Just imagine your backyard with butterflies lighting up your garden from morning until sundown. By integrating native plants and flowers you will be inviting a host of beautiful butterflies and moths to visit your garden adding splendour to your landscape and hours of entertainment.
Creating a pollinator garden with the right plants and flowers will quickly attract many species of these beneficial insects.
Creating a butterfly garden is much easier than you think — it is as simple as selecting the plants butterflies are most attracted to. Pay attention to the plants you are buying this spring. Many garden centres will label plants that are good for butterflies, bees and pollinators. It is best to choose native plant species which includes trees, shrubs and grasses in addition to native perennials. Some of the best flowers are black-eyed Susan, butterfly milkweed, coneflowers, boneset, wild columbine, Joe Pye weed, cardinal flower, ironweed, or bee balm.
Shrubs and grasses also serve as host plants that provide food at the caterpillar stage. Butterflies enjoy the heat so plant your flowers in warm sunny locations.
Canadian Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths and skippers) are adapted to plants which are native to Canada. It is important to have a good variety of blossoms to suit their individual needs. Native plants are often referred to as wildflowers, and provide the necessary food at just the right time to coincide with the life cycle of the insect. Lepidoptera have different needs during each stage of life: the egging stage, the caterpillar stage, the chrysalis/
cocoon and then the adult stage, so make sure you have something blooming from spring until fall.
There are three categories of Lepidoptera and it is easy to identify them by the following traits:
Butterflies — fly during the day, have brightly coloured scaly wings, and rest with their wings closed. Their antennae have a club-shaped end, and they generally pupate in a chrysalis (a protective hard shell).
Moths — often have less colourful or hairy wings, are more active in the evening or night, and rest with their wings open. They pupate in soil, leaf litter, or under bark with little or no cocoon (protective shell made of silky threads). Their antennae are generally smooth and slender but may have featherlike branches.
Skippers — are smaller, may be hairy or smooth, and dart about in the daytime like butterflies do.
To start the reproductive cycle, butterflies lay eggs on a host plant that is suited to the insect’s dietary needs. Once the egg hatches, the caterpillar feeds upon that plant until it is ready to form a cocoon. In this protective shelter, it will grow wings and transform into its adult stage as a mature butterfly or moth. Only adults feed on sugar from nectar, which they find in flowers. Their taste receptors are on the feet, and their tongue (proboscis), is rolled up until it lands on a flower. The strawlike tongue then unrolls and dips deep into the base of the flower to suck up the nectar. While searching for nectar, pollen from flowers sticks to their scaly or hairy bodies, thus pollinating the plants as they fly from one to another.
Some butterflies are plant-specific and are only adapted to certain shapes or varieties of flowers. For example, a monarch butterfly can only feed on a milkweed plant, and the spicebush swallowtail butterfly’s host plant is the spicebush. When arranging your garden, be sure to group similar coloured plants together in clumps to make it easier for the insects to find them. Organize your garden with taller plants at the back and shorter ones at the front for best viewing purposes.
Also place some large stones in your garden that will stay warm. This will provide a safe place for the butterflies to rest and bask in the sun. Be sure to leave some open soil spots so rain or sprinklers will create little puddles for the butterflies to drink from. Avoid being a super tidy gardener, for it is better to leave some fallen leaves and branches around to provide habitat for nesting and overwintering. Hibernating butterflies spend the winter in hollow trees or amongst dead, rolled, folded or webbed leaves or grass.
Once the butterflies arrive in your garden, taking photos and looking them up on the internet is a great way to educate yourself about the different types of butterflies. Their distinctive colours and patterns are a survival mechanism meant for camouflage or to deflect predators. Some caterpillars have stripes that simulate veins in a leaf or the stripes on a plant. Inchworms often look like twigs or twisted dead leaves. The wings of moths may mimic the pattern of the tree bark they are resting upon. The bright colours on the wings of butterflies are hidden when they are at rest and the wings are closed, but when they open their wings, the bright patterns and colours startle their attackers just long enough for them to escape. That is why you often see patterns that look like eyes on their wings. Even though they have this natural protection, they are still the choice food for birds, so large populations are necessary because only a few survive.
Besides natural predators, butterflies, moths and skippers are increasingly under threat from diminishing habitat, chemicals, pesticides, contaminated water and climate change. Creating a butterfly garden is a win-win situation — you provide refuge for these creatures and in turn you get to enjoy their beauty and pollination services.
Beautiful butterflies of Southern Ontario
Large: Canadian tiger swallowtail, black swallowtail, giant swallowtail, monarch, viceroy, admiral
Medium-sized: Cabbage white, orange sulphur, checkerspots crescent, comma, question mark, buckeye, wood satyr, pearly-eye, ringlet, wood nymph, painted lady, mourning cloak
Small: skipper, copper, elfin, hairstreak, blue, azure, fritillary, northern crescent, painted lady
Tip of the week: Create your butterfly garden in an area protected from wind so your butterflies won’t be blown away!