Grow Your Own Butterfly Garden

Top 10 Plants to Create A Butterfly Garden

1. Aster. A great plant for the autumn garden, aster is a heavy bloomer with colorful flowers in shades of blue, purple, pink, red, and white.
2. Buddleia (Butterfly bush). This shrub is called butterfly bush for a reason - you're sure to see it covered in butterflies all summer long. An easy-care shrub, it features fragrant flowers in shades of blue, purple, and white.
3. Coreopsis. Bears little yellow flowers over rich green, ferny foliage for much of the summer.
4. Echinacea (Cone flower). A wide range of butterflies love sipping coneflower nectar. The plant is very heat and drought tolerant, it's a perfect cut flower, and it blooms almost all summer long.
5. Eupatorium. Forms tall flowers bearing big clusters of dusty-pink flowers that appear from midsummer to autumn.
6. Lantana. Lantana blooms all summer long in shades of lavender, pink, red, orange, yellow, cream, and white. The versatile plant looks perfect in containers or beds and borders.
7. Phlox. Phlox bears beautiful clusters of red, pink, lavender, salmon, or white blooms throughout the summer. Their lovely scent delights our noses as much as their nectar delights hungry butterflies.
8. Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susan). Black-eyed Susan is a tough perennial, which blooms in late summer with big, yellow, daisy-shaped flowers.
9. Salvia. There's a salvia for every garden: some are tall, others are short. Some have blue or purple blooms, and others have red, orange, or pink flowers. While you might have trouble picking a salvia, the butterflies love them all.
10. Zinnia. Just about everyone loves zinnia, which is why it's a favorite of butterfly gardeners, cottage gardeners, and beginner gardeners. It blooms in an almost endless range of colors and looks great right through the summer months.