Butterflies pollinate crops and flowers and play a critical role in the food chain. However, their habitat corridors and food plants are disappearing.
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To attract butterflies, you need to provide brightly coloured, shallow throated flowers rich in nectar. Butterflies prefer sheltered places, so choose a calm, sunny, relatively undisturbed area for your butterfly garden.
Plant a mix of buddleja, bursaria, tea-tree, daisies, marigolds and lavender, combined with long-flowering bottlebrushes and grevilleas. Group them in dense plantings to make it easy for butterflies to find them and ensure there is food for most of the year by choosing plants that flower in succession.
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Let your garden run a bit wild as butterflies prefer overgrown areas to neat garden beds.
Don't use insecticides. Most pests can be managed without chemicals.
You can also entice butterflies to feed in your garden with coloured saucers containing rotten fruit or a liquid mix of one part sugar to 10 parts water.
Butterflies like to sunbath on large flat rocks and sip salts and minerals from patches of wet sand of mud puddles. Line a shallow hole with plastic and cover it with sand and a little salt. Keep it moist with water or stale beer and surround it with flat rocks.
If you really want butterflies, you do need to accept that you need to have caterpillars as well! Just remember that healthy plants quickly recover and that a few holey leaves is a small price to pay for the beauty of a butterfly-filled landscape.
Butterfly bush (Buddleja spp.) is a fabulous shrub for attracting butterflies, and the stems also last quite well in a vase if cut when the flower spikes are just beginning to open. After flowering and before the new growth begins in spring, do make sure you prune them back quite hard as otherwise you can end up with the flowers forming way up at the top of the plant where you can only fully enjoy them from the top of a ladder!
Shrubs that bloom on new growth need pruning and thinning after flowering each year to keep them compact. Removing up to two-thirds, trim most of the foliage with shears or any thick stems with long-handled loppers. Then thin out stems of dead, old and diseased wood at their base. Leave young, healthy growth evenly spaced. Fertilise, water and mulch. Water regularly for a month to stimulate new growth for next year's flowers.
