Butterfly gardening

Butterfly gardening is a way to create, improve, and maintain habitat for lepidopterans including butterflies, skippers, and moths. Butterflies have four distinct life stages—egg, larva, chrysalis, and adult. In order to support and sustain butterfly populations, an ideal butterfly garden contains habitat for each life stage.

Butterfly larvae, with some exceptions such as the carnivorous harvester (Feniseca tarquinius), consume plant matter and can be generalists or specialists. While butterflies like the painted lady (Vanessa cardui) are known to consume over 200 plants as caterpillars, other species like the monarch (Danaus plexippus), and the regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) only consume plants in one genus, milkweed and violets, respectively.

As adults, butterflies feed mainly on nectar, but they have also evolved to consume rotting fruit, tree sap, and even carrion. Supporting nectarivorous adult butterflies involves planting nectar plants of different heights, color, and bloom times. Butterfly bait stations can easily be made to provide a food source for species that prefer fruit and sap. In addition to food sources, windbreaks in the form of trees and shrubs shelter butterflies and can provide larval food and overwintering grounds. "Puddling" is a behavior generally done by male butterflies in which they gather to drink nutrients and water and incorporating a puddling ground for butterflies will enhance a butterfly garden. While butterflies are not the only pollinators, creating butterfly habitat also creates habitat for bees, beetles, flies, and other pollinators.

Butterfly gardening provides a recreational activity to view butterflies interacting with the environment. Besides anthropocentric values of butterfly gardening, creating habitat reduces the impacts of habitat fragmentation and degradation. Habitat degradation is a multivariate issue; development, increased use of pesticides and herbicides, woody encroachment, and non-native plants are contributing factors to the decline in butterfly and pollinator habitat. Pollination is one ecological service butterflies provide; about 90% of flowering plants and 35% of crops rely on animal pollination. Butterfly gardens and monarch waystations, even in developed urban areas, provide habitat that increases the diversity of butterflies and other pollinators, including bees, flies, and beetles.

Before buying plants and digging into the soil, "ground-truthing" is a necessary first step, Ground-truthing involves surveying a property in order to assess the current resources available. Some aspects to keep in mind are the following:

Butterflies are ectothermic and rely on solar radiation for their metabolism. South-facing slopes are an ideal location for a butterfly garden, as they provide the most solar radiation (in the Northern Hemisphere; the opposite is true in the Southern Hemisphere). Where native, shrubs and trees such as spicebush (Lindera benzoin), pawpaw (Asimina triloba), sassafras (Sassafras albidum), and black cherry (Prunus serotina), provide windbreaks for butterflies and can also be their host plants.

The types of plants used in a butterfly garden will determine the species of butterflies that will visit the garden. Lepidoptera societies and the PLANTS database of the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Natural Resources Conservation Service provide state and county-level distribution maps of plants that are native to the United States. The Plants of the World Online database of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, contains information on the taxonomy, identification, distribution, traits, threat status, and uses of plants worldwide, as well as many images of those plants. Published lists of host plants for butterflies and other pollinators can help select the plant species desired in the garden.

While non-native plants can provide floral resources to a garden, they can also have an overall negative effect on butterflies and other pollinators. Therefore, it is often recommended to use native plants. It is also important to check invasive species lists to ensure that plants are not invasive in a given locality or region. The Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States and similar publications can help provide such information.