The Butterflyway Project

A butterflyway is a neighbourhood-scale corridor of habitat for butterflies, bees and beneficial insects.

The Butterflyway Project is a citizen-led movement that is bringing nature home to neighbourhoods throughout Canada, one butterfly-friendly planting at a time.

The project began in 2017 in the cities of Markham, Montreal, Richmond, Toronto and Victoria. In each community, we recruited a team of volunteers, called Butterflyway Rangers. The David Suzuki Foundation trained local Rangers, who then returned to their neighbourhoods with a mission to plant networks of native wildflowers in yards, schoolyards, streets and parks.

To establish a local butterflyway, each troop of Rangers must plant at least a dozen pollinator patches in their neighbourhood. The David Suzuki Foundation will formally recognize each successfully established butterflyway through signage and inclusion on our website and maps.

In 2017, troops of Butterflyway Rangers connected with local schools, city agencies and homeowners, planting thousands of wildflowers in hundreds of pollinator patches, establishing official butterflyways in all five cities! Find out more about each butterflyway below.

This year, we have recruited new Rangers in Markham, North Vancouver, Richmond, Scarborough (Guildwood) and Toronto (Leslieville) and have expanded our team in Montreal through l’Effet papillon.

If you do not live in one of the current butterflyway communities, check out the resources at the bottom of this page to find out how you can bring butterflies home to your neighbourhood, one fun planting at a time.

The Butterflyway Project is based on the David Suzuki Foundation’s Homegrown National Park Project, which began in 2013. The award-winning, citizen-led project created butterfly-friendly corridors in three Toronto neighbourhoods, establishing dozens of pollinator patches in parks, front yard rain gardens and schoolyard canoe planters.

In the summer of 2015, volunteers and homeowners transformed front yards in Toronto’s Danforth East Village into a network of butterfly-friendly, flood-busting rain gardens.