Monarch butterflies have been in the news lately, but for all the wrong reasons. Loss of habitat has led to a precipitous drop in the monarch population. The brilliant orange-and-black monarchs are our most widely recognized butterfly, but they need our help.

It's easy to make a welcoming spot for them -- and for all butterflies -- in your garden: Plant the flowers they love. When you plant flowers that provide for their needs, you're essentially growing your own butterflies.

"We tell everybody we talk to that there are things they can do to help monarchs -- and what's good for monarchs is good for pretty much every pollinator," says Katie-Lyn Bunney, coordinator for the Monarchs in the Classroom program at the University of Minnesota's Monarch Lab. "The first thing we recommend is to plant milkweeds."

For monarchs, the most important function of milkweeds is as a host plant for the caterpillars: Milkweed is the only food monarch caterpillars eat. Many other pollinators also favor its nutritious nectar.

Milkweeds were once common roadside plants. They were plentiful in the margins of farm fields and in the wide-open spaces of rural areas. Development has claimed the habitat of milkweeds in many areas, and modern farming practices do not leave much room for anything but cash crops. Bit by bit, it has added up to a disaster for the monarch.

Home gardeners in cities, in suburbs and in the country can take an important part in this environmental rescue project: Many milkweeds are also terrific garden plants. The orange-and-yellow blooms of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) are particularly striking, and it is easy to grow.

The "Bring Back the Monarch" campaign of Monarch Watch, another program dedicated to restoring butterfly habitat and reviving the monarch population, is working to restore 20 important milkweed species to their native ranges throughout the United States. The campaign, which started in 2010, is launching a "Milkweed Market" this year to help gardeners find appropriate milkweed species for their area. In the process, they're promoting healthy habitats for all pollinators.

Milkweeds are crucial, but, Bunney says, "for anyone looking to plant a pollinator or butterfly garden, you want to make sure there is nectar throughout the gardening season. If you only have some flowers in June or July, then you're not going to have butterflies all through the season." Plan ahead, and try to grow flowers to attract butterflies from the first spring bloom until the last flower succumbs to frost. Bunney recommends other native plants, too. Growing black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, coneflowers and asters -- lovely garden plants all -- is a great way to get started on a butterfly garden. Many summer annual flowers, even if they are not natives, also attract butterflies. Butterflies love zinnias as much as most gardeners do.

Good garden design benefits butterflies and other pollinators. Butterflies are attracted to plants growing in clusters, and garden designers often recommend the same technique: When you plant three or five plants of one species in a group, they have more visual impact. "Bright blotches of color are good," Bunney says.

Butterflies also need shelter. Tall shrubs, fences -- anything to break the wind -- will make life a little easier for butterflies. You could mix tall flowers, such as phlox or milkweeds, with low mounds of verbenas, for example, to create layers of nectar-rich flowers and at the same time provide some protection from wind. Planting densely also makes it easier to care for plants, and it helps shade out weeds.

You don't have to have a big garden to capture butterflies' attention. Alan Branhagen, director of horticulture at Powell Gardens, a botanic garden just outside Kansas City, worked with a local wholesale nursery this year on a design for a small and easy butterfly garden, using just three plants: butterfly milkweed, tall verbena and parsley. You could plant these together in a flowerpot, in a flower bed by the front door or at a garden gate. Parsley and other plants in the parsley family are the preferred food for swallowtail butterflies.

Branhagen designed another, more elaborate butterfly garden with purple coneflowers, catmint, Joe-pye weed, blazing star and black-eyed Susans.

It only takes a few plants to make a difference, because your friends and neighbors will be inspired by your pretty butterfly garden, Bunney says. If you join one of the monarch-support groups and post an official-looking sign designating your garden as a waystation for monarchs, "it gets people thinking about what they can do in their own garden," she says. "They will see there is a purpose to this." Before you know it, the neighbors will be making room for colorful butterfly-garden plants, too. The whole neighborhood will look the better for it, and you will be giving local and migrating butterfly populations a big boost.

SIDEBAR

KNOW YOUR MONARCHS' MIGRATION PATTERNS

The monarch butterflies we see in central and eastern North America migrate up from Mexico every spring. The journey begins when the temperature warms up enough for the first nectar plants to come into bloom. The butterflies breed as they travel north. Each monarch only lives for between two and six weeks, but, between April and August, four successive generations of monarch butterflies will have carried on the journey north. In the fall, the migration is back toward the mild climate of Mexico, where one generation overwinters.

West of the Rocky Mountains, monarchs migrate to locations along the Pacific coast. Hosts for the caterpillars and nectar plants for butterflies are crucial to both regional migrations at every stage of the monarchs' life cycle.

Monarch butterflies are "a flagship species. They are well-known and beautiful and people love them," says Katie-Lyn Bunney, who works with the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota. But all pollinators benefit from the effort to protect and restore monarch habitat, she says.

SOURCES

-- Monarch Joint Venture (monarchjointventure.org) is a good place to start learning more about the importance of monarch butterflies and other pollinators. The site includes links to many monarch and pollinator web sites, and it supplies butterfly garden ideas, lists of plants and places to find them.

-- Monarch Watch (monarchwatch.org) hopes to distribute thousands of milkweed seedlings this year through its Milkweed Market; if you do not know of a source for milkweed in your area, this website will help you find milkweed plants nearby.

-- Grow your own butterfly garden and have it certified as a Monarch Waystation through the Monarch Watch program. Almost 8,000 waystations have been registered. The organization also sells a waystation seed kit with tips and ideas, and a monarch waystation sign to display in your garden.

-- Monarch Lab (www.monarchlab.org) is a particularly rich site full of resources for teachers, students and schools.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com or the Universal Uclick Editorial Department at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)

Vegetable gardens don't have to be huge to be productive. The real measure of success is being able to nip out into the garden to pick fresh food when it's just at its peak.

My friend Henry, an "old geezer" in his own words, has a smallish backyard garden these days, but years ago he lived on a farm, and "when I needed more room for crops, I just put a plow on the tractor and plowed up more space," he says. He still grows lots of different crops, but on a scale that requires neither plow nor tractor. He grows all he needs, and no more. During the gardening season, he and his wife eat produce from their garden every day.

There's an art to getting the most out of a small vegetable garden. It involves being realistic about the space available, how much time you have and, of course, what you like to eat. When you concentrate your efforts on a few crops you love, taking care of the garden is not a chore.

"If you have a small space, you want to plant things that don't take up a lot of room and have a big return," says Renee Shepherd, owner of Renee's Seeds. Plant your favorite herbs, she says, grow compact varieties of your favorite vegetables, and grow upward: Let cucumbers, melons and squash plants climb a trellis to make the most of the space and light.

"You can have a wonderful kitchen garden of the things you like to eat, and you can plant it for spring, summer and fall," she says.

Size is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Don Schreiner, a gardener in Overland Park, Kan., has six raised beds, each 6 feet by 6 feet, with room for tomatoes, lettuce, okra and beets. An entire raised bed is devoted to basil. But even just one bed, 4 feet on a side, will produce an impressive harvest of beans, greens and tomatoes. You can grow lettuce, eggplant, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers in flowerpots on a patio. In a window box on a balcony, you have plenty of room for carrots and arugula.

When space is limited, try to make your choices count, Shepherd advises. If you grow beets, you can eat both the roots and the tender leaves. Lettuce is easy and prolific, which is good, because you'll be eating it just about every day. Swiss chard and other greens produce over a very long season, so you get a lot of bang for your buck. Let your herbs bloom, Shepherd says. "If you want butterflies in your garden, that's an easy way to attract them."

Mark Gawron is in charge of the Heartland Harvest Garden, a 12-acre landscape devoted to all things edible, at Powell Gardens outside Kansas City, Mo. Inspiration is cultivated here in abundance. This year, Gawron is planning to show off the many ways small-space gardeners can take advantage of trellises and arbors: "We're going to do hanging melons; it's great for small spaces." Melon plants grown on trellises produce smaller fruit than melons that sprawl, he says, but more of them.

Edible pansies, calendulas or nasturtiums add lots of color and texture to a small-space garden, Gawron says, and they especially make front-yard vegetable gardens "appealing to your eye, and to your neighbor's." Shepherd recommends cosmos and zinnias. Gawron recommends growing lettuce as an edge in a flower garden, and slipping a few broccoli plants in among the daisies. "No space is too small. You will be surprised by how much you can grow," he says.

Small vegetable gardens are naturally easier to take care of than big plots. There is not as much room for weeds, and the weeding -- which is inevitable, no matter what -- takes much less time than you'd expend on a big garden. It's easier to manage pests, too: When you have only six broccoli plants, picking off a few caterpillars is no big deal. In a 30-foot row of broccoli, it can be overwhelming.

To get the most out of small gardens, you still have to give plants room to grow. It's easy to convince yourself that more plants will produce more harvest, but that's not always true, according to Shepherd. "If you don't thin your seedlings, you are torturing them," she says, "and they will never grow as vigorously."

Soil enriched with compost provides basic nutrients and micronutrients, but crops still need fertilizer, even in a flowerpot, Shepherd says. "Just a couple of times in the summertime will make a very big difference in productivity."

One of the most satisfying things about a small vegetable garden is the thrill of watching something grow from the time you plant the seed until you put it on your plate. When you start with a seed, "seeing it germinate is always a miracle," says Shepherd, "and then having it grow into a big plant makes you feel self-sufficient and self-reliant like nothing else can." The harvest from a small garden is a big deal.

Sources:

-- Renee's Garden Seeds, www.reneesgarden.com, includes many varieties chosen especially for small gardens. Look for the flowerpot symbol.

-- Gardener's Supply Co., www.gardeners.com, sells planters, raised beds and supplies for patio, deck and small-space gardens.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com or the Universal Uclick Editorial Department at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)

Obelisks make a good point. They're an ancient garden ornament with plenty of modern style.

Obelisks give a garden a lift; they're monumental exclamation points that capture your eye and attention and help organize a space. Although the world's most famous obelisks -- Cleopatra's needles and the Washington Monument, among them -- are not exactly on the scale of garden ornaments, the dramatic form adapts very gracefully to gardens of every size.

Technically, an obelisk is simply a pointed stone pillar, but this basic definition has been broadly interpreted. Garden obelisks can be constructed of almost any material. Unlike a garden tepee for beans or peas, which is usually put together with just three tall stakes held together at the top, an obelisk is a sturdier construction, with a strong architectural presence in the garden. They are the perfect finishing touch.

A pair of obelisks at a garden gate have the stately bearing of sentries, but you don't need two: a single tall obelisk, standing proudly in a flower bed or at the bottom of a path, strikes a resounding and unifying note in a garden. Obelisks at the outer corners of a patio provide a subtle sense of enclosure, and they need not be tall to have this effect: by their very presence and uniformity, they lend a certain momentum, like chess pieces on a board, to even a simple setting.

Garden obelisks were perhaps at the height of their popularity in the 17th century, when Andre Le Notre, the great landscape architect of the palace of Versailles, set a pair of them at the gates to the French king's extravagant country estate. Within the gates, topiary obelisks held strategic echoing positions in the artful parterres. In the 17th and 18th centuries, trellis-work obelisks were used extensively in clipped and controlled Dutch gardens. Garden historians describe obelisks as "practically ubiquitous" in 18th-century English and Irish gardens, where stone obelisks framed the views. They were often engraved with commemorative inscriptions.

From European gardens, obelisks moved to America, where they took up residence especially in cemeteries. One theory about their popularity is that obelisks had a much smaller footprint and were less expensive than more magnificent monuments. Another is that obelisks evoked the great civilizations of classical antiquity to which the young nation was very eager to compare itself. They also had space for engraving on four sides, and were thus sensible choices for family plots.

In a graveyard, obelisks appear solemn and perhaps a little mournful; in a garden, they are certainly dignified, but not always quite so serious. In a tiny backyard in Virginia, a designer erected a rustic fieldstone obelisk at the back of his garden and topped it with a shimmering golden ball, like something out of a fairytale. Another gardener set tradition aside and topped her 10-foot obelisk with a charming birdhouse. Topiary obelisks of clipped boxwood, yews or other naturally slender evergreens, grown in ranks or as solitary punctuation points in a garden design, are living obelisks that need little attention. They become more and more commanding as they grow to their full height.

Wrought iron or wood obelisks are often put to work as three-dimensional trellises for clematis, annual vines, beans or tomatoes. They're great for clambering roses and evergreen honeysuckles because lanky growth can be confined within their tidy framework while the blooms shine through the structure. Small obelisks, designed to fit in big flowerpots, let you bring vining plants such as mandevillas up onto a porch, where you can appreciate their flowers up close.

Even if you're not very handy with tools, making your own obelisk is an easy project, well worth a few weekend hours. My husband and I downloaded plans from the Internet -- many styles and designs with pointed or square tops are available for free -- and made two obelisks last summer, a small one for a cucumber vine in a big terra-cotta pot, and an 8-foot-tall obelisk for a place of prominence in the middle of the garden. Once we had our materials together, it took us most of an afternoon to complete the job, but we took plenty of breaks to appreciate our progress. Both obelisks were an instant success, standing tall in the summer garden.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com or the Universal Uclick Editorial Department at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)