What Perennials Attract Butterflies

Attracting hummingbirds and butterflies to your garden is a satisfying and rewarding experience. The sight of these beautiful creatures fluttering about makes the garden come alive. Here are some tips to help you attract these winged beauties from spring ‘til fall.

1. Provide both open, sunny areas and shrubs or trees for shade, nesting and other food sources.
2. Provide a mix of Native and cultivated plants with various bloom times and colors from the lists provided. By providing a wide variety of plants, your garden can attract a wide diversity of both hummingbirds and butterflies.
3. While hummingbirds are attracted to many of the same nectar filled flowers as butterflies, they are more strongly attracted to flowers which are also tubular, lacking in fragrance, structurally designed to be accessible to hummingbirds (and, therefore, inaccessible to other nectar feeders) and have the color red.
   As an example, Aquilegia (Columbine) is attractive to both creatures; however, the red varieties will tend to be more attractive to hummingbirds.
4. Consider providing hummingbird feeders filled with sugar-water. Even flowers with the longest blooming period and the most abundant nectar production may not be able to fill the energy needs of these busy little creatures. However, once you start attracting these gems to your yard, make sure you have someone to look after the flowers and feeders while you are gone. Hummingbirds come to rely upon a dependable source of food.
5. In addition to nectar, hummingbirds rely on spiders and other small insects as a food source. Do not use insecticides of any kind in your hummingbird or butterfly garden. Not only do these chemicals kill the food sources and poison the nectar that these creatures rely upon, but can also sicken or even kill the hummingbirds or butterflies that ingest them.
6. Remember, caterpillars are baby butterflies. You can’t have a butterfly garden without them. Butterflies should have host plants (marked with an * on the following list) on which to lay their eggs, and for the caterpillars to eat. Expect these plants to look very bare as the babies munch.
7. Butterflies also appreciate shallow water or puddles to drink from and overripe fruit for a treat.