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    Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies
    Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies
    Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies

    By Christopher Kline

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    About this ebook

    • Fun how-to guide for attracting butterflies with native plants
    • Includes more than 150 color photographs
    • Suitable for kids and adults 

    Have you ever wanted to draw butterflies to your home, but you haven’t known where to start? This book will help you! Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants is much more than a book filled with beautiful photographs. It brings the butterfly’s perspective to the reader. Living in nature is getting more and more difficult around the planet for butterflies. This makes manmade habitats, filled with native plants, much more important. 

    Butterfly expert Christopher Kline explains how to use native plants and draw butterflies to your home landscape. He discusses butterfly gardening basics, common butterflies int he garden, garden designs, guide to host plants, native nectar, and sources for native plants. Many detailed illustrations on garden layout will make building your own garden much easier. This guide also makes it easy to pick plants that attract different butterfly species. Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to draw butterflies to their home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateApr 7, 2015
    ISBN9781632209306
    Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants: How to Attract and Identify Butterflies

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      Book preview

      Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants - Christopher Kline

      1

      How to Use This Book

      Pepper and Salt Skipper

      Chapter 1

      How to Use This Book

      Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants is intended to accomplish two goals. First, this book is to serve as an introduction to gardening, specifically with the purpose of attracting butterflies to your garden. In the mind of the butterfly, not all plants are created equal. In this book, I hope to encourage you to think like a butterfly.

      Second, I want this book to serve as a butterfly field guide, specifically for the butterflies you are most likely to encounter in your garden in the eastern United States. For example, there are over 150 butterfly species native to the Ohio River valley. Not all of them will be making their way to your yard. However, for folks who have a little more experience with butterflies, there are some very good field guides that are available that will cover regional butterfly species much more comprehensively.

      The beginning of the book discusses gardening, gardening style, and the importance of gardening. This is followed by the field guide portion of the book. In this section, all similar butterflies are grouped together. So, the butterfly section starts with the swallowtails, followed by the whites and sulphurs, blues and hairstreaks, brushfoots, and skippers.

      On each butterfly species page is a general description of the butterfly, its season, its host plant, and any specific advice about attracting the butterfly to your garden. At the top of the page is a bar that shows the season in which you would commonly find that butterfly. The letters across the bottom of the bar represent the months of the year.

      The next section of the book discusses the best nectar plants for attracting butterflies, in rough order of bloom season. For each nectar plant, there is a general description of size and growth habit, sun requirements, and its specific attraction for butterflies. There is also another calendar bar at the top showing the approximate bloom season of the plant.

      Variegated Fritillary

      In addition, certain plants have received gold stars. These are my top ten, must have plants for any butterfly garden. My number one choice, Purple Milkweed, in my opinion, is the best butterfly attractant there is among our native flora.

      The next section of the book contains a chart of butterfly host plants, or the plants that caterpillars of specific butterflies will eat. I like to think of caterpillars as nature’s little pruners. The chart gives the name of the host plant, size, flower color, fall color, and the specific butterfly that feeds on the plant. Keep in mind, the purpose for having these plants in your garden is for them to be eaten. Do not invest $60 in a six-foot dogwood cultivar, when a $14.95, two-foot everyday dogwood will work. Do not worry, caterpillars will not eat your dogwood to the ground. They know better than to wipe out their food supply.

      Finally, in the index, page numbers are listed not only for the page a particular species is discussed, but also pages in which a photo of a given plant or butterfly can be found. The page number in bold is the page number of the specific discussion of that species.

      My hope is that through this book you will not only begin to notice the butterfly life around you, but that you will also take an active role in attracting that butterfly life to your home landscape. Many states and communities have butterfly clubs and Listservs that can help answer questions and provide encouragement. Good luck with your newfound butterfly interests!

      2

      Butterfly Gardening Basics

      Harvester

      Chapter 2

      Butterfly Gardening Basics

      Why Gardening?

      The practice of gardening dates back to Biblical times. One of the tasks assigned to Adam and Eve in the second chapter of Genesis was to take care of it and keep it, in reference to the Garden of Eden.

      Gardening is beneficial from a physical health perspective. When gardening, muscles are stretched and strengthened. Coordination and balance is challenged as one traverses narrow paths across the uneven ground. Joints are exercised as the gardener stoops and raises to work at different levels in the garden.

      While these types of movements may seem minimal, their importance becomes more and more emphasized as our society and workplaces become more and more sedentary. We have escalators to move us vertically through space, and even horizontally through space in many airports. We use golf carts in the workplace to carry us and our equipment relatively short distances to which in the past we would’ve walked or ridden bicycles. Our hurried and busy lives have forced us into our cars to save time, when in the past

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