Summer in the garden wouldn’t be complete without the joyous sight of butterflies in flight, and there are loads of great ways to encourage more of them into your garden.

Few things are more rewarding for a gardener than seeing butterflies and moths fluttering around and feeding on our flowering plants. We get to appreciate the beauty of flowers and they get to enjoy the pollen and nectar. And while this in itself is a brilliant thing, what really helps the butterflies is not so much the flowers they feed on, but rather the plants their younger caterpillar incarnations hatch on and eat.

They only eat and lay on specific plants

They are rather picky about which plants they eat, though. Different varieties of caterpillar will only eat certain plants and so their parent butterflies will only lay their eggs on these specific plants.

If you’ve got the space to allow some nettles to grow in a rough patch of ground or wild area then you could be rewarded with the sight of Peacock butterflies, Commas, Small Tortoiseshells and Red Admirals, as their caterpillars like to feast on them.
Sweet woodruff is a lovely ground-covering plant that loves a shady area, and added as underplanting, is of great service to the caterpillars of the Hummingbird Hawk-moth, which looks amazing when hovering and feeding with a long proboscis, just like its namesake.

Comfrey produces beautiful pink and white flowers

Comfrey is a great low maintenance plant for a shady spot that produces beautiful pink and white flowers, which the zany looking Scarlet Tiger Moth chooses to lay its eggs on. You can try adding bird’s foot trefoil to your lawn or wild flower area to attract the charming Common Blue and Green Hairstreak butterflies.

Our native grasses are also invaluable and worth considering adding to a garden’s wilder areas where they can grow tall and uncut to be a home for caterpillars of Speckled Wood, Meadow Brown and Gatekeeper butterflies.

Continue to grow flowering plants

Of course, it’s still a really good idea to grow loads of flowering plants like buddleia, lavender and verbena to attract the adult butterflies in to feed on, but if you’ve got some of the plants they lay their eggs on too, then they’re more likely to stay on your side of the fence.

It is a gardener’s paradox that we love butterflies and hate caterpillars, but you really can’t have one without the other. The great thing about adding some of these extra plants to your garden is that they will not only help support more beautiful moths and butterflies, but also the plants in themselves are a delight.