Attract Hummingbirds To The Garden With These Flowers

Hummingbirds are beautiful to watch and can be easily enticed into your flower garden. Here's a list of plants they love from A to Z.

Hummingbirds are beautiful to watch and can be easily enticed into your flower garden.

Which Flowers Do Hummingbirds Like?

The first important fact to know is that hummingbirds are attracted to flowers by color. They are particularly drawn to red, orange, and pink blooms for the nectar. Hummingbirds love flowers that produce a large amount of high-sugar-content nectar. These flowers tend to be red or orange, and are often long and tubular, and hang or point downward.

Providing this natural botanical nectar will supply essential nourishment and energy to visiting hummingbirds. To lure hummingbirds to linger long in your flower garden, plant any of the following botanicals:

List of Flowers Hummingbird-Friendly Flowers

Azalea

Azalea - Flower
Azalea

Bee Balm

Hummingbirds - Ruby-throated hummingbird
Bee Balm

Bellflower

Bellflower

Borage

Borage - Flower
Borage

Butterfly Weed

butterfly weed with hummingbird sipping nectar
Butterfly Weed

Columbine

Blue columbine

Cypress Vine

beautiful red flowers of the cypress vine  Ipomoea quamoclit
Cypress Vine (Ipomoea quamoclit)

Flowering Quince

Orange Japanese Quince ‘Chaenomeles x superba’ Salmon Horizon in flower

Foxglove

Lady's glove - Biennial plant
Foxglove

Fuchsia

Fuchsia
Beautiful fuchsia

Hibiscus

pink flowers hibiscus
Hibiscus

Lilac

Flowering plant - Common lilac
Lilac bush

Lily

Hummingbird hovering next to lily flowers panoramic view
Hummingbird hovering near lily flower

Mock Orange

Stock photography - Photography
Mock orange is also beautiful in a Moon Garden.

Morning Glory

Morning Glory

Petunia

Pink petunia flowers bloom in the garden.
Pink petunias are a hummingbird favorite!

Phlox

Garden phlox

Rhododendron

Plants - Garden
Rhododendron

Salvia

hummingbird drinking nectar from salvia flowers
Salvia

Spotted Touch-Me-Not; Jewelweed

spotted touch me not flower also called jewelweed
Spotted Touch-Me-Not (Jewelweed)

Sweet William

Pink flowers of dianthus
Flowerbed of Dianthus barbatus (Sweet William).

Trumpet Honeysuckle

Hummingbird and Honeysuckle
Trumpet Honeysuckle

Weigela

Pink Weigela

Zinnia

a hummingbird floats over a zinnia flower
Zinnia

Flowers Are An Important Food Source For Hummingbirds

All hummingbirds rely on flower nectar for 90% of their food. Unlike ducks or geese, they are solo migrators. Their migratory patterns are tied to their breeding grounds and food sources. All hummingbirds are exclusive to the Western Hemisphere, and most live in the Caribbean and South and Central America. Of more than 300 species, only 16 migrate to North America and most come only to breed. One of these, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, migrates to breeding grounds east of the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada, and is the only species that nests east of the Mississippi River.

Become A Citizen Scientist

The National Audubon Society designed a program to mobilize citizen scientists across the US to bolster current research by documenting the feeding patterns of hummingbirds. Learn about hummingbirds and sign up to do your part at Hummingbirds at Home.

Drink Hummingbird-Friendly Coffee

Hummingbirds spend most of the year in the tropics where they often move up and down mountains to keep up with all types of flowering plants. Coffee beans are grown on the same mountains. When coffee beans are shade-grown on organic coffee farms, the farms provide a pesticide-free and flower-rich habitat for the hummingbirds. When you drink coffee that has been certified as bird-friendly, you help to ensure and protect the kind of habitat that hummingbirds need. The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center has an online resource where you can learn more about bird-friendly coffee, and find certified bird-friendly coffee retailers and roasters.

Head - Ear pain
Deborah Tukua

Deborah Tukua is a natural living, healthy lifestyle writer and author of 7 non-fiction books, including Pearls of Garden Wisdom: Time-Saving Tips and Techniques from a Country Home, Pearls of Country Wisdom: Hints from a Small Town on Keeping Garden and Home, and Naturally Sweet Blender Treats. Tukua has been a writer for the Farmers' Almanac since 2004.

Sweet potato - Vegetarian cuisine
Jean Grigsby

Jean Grigsby is a writer, who lives on the banks of the Kennebec River in Chelsea, Maine. She enjoys working out, reading, and running her marketing and public relations business, The Write Approach. Her article, Where Are All The Birds? appears in the 2021 Farmers' Almanac.

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Bruce Parker

Saw my first Hummingbird of 2024 last week. I’m so glad I went ahead and put out my feeders early.

Heather

We love to hear of their return – even better to see them ourselves!

Kelley

Love this!! Thank you!!

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