The Art of Butterfly Gardening: How to Make Your Backyard into a Beautiful Home for Butterflies - Softcover

Butterfly gardening is the practice of attracting beautiful butterflies to your garden by growing common plants and flowers that they use for food and nectar. This fun and wonderfully simple activity will bring color, light, and beauty to your garden and home. With the relaxing and rewarding qualities of this outdoor hobby, it's not hard to see why it's sweeping the nation and growing in popularity. Mathew Tekulsky's The Butterfly Garden is a complete, step-by-step guide to gardening for butterflies. You'll learn about: The butterfly life cycle, habitats, and behaviors Choosing and obtaining food and nectar sources Designing your garden Options for country, suburban, and city gardens Fifty common garden butterflies and the plants they like Butterfly observation and conservation This guide will teach you everything you need to get started-whether you're a suburban resident, the owner of a small urban garden, an apartment dweller, or a keeper of a country estate, you can enjoy frequent butterfly visits to your garden or window box. The key, Tekulsky believes, is learning some basic knowledge of butterfly characteristics and behavior and knowing how to meet the needs of the butterfly species most common in your neighborhood. Not only is butterfly gardening one of the easiest ways to enjoy these enchanting creatures, but it's also a wonderful way to help conserve natural butterfly populations for generations to come. Learn how to create your own beautiful butterfly garden today!

Mathew Tekulsky is the author of Making Your Own Gourmet Coffee Drinks (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013); Backyard Birdfeeding for Beginners; The Hummingbird Garden; and The Butterfly Garden, among other books. He is also the author of "The Birdman of Bel Air," a column at NationalGeographic.com featuring essays about his birding experiences. His bird photographs have been published in field guides and have been displayed in galleries and museums.