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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent resource...
Review: BUTTERFLY GARDENING is a collection of interesting essays about butterflies. Chapters cover gardening tips, including an annotated list of plants that attract butterflies, and various other butterfly related topics such as: "What do butterflies see?"; "The struggle to survive"; "The life cycle of the large white butterfly"; and "Moths in the garden at night." If you love butterflies, you will probably enjoy this book but it won't go a long way toward helping you identify the Red Admiral you spotted on the Frikartii Aster yesterday. Another reviewer referred to this as a starter book, but I don't think of it as that at all although it does introduce a number of important topics. The book includes a few "designs" for butterfly gardens, but they are general, and you would do better to use the garden designs in THE AUDUBON BACKYARD BIRD WATCHER. Let's face it, where the birds are is where their dinner is and dinner for birds is often the larval stage of moths and butterflies. The plant lists in BUTTERFLY GARDENING are adequate. Certainly the best thing to plant is Buddleia..the butterfly bush. This morning I saw three Monarch butterflies on my lavendar flowered Buddleia. The bush also supports a Grandpa Otts morning glory vine which produces flowers that are a dark bluish purple which changes to a purplish magenta. The butterflies were flitting from flower to flower and the color combo was a knockout. This little book has much to recommend it. From BUTTERFLY GARDENING I learned the value of Parsley for larvae and that no matter how many butterfly boxes one hangs the little critters are visitors not tenants.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource...
Review: BUTTERFLY GARDENING is a collection of interesting essays about butterflies. Chapters cover gardening tips, including an annotated list of plants that attract butterflies, and various other butterfly related topics such as: "What do butterflies see?"; "The struggle to survive"; "The life cycle of the large white butterfly"; and "Moths in the garden at night." If you love butterflies, you will probably enjoy this book but it won't go a long way toward helping you identify the Red Admiral you spotted on the Frikartii Aster yesterday. Another reviewer referred to this as a starter book, but I don't think of it as that at all although it does introduce a number of important topics. The book includes a few "designs" for butterfly gardens, but they are general, and you would do better to use the garden designs in THE AUDUBON BACKYARD BIRD WATCHER. Let's face it, where the birds are is where their dinner is and dinner for birds is often the larval stage of moths and butterflies. The plant lists in BUTTERFLY GARDENING are adequate. Certainly the best thing to plant is Buddleia..the butterfly bush. This morning I saw three Monarch butterflies on my lavendar flowered Buddleia. The bush also supports a Grandpa Otts morning glory vine which produces flowers that are a dark bluish purple which changes to a purplish magenta. The butterflies were flitting from flower to flower and the color combo was a knockout. This little book has much to recommend it. From BUTTERFLY GARDENING I learned the value of Parsley for larvae and that no matter how many butterfly boxes one hangs the little critters are visitors not tenants.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent guide book
Review: I'm an up and coming butterfly gardener. This book had a great deal of information to share not only regarding what species of flowers to plant, but also about the life cycles of the butterfly and the importance of planting your garden for the entire life cycle - from egg, to caterpillar, to butterfly Discussion focused on butterfly/larva predators and how important they are to the cycle. Tips on photography, particularly in the dark were helpful. The pictures of the butterflies and flowers were exquisite! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and the information in it will go a long way in helping me create my dream garden.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent guide book
Review: I'm an up and coming butterfly gardener. This book had a great deal of information to share not only regarding what species of flowers to plant, but also about the life cycles of the butterfly and the importance of planting your garden for the entire life cycle - from egg, to caterpillar, to butterfly Discussion focused on butterfly/larva predators and how important they are to the cycle. Tips on photography, particularly in the dark were helpful. The pictures of the butterflies and flowers were exquisite! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and the information in it will go a long way in helping me create my dream garden.
Rating:
Summary: best butterfly gardening book!
Review: This book actually takes you past the very basic of plant lists (primarily US native plants) and arranging your garden (although it has all that too). It gets into things like a chapter on what butterflies see, their life cycles, butterfly watching tips, conservation, photography,pictures of caterpillars, etc. The photos are fantastic - not just pictures of butteflies on flowers but really close-up pictures of the wings, and butterflies in flight. They also include information on moths which is neat. This book is above and beyond the best book I've seen on butterfly gardening. For those who want to not only attract butterflies but also know what's going on and understand some of their world, this is a great book. I'd buy it all over again!!
Rating:
Summary: best butterfly gardening book!
Review: This book actually takes you past the very basic of plant lists (primarily US native plants) and arranging your garden (although it has all that too). It gets into things like a chapter on what butterflies see, their life cycles, butterfly watching tips, conservation, photography,pictures of caterpillars, etc. The photos are fantastic - not just pictures of butteflies on flowers but really close-up pictures of the wings, and butterflies in flight. They also include information on moths which is neat. This book is above and beyond the best book I've seen on butterfly gardening. For those who want to not only attract butterflies but also know what's going on and understand some of their world, this is a great book. I'd buy it all over again!!
Rating: 
Summary: Too much activist nagging, not enough focus on gardens
Review: This was a promising-looking book. It has a good number of very interesting butterfly pictures, attractive diagrams of bedding layouts, and photos of useful flowers. However, I was greatly disappointed by two things.
First, the personalities of the multiple authors intrude too much in the book. Not only do we read too much of "I" this and "my" that, but the potted biographies are sometimes much too long, self-regarding, and irrelevant. Are they promoting butterflies, or themselves?
Second, I quickly got the sense that the butterfly-gardening discussion is really a Trojan horse for environmental activism. It lectures repeatedly at the reader, when the reader feels like saying: "Stop trying to convert me! I bought the book, didn't I? I'm happy and willing to make a garden that butterflies might like, and that should be enough."
The moralizing starts with the preface, and continues with the introduction by E. O. Wilson. Wilson wags his finger at "prideful Homo sapiens," saying that people are mostly "indifferent or repelled by the generality of insects." Apart from stating that Homo sapiens has every reason to be proud of its accomplishments, I would like to add that people have (naturally) feared insects for excellent reasons: mosquitoes bring malaria, the West Nile virus, and other diseases; pests spoil crops and contaminate food; and the bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas in Europe in the mid-1300s, wiped out one-third of the human population. So don't lecture us about how we're just mindlessly prejudiced against insects (or anything else for that matter).
There are several books on this subject currently available. If you are looking for a book by garden-lovers, for the benefit of other garden-lovers, I would advise you to choose one of them. I would certainly recommend Attracting Birds and Butterflies by Barbara Ellis.
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