Wendy Killeen Fred Goodwin

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Plant a little clover, mix in some black-eyed Susans and flat-topped zinnias, add parsley and dill, and you have a recipe for a garden that will attract butterflies.

Just ask Sharon Stichter of Newbury, Massachusetts, a retired sociology professor who has been fascinated with the winged insects for a decade.

“They’re such lovely creatures and so ephemeral,” says Sharon, who is editor of Massachusetts Butterflies, a biannual journal published by the Massachusetts Butterfly Club.

And, she says, given the right horticulture, “some of them will come and make themselves at home and be very happy in your garden and your backyard.”
         
Creating a butterfly garden
About six years ago, Sharon moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a home on nine acres next to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in Newbury “to be able to develop a butterfly garden in a rural setting.”

“I have always been interested in how we can co-exist with wildlife without destroying it,” says Sharon. “I wanted to have a place where wildlife could be at home and I could be at home.”

Sharon gives tours of her property and of butterfly gardens she developed and maintains at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Joppa Flats Education Center in Newburyport. She is also editor of a guide to butterfly-viewing sites around Massachusetts, published by the Butterfly Club, as well as editor of the group’s journal.  

“Interest in butterflies and butterfly gardens has been growing enormously,” Sharon says.

It began with the 1993 guide, Butterflies through Binoculars, by Jeffrey Glassberg, she explains. “It was the first book that showed how to identify butterflies through binoculars, without using a net, without having to catch them, without having to kill them or take specimens or collections,” Sharon says. “It was just by looking at them.

“It really created butterfly watching as a hobby in the same way Roger Peterson created birding by publishing books on how to identify birds,” she adds.

Who visits a butterfly garden?
The Butterfly Club takes butterfly counts at several locations in Massachusetts around July 4 and provides the data to the North American Butterfly Association, which tracks butterfly populations around the country.

Sharon says there are about 100 species in Massachusetts, which are some of the same types seen down the East Coast. They include the black swallowtail, monarch, American lady, and the small cabbage white.

New Hampshire and Maine also attract about 100 species, including some not found in Massachusetts. The green comma and grey comma, for instance, visit the White Mountain region of New Hampshire, and the bog fritillary can be see in Maine.

Increasingly, butterflies have an incentive to come and stay a while as gardens designed for their pleasure are blossoming at Audubon centers, in community plots, at schools, and at people’s homes.

“It’s a way of enhancing the enjoyment of your backyard,” Sharon says. “Just seeing a living thing is very uplifting.”

“When you have a flower garden, once it’s all in, you are done,” says Dorothy Saffarewich, who helps Sharon with the Joppa Flats site and has a butterfly garden at her home in Nahant, Massachusetts.

But with a butterfly garden, she adds, the planting “is just the beginning because you want to see all the different butterflies that will come in.”

Plants butterflies love
The secret of a successful butterfly garden is in plant selection. There must be two types: plants that provide nectar for the adult butterflies and larval host plants for the butterfly caterpillars.

Nectar plants include black-eyed Susan, clovers, Joe-Pye weed, lantana, marigolds, Mexican sunflowers, milkweeds, phlox, purple coneflowers, verbena, flat-topped zinnias and others Hummingbirds, which also eat nectar, are attracted to many of the same plants, especially bee balm, columbine, honeysuckle, salvia and weigela.

Larval host plants include asters, pearly everlasting, pussy toes, sassafras, native violets, spicebush, juniper, dill, parsley, thistle and many grasses.

The choice of plants may also determine just which butterflies you see. The black swallowtail, for instance, likes parsley and dill for host plants and nectars on butterfly bush. Monarchs like swamp milkweed for nectar and will also lay eggs on it.

Sharon says some butterflies like a meadow habitat, with grasses and flowers. “If you have an area of your lawn you cannot mow, and put in some more colorful things like daisies and coreopsis and black-eyed Susan, you can have a colorful wildflower meadow that will attract butterflies,” she says.

Herb gardens are also favored, with butterflies liking thyme, lavender, oregano and mint.

Location of the garden is important as butterflies love sun and heat and need some protection from wind, especially along the coast.

The season for butterflies goes from spring to fall so the garden must be long lasting, with plants blooming at different times.

The height of the season, both in terms of bloom and the number of butterfly species, is mid-July to the end of August.

Still, Sharon says, “Some of the best butterflies are seen in the fall.” Monarchs can be seen from September to mid-October, attracted by Joe Pye weed and New England asters.

It’s easy to attract butterflies
Creating a butterfly garden is not as overwhelming as it may sound. “Just start adding to what you already have,” Sharon says.

And the garden doesn’t have to be large. In the city, it can be located on a balcony. Even hanging baskets of flowers like verbena attract butterflies.

Sharon and Dorothy also suggest locating a garden where it—and the butterflies—can be viewed from inside. “I sit in my air-conditioned living room and look out at them a lot of the time,” Sharon says.

“I love to be on butterfly patrol all the time,” Dorothy says, adding the rewards come quickly.

“When I started a butterfly garden and the first flower opened, there was a butterfly that day,” she says. “If you plant it, they will come.”

Butterfly Gardens Worth Seeing

Maine
Kennebec Valley Garden Club Park | University Drive, Augusta
Admission is free. 207 623-4559.
Maine Audubon
Fields Pond Center in Holden
The Gisland Farm Center in Falmouth
207 989-2591 and 207 781-2330, | maineaudubon.org.

Butterfly Habitat Garden | Route 302 in Bridgton
207 647-3472.

Massachusetts
The Butterfly Place | 120 Tyngsboro Road in Westford
Open daily, April 1 to early October, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission $8.50, adults; $6.50 senior citizens; $6, children ages 3–12; free, children 2 and under.
978 392-0955 | butterflyplace-ma.com.

Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory and Gardens | 281 Greenfield Road (Routes 5 and 10) in South Deerfield
Open daily, Memorial Day through Labor Day, 9 a.m.– 6 p.m.; Labor Day through Memorial Day, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8, adults; $7, senior citizens; $5 for students and children ages 3–17; free for age 3 and under.
413 665-2805 | magicwings.com.

Museum of Science | Boston
Open Thursdays through Saturdays, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., and Fridays 9 a.m.–9 p.m. Admission to the butterfly garden is $4 for adults, $3.50 for senior citizens, $3 for children.
617 723-2500 | mos.org.

Mount Auburn Cemetery | 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge
Open daily, May through September, 8 a.m.–7 p.m. Admission is free.
617 547-7105 | mountauburn.org.

New Hampshire
Kirkwood Gardens | Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, Route 3, Holderness
Open to the public daily and admission is free.
603 968-7194, nhnature.org.

Fuller Gardens | 10 Willow Avenue, North Hampton
Open daily from mid-May to mid-October, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Admission is $6.50 for adults; $5.50 for senior citizens; $3.50 for students; and $2.50 for ages 12 and under.
603 964-5414 | fullergardens.org.

Massabesic Audubon Center | 16 Audubon Way, Auburn
603 668-2045, nhaudubon.org.

Ordiorne Point State Park | Route 1A, Rye
Open daily all year. Admission is $3 ages 12 and older; $1 for ages 3 to 11; free for children 5 and under.
603 436-8043 or 603 436-7406 | nhparks.state.nh.us.