Buena Creek Gardens

San Diego's finest selection of new and uncommon flowering plants

Birds and Butterflies in the Garden - part two of a two-part series
by Steve Brigham

Autumn is one of the very best times for butterfly watching in the garden, particularly if you grow lots of the plants they love the most. It’s the end of September as I write this, and every Butterfly Bush (Buddleja) in the garden has butterflies all over it right now. It’s no secret that these shrubs (which are evergreen here) are most butterflies’ favorite food. Other notable “butterfly cheeseburgers” include pentas, lantana, verbena, milkweed (Asclepias), fennel, heliotrope, and various types of daisies, just to name a few.

There are lots of different kinds of butterflies in the garden now, but two you can’t help but be really amazed at are the biggest ones – the Anise Swallowtail and the Monarch. These “big boys” are not only very colorful (Swallowtails are the yellow-and-black ones and Monarchs are the orange-and-black ones), but they are also strong fliers with big wings that allow them to glide rather that flutter as they fly, which is a wonderfully graceful thing to watch.

You can actually watch Anise Swallowtails and Monarchs reproduce in your garden if you plant their larval food plants. Anise Swallowtails like Fennel in particular, which is a 4-5’ tall perennial (Bronze Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare ‘Purpurascens’, is considered the most ornamental form). For Monarchs, plant Milkweed (the 3’ by 3’ Asclepias curassavica cultivars are the most ornamental ones here because they’re evergreen and bloom all year with either red and yellow, red and orange, or golden flowers). Imagine seeing brand new Monarch butterflies hatching out in your own garden – it can happen if you’ve got Milkweeds!

Serving Suggestions

If you really want to attract the most butterflies possible to your garden, there are two simple but very important things to keep in mind. First is how best to serve the food, and second is to provide plenty of drinks. It turns out that butterflies (like many humans) are very impressed by buffets with really big portions (as well as a nice variety of different foods tastefully presented, of course). This probably has something to do with the way their eyes see, and perhaps also the size of their appetites. Anyway, if you plant big groupings of the same plant, it really draws them in. This multiple-planting technique also looks good to us, for big swaths of the same color brings the scale of your garden up to human size. For example, in my garden, I planted not one but 5 plants of the tall Verbena bonariensis as a background for 5 plants of the tall orange Alstroemeria ‘The Third Harmonic’. This grouping is much more dramatic than one plant of each. The butterflies (verbena) and the hummingbirds (alstroemeria) are impressed, too, with plenty of flowers nearly every day of the year from these plants alone. Similar groupings nearby of 5 plants of Heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens ‘Santa Barbara’) and 5 plants of Red Star Cluster (Pentas lanceolata ‘Crimson Star’) are equally floriferous and impressive to all. (You just never know when company might be coming, so it pays to have plants that are in bloom every day of the year!)

Got Mud?

So that’s the food part, but what about the drinks? The best party hosts are always careful to provide exactly the types of drinks that their guests prefer, of course, and we all want to be good hosts. If your guests are butterflies, you just have to know what they like, and what they like is mud! Because of the way their mouthparts work, it is difficult for butterflies to drink out of pools of water, but mud or wet sand is just fine. One way to provide this in the garden is with a large, shallow saucer of screened decomposed granite that you keep wet but not flooded. Another good serving suggestion is to create a small mud puddle in a low-lying area that you keep wet (this can also be filled with decomposed granite or coarse sand if you don’t like the looks of mud). Butterflies actually get mineral nutrition from mud and wet decomposed granite or sand, so think of it as “butterfly tea”. (Remember to freshen-up your mud puddle from time to time, so that you’re not serving yucky “tea”.)

Well, that’s about it for now. If you’ve got good food, good drinks, and some “happy meals” for their kids, you’re going to make lots of new butterfly friends! Pretty soon, you’ll be able to identify all the different kinds of butterflies, and get used to which seasons each one is likely to be visiting. And even if it’s a rainy day and there aren’t any butterflies around, you’ll see that all those butterfly plants you’ve planted have made your garden look fantastic!