Are you interested in creating a butterfly garden? Perhaps it is for the purposes of providing some habitat for butterflies in your area? Maybe you just want to attract them to your garden so you and your children can delight in their antics. While there are several things you must consider when building a butterfly garden, a major consideration is providing shelter for them.

Butterflies need shelter from both wind and rain. In winter, if you are lucky enough to have over wintering adult butterflies, they will need shelter for hibernation. So as you begin to create your butterfly garden, you will need to provide shelter.

To begin your butterfly garden give consideration to the direction of the prevailing winds of your area. In the US, mostly the prevailing wind is out of the Northwest but check in your area to be sure. In my area, we can at times get a mean upsloping eastern wind but our normal winds are western winds.

If you do have a prevailing wind from the Northwest, this means you will want to provide some type of windbreak along the northern or northwestern side of your butterfly garden location. If you are creating it on the southern side of your home, you may already be one step ahead. You will simply need to continue your windbreak along the western side of your home.

A windbreak can be created with trees and shrubs, walls and fences or even a stack of firewood or rocks. You will want the taller plants to be on the northern or northwestern side of your butterfly garden. If at all possible, create a protected area for the butterflies by putting the tallest trees, shrubs or whatever on the north side and progressively smaller plantings coming around to an almost open southern side which will allow the sun to shine in.

It may be easier to picture this as a circular area. It does not have to be circular but any shape you desire will work as well as long as there is a windbreak towards your prevailing winds and it allows plenty of sun to shine in from the south for the butterflies to bask in.

The plantings and structures you use to prepare the "bones" of your butterfly garden will provide shelter from rain as well as from the winds. Butterflies will hide from the rain under leaves of the vegetation as well as the eaves of your home and any little nook or cranny they can find.

If you use hard structures such as fences or trellises, add plants such as passion flower or pipevine that will grow up or along these structures to further your butterfly garden goals. Not only will you be providing shelter but, in the case of the stated plantings, you will also be providing host plants. Choose nectar-providing shrubs as your living windbreaks.

Follow these tips and you will have a great start on providing a little habitat for butterflies within your own landscape. Doing so will provide you with many opportunities to watch the butterflies of your area.

Copyright 2006, Sandra Dinkins-Wilson