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Butterflies
Attracting Butterflies
Like most animals, the butterfly's main purpose in life is to reproduce. If there is adequate food for their caterpillars around, you should have no trouble attracting the parent butterflies to your garden.
Most adult butterflies eat nectar, which is very easy to provide by having flowers blooming in your garden. Some flowers seem to be more desirable to the butterflies than others. Here's a few of plants that are highly attractive to many kinds of butterflies:
- Butterfly Bush*
- Hardy Fall Asters
- Bee Balm
- Sedum
- Verbena
- Milkweed, Butterfly Weed
- Joe Pye
- Zinnias
- Marigolds
- Cosmos
- Black-Eyed Susan
- Coreopsis
- Coneflower
- Goldenrod
Some caterpillars will eat lots of different foods, such as the cabbage white butterfly's caterpillars, and that's why we see so many of them around. However, some butterfly species are very picky when it comes to food for their caterpillars. For instance, the caterpillars of monarch butterflies only eat milkweeds. If there are no milkweeds around for the female to lay her eggs on, she'll live somewhere else, and so will the males. Some butterflies are becoming quite rare because the caterpillar foods, (aka host plants,) are not as common as they were before urban sprawl and the introduction of exotic plants to our area.
If you want to attract a variety of butterflies to your yard, try to include as many of the host plants as you can. If you can plant lots of one of these plants, such as a big patch of bleeding heart, the better luck you'll have attracting a particular butterfly.
Here is a list of some host plants to try and the caterpillars that will eat them:
| HOST PLANT | BUTTERFLY |
|---|---|
| Bleeding Hearts | Clodius Parnassian |
| Spring Gold | Anise Swallowtail |
| Passion Flower | Gulf Fritillary |
| Pearly Everlasting | American Lady and Painted Lady |
| Western Dog Violet | Threatened Oregon Silverspot |
| Liatris | Silvery Checkerspot |
| Wheat grass | Woodland Skipper, other skippers |
| Choke cherry | Western Tiger Swallowtail, Spring Azure, and others |
| Milkweeds and Butterfly Weed | Monarch |
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Be sure to visit Pollinator Partnership and check out their Pollinator Friendly Planting Guides. These are full of information about how you can protect and help out pollinators where you live. Also explore their listing of resources, especially the section for home gardens. They've put together an amazing amount of information!
Also visit Gardens With Wings for more information about creating a garden habitat for butterflies.
For information about what butterflies are in your area and what host plants they use, visit the NABA (North American Butterfly Association) Garden Guides.
Also visit the Xerces Society.
For more information about butterflies and to find out which butterflies are in your neck of the woods, visit Butterflies and Moths of North America.
For a list of the native host plants for butterflies in the Oregon Willamette Valley, please visit NABA Eugene Springfield Chapter.
*Butterfly Bush has become an invasive weed in Washington state and other parts of the Pacific NW, which is why we do not carry them. In areas where they are not invasive, please buy them locally, butterflies and hummingbirds love them.
