good rule for a butterfly garden is possibly ?no peacocks allowed?. When reporter Jessie Moniz visited the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo to learn how to create a butterfly garden, the peacocks had eaten all the butterflies.

Lisa Greene, collections officer and project co-ordinator at the Aquarium recently gave a talk about butterfly gardens at the Botanical Gardens.

?If someone wants to have a butterfly garden or, more broadly, they want to attract wildlife to their garden the butterflies are a great place to start,? said Mrs. Greene. If you want to attract local butterflies such as the the monarch, the yellow sulphur, the white cabbage, the buckeye or the gulf fritillary gardeners may have to make a few sacrifices, namely pesticides.

?You have to accept that your garden won?t be absolutely perfect, but the benefits are that you get these butterflies flying around and they are pretty,? said Mrs. Greene. ?Plus, you are supporting nature. Bermuda really needs that because we are becoming more urban all the time. With each generation we are becoming less connected to gardens and beyond that to natural Bermuda.?

She said if you let your garden go completely pesticide free, after about three years the natural balance reasserts itself, and beneficial insects start to control the bad ones.

?You would have some insect damage in your garden, but it would be a much healthier garden for you and your family to be in,? she said. ?I strongly promote that. Be patient.?

Mrs. Greene said that in Bermuda, any time is a good one to plant a butterfly garden. Local butterflies such as monarchs stay on the island all year round.

?They are probably laying eggs all of the year, but probably more so during the warmer months than the colder months,? she said. ?In the fall, if you wanted to attract migratory butterflies you would probably want to have in place plants that the butterflies are going to like in the fall.?

Mrs. Greene said the plants in the garden should provide a lot of nectar for the butterflies, and also give them a proper landing platform.

?There are certain types of flower structures that butterflies like such as lantana which has a nice big cluster of flowers with lots of little florets,? she said. ?Some of these plants we think of as weeds. It depends on what your main purpose is. If you are just going to attract butterflies to your garden then you are just going to have pretty flowers that will produce nectar.

?If you want to have the life cycle and have the butterflies produce the larvae and watch the larvae turn into a chrysalis and then emerge as a butterfly then you want to provide the specific food that local butterflies need. Those food plants would be specific for each type of butterfly. For the monarch it is milk weed. For the buckeye it is the plantain weed. Locals call it cats cradle. The sulphur butterfly likes cassia trees. The gulf fritillary feeds on passion flower, but not the red passion flower, for some reason. Then the cabbage white feeds on plants in the mustard family like cabbage and broccoli and mustards.?

Migratory butterflies such as the painted lady and the red admiral also visit Bermuda in the fall.

?They go all the way across the ocean,? she said. ?Some scientists have tagged butterflies, and found that they can travel tremendous distances. For example, scientists found that a North American monarch went from Canada and down to the Mississippi in 17 days which is 62 miles a day.?

She said the migratory butterflies probably fly the distance, but also drift on the wind.

?If you watch butterflies they really fly,? she said. ?They fly against what you would think they could fly against.

?I was out in a rowboat one day and there was a butterfly flitting across the water. There were waves and it was going up and down over them. It was pretty remarkable. They are better flyers than we would imagine. They are not quite as delicate.?

Stinging nettles are a source of food for one of the visiting species of butterflies.

?Making a butterfly garden can be is easy and it is quick,? she said. ?It can be very pretty. You don?t have to have any style of garden. You can have whatever style of garden you want, formal, informal. It doesn?t matter. It can just be a small area, a corner of your garden. It is also good for nature in Bermuda.?

The garden should also be a sunny place, but out of the wind.

She said it was an excellent way to help children connect with the natural world.

?They can actually see what is going on,? Mrs. Greene said. ?They can enjoy the butterflies coming through the flowers and learn about what they are doing.

?If you have the food source for the caterpillars then you can see the caterpillars going through their various stages and emerging as a butterfly. If they connect there then maybe they will get connected to other parts of nature.? She said some of the plants needed can be found in a gardening store, but others can simply be found growing wild.

?The milkweed grows pretty easy through seeds if you can find someone who will give it to you,? she said. ?I am not sure that the nurseries always sell milkweed seedlings. They have been seeding themselves amazingly these last two years. If someone you know has a butterfly garden they probably have lots of milkweed seedlings and they will give you some.?

Other plants that are good for butterflies include pentas, marigolds and even rosemary.

?I don?t know they have a sense of smell, but they are attracted to colour,? said Mrs. Greene. ?They have colour preferences. They like bright colour and they like something that has a good nectar source. There are a number of plants that will fit the bill there.?

She said if you want to attract birds to your garden you have to go a bit further by planting trees and giving the birds somewhere to roost out of the reach of cats.

?Toads will eat caterpillar larvae, particularly the monarch caterpillars for some reason,? she said. ?They seem to be immune to the poison. Monarchs are very specific to the milkweed plant, and the milkweed is poisonous. The monarch only lays its eggs on the milkweed plant. It lays an egg at a time. It will come and light on a leaf. You can see it curl its abdomen underneath and lay tiny eggs on the underside. The tiny caterpillar hatches out and proceeds to eat the milkweed. It is able to sequester the poison in its body. Monarchs don?t process the poison they hold on to it. Anything that eats them is effected by the poison.When they hatch out into a butterfly that poison is carried with them. Birds will have a go at a monarch and not want to eat them again.?

Other butterfly friendly plants include: nasturtium, goldenrod, daisies, salvia and Jamaican vervain, among others.