How to Attract Butterflies and Moths to Your Garden

A garden alive with butterflies feels like the height of summer, and it is one of the easiest kinds of wildlife to invite in. But there is a catch most gardening advice skips over: planting a buddleia and a few nectar flowers will bring butterflies visiting, yet it does almost nothing to help them breed. To keep them — to have them living on your plot year after year — you need to feed both halves of their life: the nectar-sipping adults and the leaf-munching caterpillars.

This guide covers both. It sits within our wider wildlife-friendly garden cluster, which explains how pollinators, predators, ponds and hedgehog highways all knit together into a more productive plot. Butterflies and moths are a lovely part of that picture — and, as you'll see, surprisingly useful ones.

Why butterflies and moths matter

It is tempting to think of butterflies as pure decoration. They are not. They earn their keep in three ways.

First, pollination. As butterflies and day-flying moths move between flowers for nectar, they carry pollen with them, helping along the same pollination that bees do for your fruit and veg. They are not as efficient as bees, but they cover ground bees won't, and they work flowers bees overlook.

Second, and this surprises people: moths do most of Britain's night-time pollination. While the bees are asleep, moths are quietly visiting pale, scented, evening flowers and shifting huge quantities of pollen. Research has found moths are far more important pollinators than we long assumed — so a moth-friendly garden is a better-pollinated one.

Third, caterpillars feed the food web. This is the big one. The caterpillars of butterflies and moths are the single most important food for baby birds in spring. A pair of blue tits will gather hundreds of caterpillars a day to raise one brood of chicks. No caterpillars, no songbirds. The same caterpillars feed bats, hedgehogs and the beneficial insects that keep your pests down. So when you grow plants for caterpillars, you are really feeding the birds and hedgehogs too.

Nectar plants for the adults

Adult butterflies want one thing: easy, plentiful nectar. As with bees, single flowers beat double ones — open blooms hold their nectar where a butterfly's long tongue can reach it, while frilly double varieties lock it away behind extra petals. The rest is just choosing plants that flower across the whole season.

These are the reliable UK butterfly plants:

• Buddleia (the "butterfly bush") — the classic for good reason. A single shrub in July and August can have dozens of butterflies on it at once. Cut it hard back in early spring to keep it flowering well.
• Verbena bonariensis — tall, airy and covered in small purple flowers from midsummer to autumn. Butterflies and bees adore it, and it self-seeds happily through a bed.
• Marjoram (oregano) — one of the very best, and a herb you can cook with. Let a few plants flower and they hum with butterflies, bees and hoverflies.
• Ice plant (Sedum, now Hylotelephium) 'Autumn Joy' — its flat pink plates are a September lifeline, alive with butterflies just as little else is open.
• Lavender — a sunny, well-drained favourite that pulls in butterflies as readily as bees.
• Ivy — when it flowers in autumn it is one of the most important late nectar sources in Britain, feeding butterflies stocking up before hibernation.

Single flowers carry the same theme through spring (pulmonaria, dandelions, aubretia), early summer (knapweed, scabious) and beyond. For a fuller season-by-season list, our pollinator plants guide covers the same succession that keeps butterflies and bees fed from March to October.

The crucial bit most people miss: caterpillar food plants

Here is what nearly every "attract butterflies" article forgets. A butterfly does not lay its eggs on a buddleia. The adult drinks the nectar, then flies off to find a completely different plant to lay eggs on — a food plant the caterpillars can actually eat. Each species is fussy: it will only use particular plants. Leave those out of your garden, and the butterflies have nowhere to breed.

The good news is that the best caterpillar food plants are plants you probably think of as weeds, which means feeding the next generation costs you nothing but a little untidiness.

• Nettles — the single most valuable caterpillar plant in Britain. The larvae of small tortoiseshell, peacock, red admiral and comma all feed on common stinging nettle. Leave a clump in a sunny spot (shaded nettles barely get used) and cut half of it back in June to give a fresh flush of young leaves for later broods.
• Bird's-foot trefoil — a low, cheerful yellow meadow plant that feeds common blue caterpillars. Easy to add to a wildflower patch.
• Lady's smock (cuckooflower) — the food plant of the orange-tip, one of spring's loveliest butterflies. It likes a damp, lightly shaded spot.
• Grasses left long — many of our "brown" butterflies (meadowbrown, gatekeeper, ringlet, speckled wood) lay on ordinary native grasses. Simply letting an area of lawn grow long feeds them all.
• A wild patch — beyond named plants, the simplest move of all is to let one corner go a bit wild: long grass, a few nettles, some bramble, the odd thistle and dock. This is a butterfly nursery.

Moths matter too

For every butterfly in Britain there are dozens of moth species — around 2,500 of them — and most go entirely unnoticed because they fly at night. Yet they do the bulk of after-dark pollination, and their caterpillars are a cornerstone of the food web. A few simple habits make a garden far better for them.

Don't over-tidy. Moth caterpillars overwinter in leaf litter, seed heads, long grass and the hollow stems of dead perennials. The autumn urge to cut everything back and rake the borders bare destroys exactly where they are sheltering. Leave seed heads standing over winter, let a layer of leaves lie under hedges and shrubs, and tidy in spring instead.

Reduce night lighting. Bright outdoor lights — security floods, decorative garden lighting, lit-up patios — disorientate moths, draw them away from the flowers they should be pollinating, and leave them circling a bulb until exhausted. Switching off unnecessary lights, fitting motion sensors, and using warm-toned rather than bright white bulbs all help the night shift get on with their work.

Grow pale, scented evening flowers. Honeysuckle, evening primrose, night-scented stock, jasmine and tobacco plants (Nicotiana) release scent at dusk precisely to draw in moths. They make a fragrant evening garden for you and a feeding station for them.

Avoid pesticides, all of them

None of this works if you spray. Insecticides do not tell the difference between a cabbage white caterpillar and a peacock caterpillar, or between an aphid and a butterfly — they kill the lot, including the caterpillars you've gone to such trouble to feed. Even some "bug-clear" sprays linger on leaves and in nectar.

The reassuring part, as with the rest of a wildlife plot, is that you don't need them. The garden does its own pest control: the caterpillars you grow feed the birds, and the flowers you grow feed the hoverflies and ladybirds whose larvae clear your aphids. Build the habitat and the balance largely looks after itself — the whole argument of attracting beneficial insects. If a pest does flare up, hand-picking, a blast of water or a fine mesh net deals with most things; for blackfly specifically, see blackfly on beans.

A year-round plan and species to spot

Butterflies are on the wing in the UK from the first warm March days to the last of autumn, and the leanest moments — early spring and late autumn — are exactly when nectar is scarcest. Aim to have something in flower across the whole stretch: spring (pulmonaria, dandelions, aubretia, flowering currant), summer (buddleia, verbena, marjoram, lavender, knapweed), and autumn (ice plant, Michaelmas daisies, ivy). Our planting calendar helps you line up sowing and flowering so there's never a hungry gap. Pair that succession of nectar with caterpillar food plants and a wild corner, and you've covered the full life cycle.

As your garden fills up, here are some of the species you can realistically hope to see in a UK plot: small tortoiseshell, peacock, red admiral and comma (all bred on your nettles), small white and large white (the "cabbage whites"), orange-tip in spring, common blue, holly blue, gatekeeper, meadow brown, ringlet and speckled wood, and — drifting in from buddleia to ivy in late summer — the painted lady, a migrant that flies all the way from North Africa. Keep an eye out at dusk for the hummingbird hawk-moth, a day-flying moth that hovers at verbena and lavender exactly like a tiny bird.

For the full picture of how butterflies and moths sit alongside pollinator plants, ponds, bird feeders and hedgehog highways, head back to the wildlife garden hub, or browse the whole wildlife gardening section.