosing flowers with shades of orange to attract butterflies, you can create different gardens or areas that will catch their attention.

We recommend that you choose native plants as they will recognize them and will be able to feed or lay their eggs there.

A good butterfly garden shouldn’t have species they don’t like, like aristolochy, silver bud, royal mallow, passion fruit, cosmos, and vervain.

Also, there are some trees that they like very much, such as willow, poplar, ash and birch.