Most people would love to see more butterflies in their gardens. But even if they grow butterfly attracting plants, they can be disappointed.
The secret to having more butterflies is simply to grow butterfly creating plants. These are the plants that feed the caterpillars that will eventually become beautiful butterflies.
Each butterfly uses just one species of plant or sometimes a wider selection of plants to feed their caterpillars. If you have a particular favourite butterfly you just need to find out what its food plant is to have a good chance of it turning up in your garden. You will also have the pleasure of knowing that you have helped to increase their numbers.
Our butterfly garden was established to showcase some of these butterfly creating plants. People can see how they grow and if they would be suitable for their own gardens.
The easiest plant to start a butterfly garden is some sort of citrus. They are easily purchased from many nurseries. We have lemon, lime and mandarin in the garden. These are all used by three butterflies – orchard swallowtail, fuscous swallowtail and dainty swallowtail.
The paper daisy is another plant easily sourced from nurseries. They have attractive flowers of many colours which are also a good nectar source for passing butterflies. The painted lady butterfly caterpillars use this plant. The chrysalis is usually brown but sometimes you will find one that is a shining gold colour.
One plant that can be hard to buy is the thornless caper (Capparis lucida). It can grow to be a medium sized tree. It is quite a stunning butterfly plant when the annual caper white butterfly migration starts in October or November. It gets covered in hundreds of caterpillars which strip all the leaves and then turn into hundreds of butterflies. They will stay in your garden for a little while before leaving to join the migration.
The beautiful blue tiger butterfly uses corky milk vine. It doesn’t turn up every year. When it does, we get lots of caterpillars and eventually many butterflies lazily flying around the garden.
We have lots more plants. There is the love flower for the leafwing, cinnamon for the blue triangle, climbing senna for the yellow migrant, native mulberry for the jezebel nymph and soursop for the pale triangle.
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