5 Orange Flowers with Butterfly Powers
Orange Blooms that Bring Home the Butterflies
Would you like to add orange ambience to your butterfly garden? If so, there are wonderful floral options to satisfy both you and your monarch guests.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the dwindling monarch population over the past two decades. As gardeners, we have a great opportunity to help save the monarchs, while making our butterfly garden dreams come true at the same time!
All of the orange flowers pictured below have long bloom periods to maximize potential visitors to your abode. Try one or more to start your butterfly garden party for monarchs and other beneficial pollinators…
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1. Cosmos sulphureus (cosmic orange cosmos)
These blaze-orange beauties are an easy-to-grow annual. These compact cosmos attract monarchs, other butterflies and bees. Blooms repeatedly with deadheading.
2. Tithonia rotundifolia (Mexican Sunflower)
A must-plant annual for North American butterfly gardens. Click the link above to discover other pollinators attracted to this glorious orange giant.
3. Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed)
A long blooming native milkweed best known for its ability to attract a wide variety of butterflies and beneficial pollinators. The only milkweed species with orange flowers.
4. Pseudogynoxus chenopodioides (Mexican flame vine)
This fast-growing climbing vine is a perennial for USDA hardiness zones 9 and above, but you can pot them to be overwintered in colder zones. The photo below is my second year plant which will start blooming before July…in Minnesota! If fertilizing, use a phosphorous-based fertilizer to promote flowering.
5. Buddleja hybrid (‘orange sceptre’ butterfly bush)
A hybrid butterfly bush with beautiful orange flowers that attract butterflies and hummingbirds from early summer through first frost…cold hardy to zone 8.
For a whole rainbow of garden flowers check out our butterfly plants page
i’m trying 3 butterfly weed, asclepias tuberosa (orange/yellow mix flowers) in a sunny border that gets watered with the lawn. i’m in zone 5-6. what do think my chances are? do i need to fertilize? when and with what? do you think they’ll spread if i don’t bind the pods? that would be fine with me.
thanks, barbara
Hi Barbara, many factors contribute to the success/failure of milkweed but your spot sounds like it should work. You can fertilize with a general all-purpose fertilizer, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Here are some we’ve used over the years:
Butterfly Garden Fertilizers
We have a plant called a bird of paradise, blooms are orange and yellow, they attract butterflies. Do know this plant?
Hi Bud, I have heard of it, but haven’t tried growing it in our northern climate. Thanks for your report!