Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Top Butterfly attracting flowers

Though i would submit a separate post on how to attract butterflies specially in lahore, right now i would focus on only which plants i have found attractive for butterflies.

1- First, butterflies are cold blooded insects so they love sunshine. They tend to prefer area which receives maximum sunshine.
2- Choose flowers rich in nectar. Have you wondered why there is not a lot of butterflies seen on Roses? nectar!!!!! Nectar rich flowers are usually single petal flowers having large seeds visible in the center. See the example of Dahlia below:

single dahlia flower with butterflyGood for butterflies, Nectar Rich










double dahlia flowerNot butterfly friendly, no nectar









Daisy is another common example. Others good flowers include following:
  • scabiosa (pincushion flower)
  • Lantana(specially blue flowered)
  • buddleia (butterfly bush, white color variety survives in plains while purple one in hills)
  • Asclepias curassavica(tropical milkweed)
  • lemon/orange/tangerine
  • Kniphofia(red hot pocker)
  • Allium
  • Cosmos
  • Single petal dahlia
  • Hibiscus
And last but not least Senecio confusus vine. In this march i had more than 200 blooms on this vine and every single day it was surrounded by butterflies.
senecio confusus mexican flame vine





Butterfly on my senecio vine





3-Choose flowers with sweet fragrance. One example is Murraya (Marwa, marwi), i have seen hundreds of butterflies on one single murraya tree near my home.

Note that butterflies usually appear in lahore from February-October. Also, Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees.

4 comments:

April said...

Lovely pictures of the flowers and beautiful blue butterfly. "hundreds of butterflies" - that must be a wonderful sight!! Great post!

Meredith/Great Stems said...

I love butterflies -- I'm so looking forward to fall when the flowers are happily blooming and the butterflies are flying all around. We have them now, but it's so hot that the flowers aren't keeping up! I hope you can get a picture of that Murraya tree to share sometime!

Unknown said...

Thanks for the great tips on attracting butterflies. Wow! what a sight to have so many butterflies visiting your plants.

Sanamt said...

This is such a fantastic bog. Any tips on caterpillar friendly plants as I was reading that butterfly friendly and caterpillar friendly are not necessarily the same thing


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