How do you make charming butterfly gardens?
Make sure you have plenty of diversity in your butterfly garden
so that there are plants that bloom all spring and summer. Milkweed
is a favorite of monarchs. Swallowtails like dill. You need the
host plants for the caterpillars but the adult butterflies like
butterfly weed, butterfly bush, lantana, coneflowers, asters,
azalea, Joe Pye weed, and zinnia. The Missouri Botanical Gardens
has a nice web page on this.
You can also have some butterfly puddlers. Butterflies need
shallow sources of water and they get minerals by walking on
mud.