Hartley Magazine

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One of the great joys of gardening – and of growing flowers in particular – is attracting all kinds of insects into your garden.

Butterflies are one group whose populations have been dwindling in recent years, and planting the right flowers can help to reverse this.

Use these articles to learn more about what you can plant and what else you can do to support your local butterfly communities.

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Children’s Butterfly Colouring Competition Entries

This competition is now closed – thank you for all the wonderful entries. The winner was Lucy Underwood, and the runners-up were: Elena Grace Harrison, Ebony Scott, Jasmine Price, Katie Underwood and Saara Hussain.  As we have entries being submitted in a variety of ways for our current Butterfly Awareness Children’s Colouring Competition, we decided […]

The Hartley Botanic guide to breeding butterflies

The life cycle of a butterfly can be seen as very simple compared with other forms of wildlife. For a butterfly, life starts with the caterpillar, continuing with the pupa stage and ending with the last stage – the actual butterfly. Depending on the species, breeding can be particularly hard, so it is important to know […]

How to help butterflies in your garden

For those that want to help the plight of the UK’s butterfly population, you can support many species of butterfly by encouraging them into your garden. If you want to do so, it’s important to know what kind of plants attract butterflies into certain areas. Adult butterflies will take and feed on nectar from a […]

Do pesticides affect butterflies?

There has been a long standing and increasingly one-sided debate over whether certain pesticides harm both butterfly and bee populations around the world. Since 1975, UK butterflies have faced long-term decline, with up to 70 per cent of species declining in occurrence, and 57 per cent declining in abundance. That said however, not all butterfly […]

Announcing our Children’s Butterfly Colouring Competition!

This competition has now closed. Thank you to all who entered. Entries can be viewed here. As part of our butterfly and wildlife awareness campaign, we are announcing the launch of our Butterfly colouring in competition! Starting on March 3, and ending at midnight on 3rd May 2016 , all you have to do to […]