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Butterfly dossiers and pollinator garden plans

The whole year of a butterfly, drawn wing by wing

FlutterBy keeps two notebooks side by side. One holds dossiers on individual species — where they fly, what their caterpillars eat, how they spend the winter. The other holds planting plans: what to put in the ground, in what order, and what to do in the second year when the first flush is over. Every plate on this site is drawn as a line illustration from the species' own proportions, not a stock photograph.

The brood line

Four stages, four species. Follow the line from left to right — each stage opens a dossier where that part of the life cycle is described in full.

卵

Egg

Laid one at a time, usually on the underside of the host leaf. A female may visit dozens of plants in an afternoon.

Monarch →

 幼

Caterpillar

The eating stage, and the only stage that decides where the species can live. Host plants matter more than flowers.

Black Swallowtail →

 蛹

Chrysalis

Not a resting stage but a rebuilding one. Some pupae wait a fortnight; others wait two winters.

Small White (Cabbage White) →

 蝶

Imago

The flying stage, and the only one most people ever see. Nectar plants written down here are the ones that actually pull it down out of the canopy.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail →

Latest dossiers

All species, by family →

Garden plans

All twelve plans →

What is in a dossier

Each species page carries the same six fields, filled in from the same set of sources, so two dossiers can be compared line by line: wingspan in centimetres, the family, the geographic range, the host plant the caterpillars will accept, the nectar plant the adults actually use, and a written account of the four stages. The identification section deliberately describes what to look for in the field rather than what a photograph shows, because the two are rarely the same — a butterfly seen against bark or in flight gives you a silhouette, a flight style and a wingbeat, not a colour plate.

A garden plan is organised the other way round. It starts from a constraint the gardener cannot change — how much sun the site gets, how wet the soil stays, whether there is any soil at all — and then works outward to a plant list, a layout order, and an aftercare note that says what to do in the second year, which is when most pollinator plantings are abandoned. Plant lists mark every species as either a host plant, a nectar plant or structure, because the two jobs are not interchangeable and most advice blurs them.

16 more dossiers and plans are already written and scheduled. They appear here on their release dates, roughly one a week. Nothing is held back behind an email form and there are no ad-only pages — if a page is listed in the sitemap, it has content on it.

Before you plant anything

Two things are worth checking first. The first is whether the species you are hoping for is actually recorded within a few kilometres — a planting for a butterfly that is not in your region will feed nothing, however good the plant list is. The second is whether the host plant you have chosen is native to your area. A native butterfly will often use a non-native relative in a garden, but it does so less reliably, and the difference is largest for the species with the narrowest tastes. If you only have room for one change, make it a host plant rather than another nectar flower.