Butterfly Gardens
In summer you can find monarch butterflies almost anywhere, but most of the time you can find them in large, wide open fields. Another place you could look is a butterfly garden. Butterfly gardens have become a beautiful and creative way to watch butterflies.
As with all insects and animals, butterflies can be found in certain areas. When most people think about watching butterflies, they go to a field. This is a correct assumption because milkweed grows in fields. Like it says in its name, it is a weed and will grow almost anywhere. The butterflies lay their eggs on these plants when they migrate back up north in spring. That is why you can find numerous butterflies in these fields in both spring and summer. They might be found there even in to the beginning of fall before the butterflies fly back down south for the winter.
Butterflies can be found in different places if you look for them. In fact one of the most popular places to look for butterflies are butterfly gardens. These gardens play host to millions of butterflies each year. The butterfly gardens have many different plants and other objects that will attract butterflies to them. Once a caterpillar turns in to a butterfly it mainly lives off of nectar. Flowers that are planted in butterfly gardens produce the nectar that butterflies want to eat. So when a butterfly is feeling hungry it knows exactly where to go. Butterfly gardens also provide warm rocks for the butterflies to rest on. The rocks give a butterfly a place to rest and to sun itself.
There are many different types of flowers planted in a butterfly garden, but some of the main ones are cone flowers and different types of grasses. These plants provide the kind of nectar that the butterflies eat in order to survive. There are two different types of plants in a butterfly garden. These would be the host plants, and the nectar plants. Nectar plants are the ones that the butterflies feed off of, and the host plants are the ones they lay their eggs on. Prairie plants are the main group of plants that will attract butterflies to your butterfly garden.