About FlutterBy

Last updated: 18 September 2026

FlutterBy keeps two notebooks side by side. One is about butterflies: where each species flies, what its caterpillar eats, and which stage it spends the winter in. The other is about planting: what goes in the ground, in what order, and what to do in the second year after the first flush of flowers is over. This page explains what the site covers and how the material is put together.

What the site covers

The butterfly side is organised by family — swallowtails, nymphalids, whites, blues — and each entry is a dossier rather than an article. Every dossier carries the same six fields in the same order: wingspan, family, range, host plants, nectar plants, and a full account of the four life stages. Because the fields are fixed, two dossiers can be compared line by line, which is the point. A reader deciding what to plant does not need prose; they need to know which species are plausible where they live and which plants actually feed them.

The garden side is organised by the constraint a gardener cannot change: how many hours of sun the site gets, whether it floods, whether there is any soil at all. Each plan carries a plant list tagged as host, nectar or structure, a planting order, and an aftercare note aimed at the second year — which is when most pollinator plantings are abandoned.

How the records are made

Each dossier is assembled from field guides, regional checklists and recorded host-plant associations, then written in plain language. Wingspans are given as a range because they genuinely vary, and the range reflects the usual span of the species rather than the largest specimen ever caught. Bloom months are stated for temperate Northern Hemisphere gardens and will shift in other climates — treat them as sequence, not as a calendar.

The illustrations are drawn for this site rather than licensed. Each butterfly is a symmetric line drawing built from the actual wing proportions and venation pattern of that species: forewing sweep, hindwing tail length, the number of veins running to the margin, and the spot count all come from the species itself, so an eastern tiger swallowtail does not share a silhouette with a cabbage white. Each garden plan is drawn as a planting schematic — bed shapes in the order you would dig them, plants placed where they belong in the layout, and a north arrow, because a plan without an orientation is only half a plan. Nothing here is a photograph, and nothing is a stock image used twice.

What this site is not

It is not a pest-control guide, a pesticide reference, or a medical or veterinary source. It does not tell you what to spray, and it does not identify a caterpillar from your photograph so that you can decide whether to kill it. Species names and host-plant facts are given for planning and observation. Before applying anything to a plant, read the label and follow local rules.

Errata

Mistakes are corrected on the page itself rather than hidden. If you spot one — a wrong host plant, a range that is out of date, a bloom month that does not match your climate, a drawing that misrepresents a species — write to [email protected] with the page address and what you think is wrong. Corrections that come with a source are the fastest to act on, but a clear description of what you saw in the field is welcome too.

How the site is funded

Through advertising. There are no accounts, no newsletter and nothing to buy here, so ads are what cover the cost of the hosting. Advertisers have no say in what gets written or which plants get recommended.