How to Plant a Butterfly Garden

In this video, This Old House landscape contractor Roger Cook shows how a garden can be made to attract butterflies.

Why Sequence Matters: Adult butterflies don’t eat leaves — they drink nectar from flowers. If you want butterflies all season long, it’s important to have flowers blooming all season long. A successful butterfly garden will have a sequence of flowers so there’s always something for them to feed on.

Steps:

1. To attract caterpillars, plant host plants about 30 feet away from the butterfly garden. Good host plants include spicebush and cherry tree.

2. Select plants for the butterfly garden that will bloom throughout the summer. In early summer, plant chives, sage, even dandelion.

3. Later in the summer, plant milkweed, coneflower or a butterfly bush.

4. Plant asters around the edges of the butterfly garden; they’ll bloom from late-summer into early-fall.

5. Be sure to set the plants in big clusters to create a larger target area for butterflies.

6. Create a damp puddling area in the garden; butterflies like to suck mud for essential minerals.

Pro Tip: Common milkweed isn’t just a great nectar plant — it’s also an important host plant for monarch caterpillars. The more milkweed you have, the more monarchs you’ll attract. As one This Old House garden expert put it: “So the more milkweed we have, the more monarchs we have. Absolutely gotta have their habitat.”