Plant These Plants For Attracting Butterflies To Your Garden
Butterflies add a flight of fancy to any garden. To see them flutter about can only make one smile. Attracting butterflies to your garden is easy. It is important to plant the one thing they cannot resist, flowers. Flowers and butterflies go hand in hand. As a poet once pointed out, butterflies are flying flowers, and flowers are tethered butterflies. Here are 8 of the best plants for attracting butterflies to your garden.
Butterfly Bush – Buddleia sp.
Butterfly bush is a shrub that’s typically covered in butterflies all summer long. An easy-care shrub, it features fragrant flowers in shades of blue, purple, and white.
Bee Balm – Monarda didyma
An old fashioned perennial, Bee Balm is a bushy magnet for butterflies. It is deer resistant and easy to grow.
Butterfly Weed – Asclepias tuberosa
Grow a butterfly weed or two and you’re sure to have Monarchs. The adults drink nectar from the plant’s summertime orange flowers, and the caterpillars eat the plant’s leaves.
Purple Coneflower – Echinacea sp.
There are lots of reasons to grow purple coneflower if you have a sunny spot. A wide range of butterflies love sipping its nectar; the plant is very heat and drought tolerant, it’s a perfect cut flower, and it blooms almost all summer long.
Joe Pye Weed – Eupatorium sp.
Create towers of flowers with big Joe Pye weed, which can grow more than 6 feet tall. If you don’t have that much room, don’t worry – types such as ‘Little Joe’ stay smaller.
Black Eyed Susan – Rudbeckia hirta
A Maryland favorite! Black Eyed Susan not only attracts tons of butterflies, it adds a splash of brilliant color to your gardens.
Chaste Tree – Vitex agnus – castus
A vase shaped small tree or large shrub, features fragrant aromatic flowers with grayish-green leaves.
