With careful planning you can increase your chances of having butterfly visitors by diversifying your landscape and creating a garden with a wide variety of plants providing continuous bloom of nectar-producing flowers throughout the summer. The second challenge of butterfly gardening is to plan and plant the landscape for the purpose of raising butterflies from caterpillars. Raising butterflies from caterpillars in your garden often requires a major change in attitude. Caterpillars have chewing mouthparts and they must eat plant foliage as their food source. Such tolerance is not for everyone.
Caterpillars feed on foliage of trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and weeds.
Some kinds of caterpillars are picky eaters that will eat only one kind of plant. The well-known monarch butterfly, for example, only grows where milkweeds are available. Other caterpillars can survive and grow on any of several different host plants. For example, the caterpillar of the attractive tiger swallowtail can be found on the foliage of cherry, ash, birch, cottonwood, willow or lilac. Resources Raising butterflies in your garden requires you to learn which plants are necessary for the caterpillars of butterflies common in your area.