Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants

by Douglas W. Tallamy

You can enjoy the fascinating world of insects if you give them the food they need to reach maturity and reproduce. The most common way gardeners attempt to connect with insects is by planting for butterflies. It is a noble idea, and exactly the sort of thing I hope to promote with this book. Sadly, the execution of this enterprise is so often directed by misinformation that we end up with fewer butterflies than we started with. When designing a butterfly garden, you need two types of plants: species that provide nectar for adults, and species that are host plants for butterfly larvae. Most people focus only on the plants that produce nectar. Even worse, they often turn to alien plants that are promoted as being good for butterflies, the most popular of which, hands down, is the butterfly bush (Buddleja species). Planting butterfly bush in your garden will provide attractive nectar for adult butterflies, but not one species of butterfly in North America can use buddleias as larval host plants. To have butterflies, we need to make butterflies. Butterflies used to reproduce on the native plants that grew in our yards before the plants were bulldozed and replaced with lawn. To have butterflies in our future, we need to replace those lost host plants, no if’s, and’s, or but’s. If we do not, butterfly populations will continue to decline with every new house that is built. Instead of building a butterfly garden with aliens that will make no new butterflies, use a native species...