If you love butterflies, you should consider creating a garden full of flowers that attract these beautiful creatures. Along with the flower garden, create a nice pathway to your flowers using stamped concrete. Place a bench at the end of the pathway for a place to sit, and you will have the perfect place to sit back and relax after a busy day.

Flowers

Butterflies love to drink nectar, which is a sugary, sweet liquid that is produced in many flowers, such as golden rods, Russian sage, Black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums, and lilacs.

One flower species that butterflies also enjoy is the milkweed. This is because they not only get the delicious nectar from this plant, but it also makes their bodies poisonous to their predators.

There are many different types of milkweed plants you can choose including:

• Butterfly weed
• Common milkweed
• Purple milkweed
• Asclepias verticillata
• Asclepias incarnate

Visit a garden center in your area to learn more about these flowers.

Stamped Concrete Pathway

You can use stamped concrete to mimic weathered wood, cracked earth, brick, and cobblestones. You can also have a lot of fun using different patterns, such as animal shapes, flower shapes, butterfly shapes, and leaf patterns. Use butterflies on a few stamps, and flower shapes on some other stamps. You can design it anyway that you want using a variety of colors.

Once the concrete is poured and smoothed out, the stamp is pressed onto the surface of the concrete while it is still soft and wet. Color can be added to the concrete when it is being mixed, or color can be sprayed onto the surface after it has been stamped. A release agent is sprayed onto the patterned side of the stamp so concrete will not stick to it.

You can use a tamping tool or step directly onto the stamps with your foot to press them onto the concrete surface. You can make the pathway look unique by using different sized shapes and patterns.

If you do not have experience stamping concrete, you should consider hiring a concrete contractor to do this for you. Make sure they are experienced in stamping concrete, however. If not done correctly, it would be expensive to remove the pathway so you could start over again. If you have a very small pathway, you could purchase ready mix concrete in bags at a home improvement store, and likely stamp it yourself.

To learn more, contact a company like New Interstate Concrete.