Having butterflies SWARM to your landscape is incredibly beneficial and visually rewarding! Using these plants will bring those beauties into your garden along with other desirable garden creatures such as bees and hummingbirds. Monarchs, Buckeyes, Sootywings, Skippers and Cabbage Whites are among the more popular butterflies in California. Providing a habitat for them helps the ecosystem and is incredibly enjoyable to watch as they taste nectar and lay eggs.
Here are the plants we discuss in this video.
Buddleia, commonly known as Butterfly Bush is aptly named. Butterflies will LOVE this gorgeously profusely flowering shrub. Large cone-shaped blooms appear in Spring and last for several weeks, bringing in butterflies and honeybees. Mosts Buddlia species are in USDA zones 5-10. These are fantastic drought tolerant plants.
Lantana is the next beautiful butterfly-attracting shrub we discuss. They come in a variety of flower colors from deep right reds to bright whites and vibrant golds. They are incredibly drought tolerant and very hardy. Lantana is used widely throughout Southern California because of it's incredible attributes as a landscape shrub. It's also used to stabilize hillsides and blanket areas that may be tough to grow other plants.
Salvia clevelandii, or Cleveland Sage, is another CA native plant that will bring those winged-beauties to your yard. The flower is a gorgeous lavender color with multiple flowers along a tall stem. The foliage is scented and smells amazing after a rain. These plants have long-lasting blooms and are very drought tolerant once established.
And lastly, Ceanothus Yankee Point. Another wonderful California native plant with incredible lilac colored blooms. This plant is a lower mounding ground cover spreading to about 10' wide. It has deep right green foliage and is very drought tolerant once established.
All these plants will work in harmony together to create an incredibly beautiful plant palette, and will of course attract many beautiful butterflies to your landscape.
A few other honorable mentions that did not make it into the video but still have butterfly attracting blooms...
Coyote Mint (Monardella villosa)
Sticky Bush Monkeyflower (Mimulus aurantiacus)
Yarrow (Achillea)
Toyota Brush (Baccharis)
Manzanita (Arctostaphylos)
Seaside Daisy (Erigeron glaucus)
...and MANY other!
Thanks for watching...and Happy Planting!
-Dom
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Music Credit
Original music (Intro)
Dominic Masiello
Sam Barsh
Olive Sampler
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Daniel Musto
Doesn't Matter
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Pala
Magic Mountains
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Purple People Tweeter
New Wave Sounds