Flowers and foliage are not the only things that provide beauty in our gardens.  Our flying friends also enchant and entertain us when they grace us with their presence.  Butterflies, hummingbirds, songbirds and bees are all welcome visitors to Southern gardens bringing more color and movement to our already diverse environment.Very likely there are many things in your yard that already attract butterflies, birds and bees, but if you’d like to see more visitors, here are some things to keep in mind to make your yard a favorite in the neighborhood. 

Butterflies start out as caterpillars and as much as we hate to see anything eating our plants, if you want Butterflies in your garden from the beginning you need to be willing to sacrifice some foliage.  Although mature butterflies have certain flowers they favor, they feed from a wide assortment of nectar sources, however, the list of host plants for caterpillars is a bit more limited.  Some good hosts that we can grow in Georgia are Willow, Cherry, Violas, Hollyhock, Parsley, Dill, Snapdragon, and Butterfly Weed. Usually the caterpillars will cause minimal damage but occasionally they may completely strip a plant’s foliage, but the plants should be able to tolerate it and put on new growth later in the season.  By mixing these host plants in with other perennials, shrubs, or trees, the damage will be less noticeable than if you use only masses of host plants together.

When looking for nectar plants, butterflies are attracted to flat flower heads like Shasta Daisies, Yarrow, and Black-eyed Susans or narrow spikes with small flowers such as Catmint, Goldenrod, Lilacs, Chaste-tree, and Butterfly Bush. 

Besides flowers, consider providing some hardscaping for your butterflies.  A flat boulder with a slight indentation for a small amount of water to form a mud puddle provides both a place to sun and a water source for butterflies.

Hummingbirds are exciting visitors with their aerial acrobatics and their speedy flights that go by in a blur on to the next food source.  These tiny birds flap their wings an astounding 80 times per second when hovering at flowers, and that kind of action requires a lot of fuel. 

Red, pink, and orange are favorite colors to hummingbirds, but they feed at all colored flowers, so don’t feel like you are limited to hot colors in your garden to attract them.  The flower shape is also important to hummingbirds, they prefer tubular flowers.  This shape is more accessible to hummingbirds than to butterflies and bees, so the competition for nectar is often lower on flowers of this form.

Some hummingbird favorites are Heuchera, Hosta, Bee Balm, Lantana, Salvia, Petunia, Blueberry, and Canna Lily.  When planting to attract hummingbirds, make sure that you have masses of flowers that they can feed from since they have very high metabolisms and high energy needs. Also, keep in mind that they tend to be very territorial, so if possible make several hummingbird friendly areas in your garden to prevent fights over nectar sources.

They also enjoy misting water rather than deep water and like a clear path to flowers so that they can come in fast and zip away safely when finished.

Songbirds are a delightful addition to our gardens that not only bring color and movement but sound to the landscape.  The diets of birds are mainly made up of insects, seeds, and berries.  They also need shelter from predators, nesting sites, and water to make an area their home.  You can always go to your nearest hardware store and pick up bird seed and feeders (good luck keeping the squirrels out!) but you can also plant for birds so that if you forget to fill the feeder they will still find your yard hospitable. A few plants that provide both shelter and food are Hollies, Southern Magnolia, Eastern Red Cedars, Elaeagnus, Wax Myrtle, Ligustrum, and Mahonia.  Their evergreen foliage gives year round protection and their berries are great food sources.  If you want to attract birds, you need to have a garden that is not perfectly tidy.  Besides providing some places for birds to hide, it is important to let some flowers go to seed.  Some perennials that are great additions to the garden because they attract butterflies for nectar and birds if allowed to go to seed are purple coneflower, aster, and coreopsis.

Our final flying friend that we see in our gardens are the bees.  Before you cringe in fear and declare that bees are not welcome in your yard, remember that bees are a major contributing pollinator for not only our ornamental plants but also our agricultural crops.  They visit all types of flowers and without them we would have reduced production of berries, fruits, and seeds that we want to attract birds and some of the things we eat ourselves.  So, before you make them off limits, keep in mind the benefits they provide.