ATTRACTING hummingbirds and butterflies to your garden can bring a sense of delight.
Said to be nature’s perfect helicopters, hummingbirds, often heard by their hum before they are seen, are attracted to tubular-shaped flowers.

Their feather colours are a combination of brilliant irridescents and metallics; their beaks are needle-like in shape, and they have extremely strong chest muscles that account for 30 per cent of their body mass.
These muscles enable them to roll their shoulder joints back, and, using their wing tips projected in a flat figure of eight, they hover.
Hummingbirds establish the extraordinary feat of recording 200 beats per second in the same manner of a variable-pitch rotor on a helicopter. By slightly altering the wing angle, they can move forward, backward, or sideways, and can perform upside-down manoeuvres with ease. Only 328 kinds of hummingbirds can hover.
Hummingbirds don’t have a sense of smell, but are attracted to colours: Bright reds, pinks, and oranges. Hummingbirds enjoy flowering, nectar-rich plants. Zinnias are a great attraction for hummingbirds, while the Morning Glory is one of the vines that attract them.
Many hummingbirds are opportunistic feeders, which means they will visit a flower as long as it has nectar, the flower doesn’t have to be tubular or red.
Hummingbirds are a gardener’s friend, as many a horticulturist will attest. Hummingbirds feed on insects such as mosquitoes and aphids.  They glean the insects from the barks of trees or from foliage; and other times they would dart to and from a perch to feast on a cloud of mosquitoes.

The butterfly
There is no more delightful decoration for a garden than nature’s own: The butterfly. On a warm sunny day, butterflies provide colour and motion that most gardeners agree doubles the pleasure of gardening.
Gardening enthusiasts can be thankful that it takes very little effort to make the yard attractive to butterflies! Butterflies like bright, sunny areas, and are particularly attracted to hot-coloured, fragrant flowers. The flower nectar they need for energy is available in lots of different flowering plants.
Butterflies will visit your yard in search of those plants that are most easily accessed by their long, coiled tongues, or proboscis, which enables them to reach deeply into the centre of flowers, where the glands that produce the sweet nectar are located.
Butterflies get further nutrition from moisture from puddles and raindrops, rotting carrion and other liquids. It is even said that human perspiration — if you stand very still– provides traces of minerals and nutrients not found in nectar.
The best butterfly blooms are composites, umbels, and panicles, whose clusters of small florets provide butterflies with many sips plus a place to pause. These include flowers that are brightly coloured in lavender, purple, red, orange and yellow; or are flat or tubular in varied lengths, and are fragrant, particularly single-flowered types, where the nectar is more accessible.
Flowers that attract butterflies include zinnias, lantanas, marigolds and sunflowers.