Plants That Attract Birds to the Garden

Do you love bird watching? Attracting birds to your yard means growing plants that attract birds and providing them with water sources. You can create your backyard bird sanctuary by adding native trees, shrubs, and flowers to your garden. Provide birds with what they need, and watch your yard come alive.

Attracting Wild Birds to the Garden with Plants That Attract Birds

Attracting wild birds to the garden and enjoying backyard birds is easy once you know which plants to include in your landscape that birds love. Native species of trees, shrubs, and flowers offer wildlife such as wild birds, butterflies, and insects food and shelter. As many habitats disappear under urban sprawl, backyard bird feeding becomes even more critical to preserve and protect many beautiful species.

What Plants Attract Wild Birds?

Birds need water, food, nesting sites, and places to hide from predators. Wild birds find what they need in the rural landscape. Nature provides a mixture of fields, mixed species forests, and water sources. As people have built on areas where wild birds once used as food sources and nesting sites, birds have been forced to seek sustenance elsewhere.

By providing natural habitats and native species in your backyard landscaping, you’re offering birds a welcome respite from urban sprawl and development, a place to go for food, and shelter for their young. Attracting wild birds to the garden is a fun hobby and adds even more enjoyment to the garden.

Aim for a Variety of Plants for a Backyard Bird Sanctuary

Planting a bird garden to create a backyard bird sanctuary enhances the natural landscape and provides plant sources of food, shelter, nesting materials and more for birds.  It takes its cues from the landscape surrounding the garden, enhancing and building upon what nature provides.

Luckily for the average backyard gardener, the habitat humans provide by planting lawns, gardens, and foundation plantings creates a landscape most birds enjoy.  Walls and fences provide perching places; foundation plants offer shelter, and garden plants provide food, nesting sites, and shelter. You don’t need a huge garden to attract birds; a small backyard is fine. 

Tips for Bird Garden Design

Bird gardens do not follow any one particular style. They may be informal, with simple flower beds and trees, or formal and meticulously clipped. While birds tend to prefer rough, ragged hedges and naturally shaped plants, they’ll still come for a visit if you love your topiary or your clipped box hedge.

Variety of Plants

The key to planting a landscape that birds love is variety. The ideal bird garden contains mature, tall, and short trees. The tall trees provide nesting and resting sites for birds and, depending upon the tree, perhaps nuts and seeds, too.  

But here’s the best part about planting a garden to attract birds: birds don’t care whether it’s your garden or your next-door neighbor’s garden. They fly where they will without regard to boundaries, fences, or property lines.

Plants That Attract Birds: Grow Native Trees

Native trees, shrubs, and flowers offer good food sources for birds. Such plants often thrive where other species struggle because they’re uniquely suited to the local climate, soil and other conditions. Check with your local County Cooperative Extension office for lists of native species that thrive in your area. Some suggestions for U.S. Zone 7 are offered here.

Native Trees to Support Wild Birds

Suitable native species of plants to attract wild birds and create a backyard bird sanctuary include:

• American beech (Fagus grandifolia)
• Aspen (Populus tremuloides)
• Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana)
• Birch (Betula spp.)
• Bayberry, blackberry, and other berry bushes such as raspberry, blueberry (Various species)
• Cherry (Prunus spp.)
• Crabapple (Malus spp.)
• Dogwoods (Cornus spp.)
• Elderberry (Sambucus spp.)
• Fir (Abies spp.)
• Holly (Ilex spp.)
• Juniper (Juniperus spp.)
• Oak (Quercus spp.)
• Pine (Pinus spp.)
• Serviceberry (Amelanchier spp.)
• Spicebush (Lindera benzoin)
• Viburnum (Viburnum spp.)
• Willow (Salix spp.)

Avoid planting shrubs such as nandina, which looks pretty but has berries that can be dangerous to certain birds, such as the cedar waxwing.

Annual and Perennial Flowers to Attract Birds to Your Yard

Many birds enjoy eating seeds from annual and perennial flowers. Some flowers provide nectar to birds, such as hummingbirds, who feed using their long, thin beaks. Such birds sip nectar from tube-shaped flowers and rely upon nectar for their energy. Others, such as goldfinches, enjoy nibbling seeds from the seed pods of such flowers as Echinacea.

Choose from the many annual and perennial flowers and ornamental grasses for your backyard bird sanctuary. These are surefire plants that will attract birds to your yard.

Annual Flowers

• Amaranthus (Amaranthus spp.)
• Bachelor Button (Centauria cyanus)
• Calendula (Calendula officinalis)
• Coreopsis (Coreopsis spp.)
• Cosmos (Cosmos spp.)
• Gloriosa daisy (Rudbeckia hirta)
• Love in a Mist (Nigella damascena)
• Marigolds (Tagetes spp.)
• Pinks (Dianthus spp.)
• Portulaca (Portulaca spp.)
• Sunflowers (Helianthus spp.)
• Zinnias (Zinnia spp.)

Perennial Flowers to Attract Birds

• Aster (Aster spp.)
• Black Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia spp.)
• Butterfly Flower (Asclepias tuberosa)
• Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum spp.)
• Columbine (Aquilegia spp.)
• Coreopsis, perennial types (Coreopsis spp.)
• Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)
• Perennial grasses (Various species, as there are numerous types of perennial grasses)

Water and Shelter

Water Features: Bird Bath or Pond

Add a small water feature to finish your backyard bird sanctuary and attract wild birds to the garden. A concrete bird bath, a shallow pool of water, or, for the more adventurous, a pond, offers birds fresh water for bathing and drinking.

If you live near a water reclamation area or sump, they’ll enjoy it as if it were a lake, and use it as their water source. If you have a park within a few miles, they’ll take advantage of the mature trees in the park for nesting sites and visit your feeder for seed.

Bird Houses

A birdhouse isn’t necessary but adds to the enjoyment of backyard bird watching. A bluebird house in rural areas placed on a south-facing fence post, especially in a field or near a field where the bluebirds can feed on insects, offers an attractive nesting site.

No matter how big or small your garden is, you can create a backyard bird sanctuary by adding a mixture of native plants, including trees, shrubs, and flowers, a bird feeder, and a small water feature. However, be sure to add this last item: a comfortable chair for bird watching. As surely as the birds love your backyard bird sanctuary, you’ll love resting in your beautiful garden and watching their playful antics.

My Garden: It’s for the Birds!

I live in a beautiful rural area with plenty of native trees and shrubs to support wildlife. However, we did add many features to attract birds. These features include a small pond, bird baths, bluebird houses, and many native annuals and perennials.

I also hang bird feeders, including this tube feeder and a suet feeder, near the windows so that I can see the birds close up.