How to attract butterflies to your garden
Provide food for caterpillars and choose nectar-rich plants for butterflies and you’ll have a colourful, fluttering display in your garden for many months.
Water vole by Terry Whittaker/2020VISION
Provide food for caterpillars and choose nectar-rich plants for butterflies and you’ll have a colourful, fluttering display in your garden for many months.
The yellow, star-like flowers of bog asphodel brighten up our peat bogs, damp heaths and moors in early summer, attracting a range of pollinating insects.
The delightful fragrance of wild thyme can punctuate a summer walk over a chalk grassland. It forms low-growing mats with dense clusters of purple-pink flowers.
The striking black-and-white checks of the marbled white are unmistakeable. Watch out for it alighting on purple flowers, such as field scabious, on chalk and limestone grasslands and along…
White dead-nettle does not sting. It displays dense clusters of white flowers in whorls around its stem, and can be found on disturbed ground, such as roadside verges.
A spring delight, the wood anemone grows in dappled shade in ancient woodlands. Traditional management, such as coppicing, can help such flowers by opening up the woodland floor to sunlight.
Brittle stars, sea urchins and other starfish will want to stay out of the way of this speedy carnivorous starfish!
A wildlife pond is one of the single best features for attracting new wildlife to the garden.
Yellow corydalis is a familiar 'weed' of gardens, walls and rocky places. It is a garden escapee in the UK, so is not a native plant. Try choosing natives for your garden to prevent…
Cross-leaved heath is a type of heather that likes bogs, heathland and moorland. It has distinctive pink, bell-shaped flowers that attract all kinds of nectar-loving insects.
Broom is a large shrub of heaths, open woodlands and coastal habitats. Like gorse, it has bright yellow flowers, but it doesn't have any spines and smells of vanilla.
A scrambling 'weed' of waste ground, fields and gardens, Common fumitory can be found on dry and disturbed soils. Its pink flowers appear over spring and summer.