Create a Butterfly Garden
May 20, 2024
By Lisa Wilson, Marketing and PR Director
As the temperature heats up, more and more butterflies show up in gardens across Southwest Florida. May is a great time of year to create a butterfly garden – or add some butterfly-attracting plants to an existing garden.
To successfully attract and keep butterflies hanging around your property, it’s important to plant both host and nectar plants. Host plants are ones that the female butterfly lays her eggs on, which hatch into caterpillars, and the caterpillars eat voraciously. Nectar plants are just that – they are plants that provide nectar to butterflies, bees, and other pollinators. Butterflies can visit many different kinds of flowers for nectar, but they generally need specific plants to raise their caterpillars.
Some of the more common butterflies (host plants in parenthesis) that frequent Southwest Florida gardens include Monarch (Milkweed species), Giant Swallowtail (Wild Lime and Rue), Black Swallowtail (Dill, Fennel, and Mock Bishopsweed), White Peacock (Fog Fruit and Bacopa), Gulf Fritillary (Passion Vines), and the Orange- Barred Sulphur (native Senna plants). Here at Edison and Ford Winter Estates, another butterfly that can often be found is the Atala. It’s host plant is the Coontie. The Atala was thought to be extinct in the 1930s, but thanks to more people planting Coontie, a Florida native cycad, the butterfly has rebounded and is thriving in South Florida.
If you are a seasonal resident, or just visiting the area, be sure to research which butterflies can be found in your neighborhood, and plant host and nectar plants forthose species. Some butterflies are only found in limited geographic areas, so be sure to plant for ones that you are likely to encounter.
It’s important to remember that a butterfly is an insect, so make sure that you are not spraying pesticides on your property. Insects, such as aphids have natural predators, including ladybugs and lacewings. If you spray a pesticide – and that includes ones that people call organic – to kill the insects that you think are pests, you will sadly also kill the beneficial insects. Nature has a wonderful way of keeping the garden balanced.
One of my favorite host plants is the Wild Lime, Zanthoxylum fagara. It is a small tree that can grow to about 20’ tall. It has thorns, similar to a rose bush, so it makes a great living fence or barrier. The tree is dioecious (male and female flowers are on separate trees). The female trees produce very tiny fruit, which birds enjoy. The Wild Lime is a host for the Giant Swallowtail butterfly – the largest butterfly in this region. The caterpillars’ nibbles will be mostly unnoticed, but any eaten leaves will grow back. We have a young specimen growing in the butterfly garden, just inside the fence along Larchmont Avenue.
The Garden Shoppe at Edison and Ford Winter Estates has lots of flowering plants to provide nectar for the butterflies, and there are several species of host plants that are regularly stocked as well, including the above- mentioned Wild Lime. Stop in today and let us help you select plants for your butterfly garden!
