The Other Half of the Butterfly's Life

A garden full of buddleia will pull in peacocks and painted ladies from half a mile around, and it is a genuinely lovely thing to sit and watch. But nectar only fuels the adult. If you want butterflies that live with you rather than simply drop in for lunch, you need the plants their caterpillars eat. Every species is fussy in its own particular way, and once you know the pairing, gardening for them becomes remarkably straightforward. The shift in thinking is small but important: stop treating one border as "the butterfly border" and start planning for the whole year, with a few scruffy corners left deliberately alone.

Nettles: the Best Scruffy Patch in the Garden

Stinging nettles in full sun are the nursery for some of our most familiar garden butterflies. A clump roughly a metre square is plenty. Cut it down in early June and again in late July: the regrowth is tender, and tender growth is exactly what females search out for egg-laying. Leave the cut stems in a heap nearby as cover.

• Peacock — lays batches of eggs beneath nettle leaves. The black, spiny caterpillars live together in a silk web before dispersing.
• Small tortoiseshell — same nettles, same sunshine, and often the first butterfly you will see in spring after hibernation.
• Comma — prefers nettles in slightly shadier, damper spots, often along a hedge or fence line.
• Red admiral — increasingly overwinters here, and uses nettles for its later generations.

Site the patch away from the washing line and the path to the shed, and it stops being a nuisance and becomes a feature. It will also feed the blue tits, which is a trade worth accepting.

Holly, Ivy and the Holly Blue

The holly blue rewards a little patience with hedges. It has two broods a year and uses different plants for each: holly in spring, ivy in late summer and autumn. A garden with a holly hedge and a mature ivy-covered wall offers both, and the butterflies will find it.

Do not clip ivy hard in July and August. It is easy to shear off the flower buds before they open, and with them the second brood's nursery plus a late-season nectar source used by red admirals and commas. If you must cut, do it in early spring. Brimstones use alder and purging buckthorn rather than holly — a shrub worth a corner if you have the space.

Long Grass, Trefoil and the Browns

If you can leave a strip of lawn unmown until late July, you have created habitat for the grass-feeding butterflies. The adults are modest browns rather than showstoppers, but they are charming and easy to encourage.

• Meadow brown, ringlet and gatekeeper — caterpillars feed on common grasses such as cock's-foot, Yorkshire fog and fescues.
• Speckled wood — dappled shade at the edge of a hedge or under a tree, again on grasses.
• Common blue and small skipper — bird's-foot trefoil in shorter, sunnier turf is what these need.
• Small copper — common sorrel and sheep's sorrel, often on rougher ground.

Mow in late summer or early autumn, after the adults have finished, and take the clippings away so the turf does not thicken and smother the wildflowers.

What the Adults Need: Nectar, Shelter and Water

To keep the cycle going, feed the adults too. Flat, open flowers are the most accessible.

• Spring: dandelions, bluebells, honesty, forget-me-nots and wallflowers.
• Summer: buddleia, lavender, marjoram, oregano, knapweed, scabious and thistles.
• Late season: ivy flowers, sedum, asters and single dahlias.

Double flowers are useless to them — the nectar is locked away behind too many petals. Leave a shallow dish of water with stones in it for drinking and minerals, and allow a few nettles, brambles and fallen leaves to linger for hibernation in winter.

A Season-by-Season Plan That Sticks

Start small and build. In spring, plant a metre of nettles in sun and put in holly or buckthorn if you have room. In summer, resist the mower on one lawn strip and watch what arrives. In autumn, cut the meadow and leave the ivy alone. In winter, do nothing at all — that is genuinely part of the work.

Allow three or four years. Populations build slowly, and a butterfly seen hunting for the right leaf is far better evidence of success than one simply nectaring on a buddleia. Once the caterpillars are fed, you stop renting your butterflies and start keeping them.