If you plan on being gone during the summer, invest in a device to turn the water on and off while you're gone or plan on getting a friend to water for you. Buy plants for butterflies. In designing gardens for butterflies, plan to have something in bloom from early spring until late fall. Different butterflies appear at different times throughout the warm months, and need to have something blooming for each species as it appears. Modern hybrid plants may not provide the food butterflies and other pollinators need.
All butterflies start off as caterpillars, and are quite fussy about what they eat.
No butterfly will stray very far from places where it can lay its eggs, so if you want butterflies you must also provide food for their caterpillars. The following list will pack a border six feet long by four feet deep. In two or three years you'll have to remove plants to make room for growth, but you can either make your garden bigger or give plants away to friends. This is a large, dramatic plant that can grow to more than four feet tall, so put it in the northeaster corner of the bed. It's somewhat shade-tolerant, so it should do well even if partly shaded by the mock orange or serviceberry.