Butterflies are everyone's favorite pollinators. Attracting them to the garden is easy: Grow flowers, and they will come.

To a butterfly, your garden is not just a pretty place; it's a habitat, and your colorful flowers are a nectar-rich source of sustenance. Many garden plants, including trees, shrubs and vines, are also host plants for butterfly larvae, fascinating caterpillars that, in time, pupate and emerge through metamorphosis to populate the garden with butterflies. When you plant both nectar and host plants, you're growing your own butterflies.

You don't need a big garden to enjoy the pleasure of many kinds of butterflies. A pot full of zinnias or cosmos will attract butterflies to a tiny patio garden. A window box planted with bright lantanas welcomes butterflies to a garden on a balcony in the big city. Urban or rural, beds filled with annual and perennial flowers, blooming in succession from spring through frost, will put you right on the stage for a fluttering pageant of butterflies. In gardens of any description, simply being able to follow the lifecycles of butterflies enriches your experience of the great outdoors.

When you plant flowers for butterflies, be bold. Large flowers, with big landing pads, are easy for butterflies to see, and they're great nectar sources. Daisies, coneflowers, lantanas, sedum, verbenas and black-eyed Susans all attract butterflies. Plant them in drifts of three or more plants, and butterflies will spot them from afar and sail in to sip eagerly from these handsome sources of nectar.

Garden phlox, a perennial plant with bold clusters of purple, pink or white flowers, is among the best butterfly plants. It is hardy and easy to grow, and it blooms for weeks in the heat of summer. Horticulturists at Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware made a two-year study of 94 different kinds of phlox that thrive in sun and shade, evaluating them for their garden performance and appeal to butterflies. They found that phlox Jeana, a strain discovered in Nashville, Tennessee, was the single most attractive to butterflies, but you can scarcely go wrong with any kind of phlox.

Anise hyssop, a good-looking perennial in the mint family, also attracts the lively attention of butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators. A single plant produces many flowering stems that stand quite tall in the tumult of a flower bed and bloom for months. They're hardy, undemanding, drought-tolerant plants. Long-blooming flowers, or an assemblage of different flowers that bloom from spring through frost, attract and maintain a thriving and varied butterfly population. Salvias, known for their long-lasting blooms, also earn high marks for their appeal to butterflies and hummingbirds. Ageratum, calendulas, and all kinds of daisy-flowered plants should be on your butterfly garden list. From late summer through fall, the purple flowers of joe-pye weed are covered with butterflies.

Milkweeds are critical flowers for butterflies, especially for the striking orange-and-black monarch butterflies, which lay their eggs on these plants. Milkweed is the only food their larvae eat. Without milkweeds -- including the brilliant orange-flowering butterfly milkweed Asclepias tuberosa -- there would be no monarchs. They bloom on and off throughout the summer, sustaining generations of butterflies and other pollinators. Milkweed plants can be found at native-plant nurseries, and they are not hard to grow from seed.

The flowers, trees and shrubs native to your region (and thus adapted to your climate and conditions) will naturally attract butterflies. Many species of aster, goldenrod, bee balm, lobelia, coreopsis, blazing star, ironweed and other natives flourish on the borders of farm fields and in the rough-and-tumble right-of-way of highways and country roads. Cultivars of these natives, chosen for their size, flower color or good garden behavior, are excellent additions to butterfly gardens.

When your garden includes host plants for caterpillars, it gives you an even deeper appreciation for the delicate butterflies they become. Voracious green-and-black-striped swallowtail caterpillars can decimate a parsley plant or a stand of fennel in no time, but watching them grow and emerge from the pupae as gorgeous swallowtails is worth losing a plant or two. To compensate in advance for any loss, simply plant more than you need.

The Xerces Society describes pollinators -- bees, butterflies, flies, beetles, moths, wasps and even some birds and bats -- as "the little things that run the world." They are "indisputably the most important animals on Earth," says the society, which works to conserve and protect butterflies and the other invertebrate pollinators. Like other pollinators, butterflies play a central role in agriculture, including backyard vegetable gardens. Butterflies and their caterpillars are an essential food for birds, which add yet another dimension to the beauty and interest of your garden. Remember, don't use pesticides in your butterfly garden: You will deprive yourself of much of the wonder of your garden's glorious show.

SOURCES

-- The Xerces Society (xerces.org) has lots of resources for gardeners on its website, including regional plant lists identifying the best nectar and host plants for butterflies and pollinators of all kinds.

-- The Mt. Cuba Center is a botanical garden in Hockessin, Delaware, with a special research interest in native plants and conservation. The center's reports on phlox, coreopsis, bee balm, coneflowers and asters are available on its website, mtcubacenter.org.

Great patio furniture makes your garden a delightful place to gather with friends. A garden bench is altogether different: A well-chosen, well-placed bench gives you a place all for yourself.

A garden bench is a finishing touch, like a feather in a hat, that completes a landscape. Benches help define spaces in a garden and complement its style. They offer irresistible destinations. Seen from the house, a bench beckons you outdoors. And once you're out there, a bench gives you the best of vantage points from which to admire the beauty around you, to rediscover your garden each day from a comfortable spot within its leafy embrace.

Making a place for a garden bench introduces an element of art and architecture into your landscape. Benches refine nature in an informal garden, and, in a formal space, they complement neat lines and clipped shrubbery. A cheerful painted bench is a bright spot in the dappled light of a shade garden. A fine, natural wood bench, aged to a soothing silver, helps tone down the riot of color in an exuberant cottage garden.

The earliest garden benches were nothing more than sturdy pieces of furniture brought outdoors for an afternoon in the sun, according to the late garden authority Rosemary Verey. Instead of having benches in the garden, most people borrowed from the house, or simply sat on the ground or on a low bank, Verey said, until the invention of the turf seat, which was basically a small raised bed planted with grass -- or, even better, with a fragrant herb such as thyme. Such benches would be a charming touch in an herb garden today, too, especially with an arch over the top, perhaps planted with morning glory or some other easy annual vine, to gracefully frame the space and provide a bit of shade.

In her book "Classic Garden Design," Verey traced the development and use of garden benches through history, exploring styles, colors and materials. The ideas of the past provide all kinds of inspiration for modern garden benches, but copying them isn't necessary. Stone benches suited to the grand estates of the past may seem out of place in modern gardens of any style. The palatial proportions of benches at English estates are intimidating by today's standards, but the careful craftsmanship of these fine old benches will never go out of fashion. Verey liked durable iron benches, and she was particularly pleased with a curved bench her husband made for her.

Today, garden benches do not need to be grand to be great. A gardener in Annapolis, Maryland, chose large boulders to use as benches in his garden, complementing rustic fences that define the garden's rooms. A boulder in the rock garden looks as though it was placed there by nature, and sitting on its smooth surface for a few moments lets you better appreciate the intriguing plantings all around.

A gardener in Virginia arranged two small benches facing each other in her courtyard, like a pair of sofas in a living room. The conversational placement takes perfect advantage of the proportions of the space.

One of the best known of simple garden benches was designed by the conservationist Aldo Leopold, author of "A Sand County Almanac," for his weekend house in Wisconsin. Leopold sat on his bench, made with six pieces of standard lumber, every morning as he drank his morning coffee and listened to the birds. He took notes as he sat there planning his day, but he did not linger -- the utilitarian bench has beautiful lines, but it is not relaxing for long.

There are no rules about where a bench should be placed, although a path to it is essential. It could be a final destination at the end of a long, meandering walk through a garden, or you may want to place a bench halfway into your garden, to entice you just far enough away from the house to escape for a moment of fresh air. It could be notched right into a flower bed somewhere along the way, where you can savor the flowers and fragrance. Or be practical: A bench beside the back door becomes a place to park tools or to change in and out of your garden shoes. A bench by the front door welcomes visitors and invites neighborly conversation.

Above all, a garden bench is a sign of good intentions. There's a chance you will not sit on it very often, or for very long, but just knowing it is there, ready for you when you find a moment, makes you feel connected to the garden. It's your reserved seat in nature.

Starting on a new flower bed can be a bit intimidating, but successful results are guaranteed if you put a little time into it before you ever pick up your trowel.

When you're planning a new bed -- whether it's a perennial garden or a mixed bed of trees, shrubs and flowers -- scrutinize your intentions first, says Heather Sherwood, senior horticulturist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. If you know what your overall goals are, it will help you make decisions about the design of the bed and its plantings. Ask yourself whether you're planting a garden bed to admire from afar, a flower bed you'll stroll along every day, or a screen of plants to block an unsightly view. Some flower beds can be approached from both sides and must be designed accordingly, and others you'll really only see from one angle.

Understanding these things about your new bed will help you to think about how big it should be and the scale of plantings within it, as well as to develop a color scheme.

Of course, your soil and conditions should be incorporated in this planning process before you start to dig.

"My big thing is choosing things for your soil," Sherwood says. You can improve any soil by adding compost before you plant, but don't expect plants that love sandy soil to thrive in clay, or the other way around. Work with the soil you have. The same applies to the conditions in your garden: If your bed will be in sun, you need to be looking forward to a garden full of plants that like a sunny spot. And if a flower bed is partly in sun and partly in shade, you'll have to vary your plantings so everything will thrive.

The first plants you choose for your bed should be the largest ones. "Go for the big stuff," Sherwood says. "Figure out what trees you want, or which shrubs. Make sure those are in place before you go into perennials or bulbs." Trees and shrubs are what really give your bed definition through the seasons.

Sherwood likes small trees in flower beds, things like fringe trees, crab apples and dogwoods. They have attractive spring blooms, give the bed architecture all year long and won't overpower the other plantings. Large shrubs, such as lilacs, serve the same purposes. "Remember the power of scale," she advises: Small trees will be magnificent specimens when planted in a narrow context. Trees that grow to less than 20 to 25 feet tall are big enough for most beds or borders.

Evergreens can also be part of the scheme: You could plant dwarf conifers, boxwood or yews, or perhaps a stalwart columnar yew to serve as an evergreen exclamation point among your plantings. If your bed is deeper than four feet, make room for stepping stones, too, so you'll be able to reach a spigot on the far side or walk among the plantings to weed and water when necessary.

Then, with the largest elements of the bed in place, start working on what's going to be growing around them. Put large perennials toward the back of a flower bed you'll see from only one side, or close to the middle of a bed you'll have a view of from both sides. Small-scale plants "should be planted closest to where your toes are," Sherwood says. Plant perennials in clusters of three or five plants, for plenty of impact, and repeat color elements throughout the garden. Repetition imparts rhythm, continuity and cohesion to your planting scheme.

It's exciting to be in a garden when everything is in bloom at once, but it's hard to sustain. In the best gardens, there's always something new happening. Peonies and daylilies come and go, each in their season, and coneflowers, salvias, phlox, black-eyed Susans and sedums, to name only a few, all have their turn in the sun. Include lots of plants attractive to pollinators, Sherwood recommends, and your garden will also be full of butterflies and bees.

If a new flower bed looks a little bare, you can count on annual flowers to fill in the gaps, especially in the first season. Annual salvias, zinnias, cosmos, marigolds and gomphrena bloom all summer long and into the fall. Some will produce seed and come back year after year, finding their own places in the garden.

Remember, part of the fun of any flower bed is watching it develop, and there will be plenty of chances to stand back and admire your handiwork. There's no hurry: If something doesn't seem quite right, make adjustments. Every garden grows and changes, and your own list of favorite plants will also evolve.

If you lose a plant to extreme heat or cold, consider it an opportunity to try something new. When small trees grow and create shade in spots that once were sunny, embrace the shade and the plants that thrive in it.

The planning and planting process is continuous, really, and so is the pleasure you'll have in your new garden bed.