Butterfly gardening: Meeting the standard

Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand certification

September 2025

Why am I blogging about creating a butterfly garden? For several reasons. It is a vow that this new garden will benefit wildlife for many years, especially butterflies. It is a motivator when I'm cold, wet and covered in mud as I work on improving the environment. It is also a record of progress, which will come in very handy, because when it became apparent I would need to create a butterfly garden from scratch, I decided that I would aim for Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand (MBNZT) certification. To have such an aim will help keep me focussed, moving forward and ensure I am putting the right elements in place to create a safe and useful habitat.

So what do I need to do to achieve MBNZT certification?

Part of the butterfly house at certified West Lynn Gardens, Auckland

Criteria for certification

•  Privately owned or public space

• Outdoor landscape

• Host plants for at least three Lepidoptera species, suitable for the climate and conditions

• Nectar plants for all seasons

• Provides appropriate shelter

• Natural means to discourage predators and parasites

• Has water for puddling

• Established for at least three seasons (evidence needed: e.g. references, photos)

• Optional – to encourage interest and participation by visitors, signage (noticeboard, pamphlets, website or whatever) describing what species, and what host and nectar species were planted.

How am I doing against those criteria so far? It's a private garden and an outdoor space rather than an indoor butterfly house for tropical butterflies (although that sounds nice!) That's the easy part.

Host plants

Host plants are plants for caterpillars to eat, so this means naming specific species I am looking to attract and having the right plants for the larval stage. The first species is the monarch butterfly. That's a no-brainer. At my old house I had pots of tropical milkweed on the deck, acting like stepping stones between the two small garden beds on each side. You could sit outside with a drink on a sunny day and have monarch butterflies constantly flying past to get from plant to plant. It gave me and my family a lot of joy. I want my family to be able to once again sit amongst the monarch butterflies so I planted tropical milkweed brought from the old house as soon as I starting working on the garden here and have continued to plant more milkweed and swan plants.

A monarch butterfly feeding from the flowers of a tropical milkweed, February 2025

There are snail vines and sweetpeas for the long-tailed blue butterfly this season. Their caterpillars develop in the flowerbuds. There are two types of native nettle for the admiral butterflies planted in the top bush and, ahem, (talks behind hand, because they are banned) lots of pots of European nettles that I will keep until the native nettle patch is established. I have added two types of muelenbeckia, as these are host plants for the two local copper butterfly species. Planting for the coppers is a bit of a punt, because they usually like to be within sight of the sea, but there are inland sightings on iNaturalist and we are a few hundred metres uphill from the estuary, so I am hopeful.

I feel like I should really mention a moth species as well as butterfly species. However, there is a huge knowledge gap around the diets of the majority of New Zealand moth species and it will be hard to link sighting a moth species to plants I have specifically introduced to the garden. Moths will benefit from the bush restoration I am carrying out, but it will be easier to link butterfly sightings with the habitat I am creating. There were no butterflies in the garden bar cabbage whites last year until I had planted the trial butterfly garden, whereas I had seen around 50 species of moth before I started planting in the bush.

A yellow admiral butterfly laying eggs on nettle leaves, April 2025

Nectar plants

I have had a full year now with something always in bloom for the nectar feeders, thanks to the camellias and the ageratum, lantana, salvia waverley and strawflowers, which never completely stopped blooming through winter. It will really take another year or two for the newly planted butterfly-friendly flowers to all start flowering. Once I understand when they flower in this micro-climate, I can ensure there are butterfly-friendly plants all year round. I think I've got it covered.

Shelter

This is a really good question. This garden is in a high wind zone and the wind tends to swirl around. Because the griselinia hedge that curves along the south and south west of the butterfly garden is lower than the butterfly beds, it is not yet enough to protect the area. However, the canopy of the bush should continue to rise and additional camellia hedging on the north and highest side should help.

Discourage Predators

I have recently written about controlling non-native praying mantis by squishing their egg cases. Now fear my wasp nets! I leave $2 Shop fishing nets around the garden so wherever a wasp is spotted it can be caught and stomped on. Honestly, I am thinking of putting a retractable one in my work bag, so I can get any wasps I see on the drive walking to my car. I've seen a common wasp and an Asian paper wasp this week and I was weaponless. However, the German wasp was not so lucky. It was netted and stomped on.

The one that got away... A common wasp spotted this week in our shared driveway

Parasites are more relevant when raising butterflies in captivity. The butterfly castles are bleached each year to keep them healthy. At the old house I cut down the swan plants and milkweed every two years so diseases did not linger and this would likely help with parasites too.

Water

This is a work in progress. I need to do some work on the stream and establish whether this is a good enough source of water and minerals for butterflies. Probably for some of the year, yes. Butterflies need sun, but ideally woodland streams are shaded to prevent the water getting too warm, so there is a tension there. However, when the sun is higher in summer, more light will get through.

I added stones to the small water bowl in the border, to prevent insects drowning, but probably need to ensure they produce a level surface for butterflies to land.

The boggy area adjacent to the stream could also be a good puddling area

Established for Three Seasons

This year will be the second summer for the garden and it will only be coming into its own next summer. That will be the three seasons. The proof of the timeframe is this blog. It's the best way to show how the garden has progressed and the investment taken to create a long-term butterfly and moth habitat.

Encourage interest

This is really for those spaces that welcome the public, but I hope this blog does become a resource on creating a New Zealand butterfly garden to counter the wealth of information for US and European butterflies. With 90% of our butterflies and moths found nowhere else in the world (endemic), we need to have local information.

If you are interested in seeing what other gardens already have MBNZT certification, you can read more about them here.