If you'd like to encourage more butterflies to visit you, and perhaps stay and breed, then you need to have plants which supply the food they need. Adults butterflies drink the necta or the flowers of a wide variety of plants. The best known is Buddleia, whose common name 'butterfly bush' is apt, as butterfiles adore it. It's a very fast growing shrub with long sparys of flowers in white, yellow, mauve, crimson, purple or pink.
Wattles and eucalypts also attract butterflies which often favour pink, yellow, or white flowers. Even some weeds are important butterfly food. The Wanderer (or Monarch) butterfly feeds on the common milkweed.
A butterfly starts life as an egg, which becomes a caterpillar before changing into a butterfly, so if you want butterflies, you'll have to put up with a few caterpillars.
Nectar Plants:
Buddleia, pentas,
impatiens, verbena, daisies, grevilleas, mistletoe, banksias,
clover and milkweed, eucalypts, grasses, bottlebrushes, sword sedges and
rushes, tea-trees, passionfruit and .antana (cultivars only)
Host Plants:
Citrus - Orchard, Dingy
Swallowtail
Snapdragon - Meadow Argus
Milkweek - Wanderer &
Lesser Wanderer
Impatiens - Hawk Moth
Flame Tree - Tailed Emperor
Cassia - Lemon Migrant
For more information on what
particular butterflies like go the Australian Butterflies
page on this site.
