Garden blooming for butterflies

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Lev Bely, 17.04.2012 19:14

Butterflies might overlook quite the stuff but an exuberant, bloomy garden. Plant your garden with native plants that will surely attract various butterflies. Choose the very native ones so as butterflies could feed on nectar and caterpillars do on foliage.

Adult butterflies might wrongly lay eggs on a non-native plant what may result in the offspring death. Planning a garden layout, better to prefer sunny areas located far from strong winds.

Things also to consider are the plant type and color. Butterflies are attracted to red, yellow, orange, pink and purple blooms with flat tops, clusters and short tubes. Say, monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) enjoy with beautiful, brightly colored asclepias (Asclepias) of milkweed family.

Make your garden blooming as long as possible since imagos need nectar through all of their life. Would be ideal to use plants that bloom one after another like summer plumbago (Plumbago) changes spring ceanothus (Ceanothus).

Caterpillars would be particularly delighted with trees, dogwoods and flowering crabapple are the best ones.

You can show an outstanding hospitality arranging a special “mud bath” like natural puddles where butterflies teamwise happen to look for water and minerals. Fill a shallow pan with a moist coarse sand, then set it up in the soil somewhere in the garden so as it would be levelled to the ground. Mind that the sand would be humid ever and butterflies will sooner appear.

That's it, your garden is blooming for guests. Take good care for it would stay vivid and joyous!

Tracy Press, http://www.tracypress.com

GrowingWisdom.com on how to attract bees, butterflies and birds to a garden