What should I plant to make a Butterfly Garden?

What should I plant to make a Butterfly Garden?

Don Herbison-Evans ( donherbisonevans@yahoo.com )
&
Stella Crossley

(updated 29 November 2009)

There are two aspects to a butterfly garden:

1. attracting adult butterflies to feed, and
2. attracting adult butterflies to breed.

1. Attracting adults to feed

This requires mainly flowers with nectar. You can cheat by placing little coloured plastic saucers around the garden with dilute honey in them. Otherwise, good plants are:

Buddleia davidii

Pentas lanceolata

Lantana camara

Some species of butterfly also drink sap exuding from trees and the juices of rotting fruit. Try leaving cut fruit on a bird table in your garden.

2. Attracting adults to breed

This requires the presence of the food plants of the caterpillars in your garden. First you need to learn what species of butterfly most commonly breed in your area. These will be the species to accommodate in your garden. Female butterflies are very fussy. They will only lay their eggs on plants belonging to a few plant species or in some cases plants from one scientific genus or family. The caterpillars have digestive systems atuned to the chemicals in only a few plant species, and so the caterpillars can only thrive on these plants. So look up books and webpages about the biology of your local butterflies, and learn what foodplants their caterpillars use. These are the plants to grow in your garden.

Often older leaves of plants contain more toxins than young leaves, so it is a good idea to prune regularly any bushes or trees that you grow in order to encourage new growth.

Some specific plants for butterflies that have adapted to suburban gardens in Australia are:

Citrus Butterfly,

Lemon Trees
Citrus limon

Dainty Swallowtail

Orange Trees
Citrus sinensis

Chequered Swallowtail,

Kumquat

Blue Triangle,

Camphor Laurel
Cinnamomum camphora

Common Crow,

Oleander

Orange Palm Dart,

Palm Trees
Phoenix canariensis

Zebra Blue

Plumbago

Pea Blue,

Spanish Broom
Spartium junceum

Grass Blue,

White Clover
Trifolium repens

Monarch,

Milkweed

Common Jezabel,

Mistletoe

Cabbage White,

Nasturtiums
Tropaeolum majus

There are a few plant families that are foodplants of several Butterfly species, particularly Grasses, Reeds, and Mistletoes.

For other species, there is a problem. Plants and butterflies have co-evolved over the last 100 million years with plants producing poisons and butterflies producing antidotes. So there has been divergent evolution ending up with many families of plants each with different poisons, and many butterfly species each being able to metabolise the poisons of one plant family. So to attract many species of butterflies to breed you will need plants from many different families, see list at:

Larval foodplant families of Butterfly species in Australia