Flights OF Fancy

Encourage butterflies into your garden and bring it alive, season after season

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They flit, flutter and flatter your garden with their fleeting visits. As butterflies dart from flower to flower, they’re fulfilling their function as the prettiest of pollinators, diving into your blooms to suck out the sweet nectar, then carrying each flower’s pollen onwards, ensuring fruit, seeds and a new flush of flowers. Here’s how you can boost your butterfly population.

1 GARDEN ROYALTY

There’s a reason why Buddleia sp is called the butterfly bush – butterflies flock to it. In late winter or spring it’s smothered in an abundance of tiny, nectar-rich lilac flowers – munch time for monarch butterflies.

BUTTERFLIES’ UPSIDE AND DOWNSIDE WING PATTERNS CAN BE DIFFERENT

LIFE CYCLE

On average a butterfly lives for about a month. Some species, such as monarchs, live for many months, while the smallest may only live a week. There’s a reason for their beauty and it’s to attract a partner, mate and lay eggs. If you want butterflies to hang around, give them leaves they can lay eggs on, so when caterpillars emerge, there is food. The caterpillars’ job is to eat, eat and eat before they cocoon themselves in chrysalides to emerge as butterflies.

2 WORK OF ART

You’ll find the painted lady – loved in cool and temperate regions for its intricate mosaic wings – feeding from everlasting daisies. Its caterpillars feast on cut-leaf daisy leaves.