Growing in pots? you have to see this!!!!!

Now this is something very encouraging for those who have no space like me and are restricted to pot culture. Folks, this railway creeper is at least 15 feet and the plastic container is only 4 inches deep. and i have placed it on a concrete shade which is further 8 feet high from the ground. Now don't ask me how did i manage to put this clay filled container on this shade!!!. The pic is taken from roof top.
















Allamanda in same container, almost 10 feet high.
Acutally there is another vine in the middle, morning glory. But i think she is over taken by these two and hardly nourishing. But she will bloom too, for sure, just wait a while. This pic taken at 4x optical zoom of canon powershot.

















Who says you cannot attract butterflies and bees with container gardening? well i surely think otherwise. now i am not good at bees and i think this is a carpenter bee. sorry for not capturing this bee closer, actually i am afraid of their sting!!!!!


























































I captured this butterfly when thick black clouds had taken over and rain was just coming by. This cutie took shelter on my jasmine nitidum leaf. It was very low light and you can see some grains in the picture
















Isn't it strange that this mushroom sprouted, oops i think we can use this word sprout with fungi as well, right? in this D shaped pot instead of my soil bed. They grow almost every year during monsoon rains.

Attracting wild life to your garden

It is not easy to establish a garden which would attract butterflies, bees, sun birds if you are living in an over populated urban city with lots of pollution around. Situation gets worse if you have as little space as i have got. Sure plants can be grown in containers and they will flourish but nothing compared to those which are nourished by sweet mother earth. After all, plants get to know they are in containers, nah? what about a patch full of self seeding bright wild flowers!!!

Although butterflies do visit my garden many times a day but this lemon tree just next to my home is something all the butterflies and bees just adore. Sometimes i think that they come all the way to sip nectar from this tree instead and in the way they also visit my garden. well i don't mind it either. My dwarf murraya tree does compete hard and tries to allure those butterflies back through its intense sweet fragrance. The competition goes on.
















This bee also visited my murraya tree just before coming here but i could not capture it there.
















This butterfly was wandering around these phlox flowers and they were hundreds in a row. something i wish i could ever grow.
















Now this wild flower garden is something i am talking about. Self seeding annuals in a natural way.
















Hope some day i will have a patch full of butterfly bushes with tons of butterflies around. Dreams never die actually.

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:

Good for butterflies, Nectar Rich










Not 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.






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.