How to Attract Lacewings to Your Garden
If you want to know how to attract lacewings, start by making your garden feel like a safe place for their eggs, larvae, and adults. Lacewings are excellent allies for controlling aphids, mealybugs, mites, and other soft-bodied pests, but they will only stay where they can feed, shelter, and lay eggs without being disturbed. The good news is that you can bring them in with a few simple planting and garden-care choices that fit right into a natural yard routine.
What Lacewings Are and Why Gardeners Want Them
Lacewings are delicate insects with net-like wings, large eyes, and slender green or brown bodies. The best-known garden species are green lacewings, which are prized because both the larvae and the adults help in the garden, though in different ways. Adults feed on nectar, pollen, and honeydew, while the larvae are fierce predators that hunt aphids, thrips, mites, and insect eggs.
Green lacewings are easy to welcome once you understand what they need. They are active around flowers, hedges, and mixed plantings, and they prefer gardens with a steady food supply and low pesticide use. If your goal is to attract green lacewings, you are really creating a balanced habitat that supports their entire life cycle, not just one stage.
How to identify lacewings
Adult green lacewings have bright green bodies, clear wings with many veins, and golden or copper-colored eyes. They are light, fluttery fliers and rest with their wings held like a tent over the body. The larvae look nothing like the adults. They are tiny, elongated, and alligator-shaped, with tapered bodies and noticeable mouthparts for grasping prey.
These larvae are the reason lacewings matter in a garden. If you see small, pale, bristly larvae moving among aphid colonies, you are looking at one of the most effective natural pest controllers in the landscape.
Build the Right Food Sources
Adult lacewings need nectar and pollen, so the easiest way to attract lacewings to your garden is to plant flowers that bloom over a long season. Give them small, open blossoms they can easily land on and feed from. A garden with staggered flowering is far more attractive than one with a short burst of bloom followed by bare stems.
Best plants for adult lacewings
- Sweet alyssum
- Dill
- Fennel
- Coriander or cilantro left to flower
- Yarrow
- Cosmos
- Coreopsis
- Queen Anne’s lace
- Tansy, where appropriate and managed carefully
Umbel-shaped flowers, like dill, fennel, and cilantro in bloom, are especially useful because they offer easy access to nectar and pollen. Mix these with native perennials and annuals so something is flowering from spring through fall. Leave a few herbs to bolt instead of cutting them all back once they start flowering.
Support the insects they prey on, but not too much
Lacewing adults also feed on honeydew, the sugary waste produced by aphids and some other sap-feeding insects. That does not mean you should invite a pest outbreak. It means a garden with light pest pressure and flowering plants can sustain lacewings without turning into a problem zone. The goal is balance, not infestation.
Plant for Shelter, Eggs, and Larvae
How to attract lacewings to your garden comes down to more than flowers. Lacewings need protected places to rest, hide from predators, and lay eggs. Dense planting, layered borders, and a few unmowed or lightly managed areas give them the cover they need.
Create sheltered habitat
Use mixed beds with groundcovers, shrubs, and upright flowers so there are multiple levels of cover. Lacewings move through gardens that have leaf litter, fine foliage, and calm corners. A bare, heavily mulched, frequently sprayed yard is much less inviting than a layered planting with some texture and shelter.
Keep a small patch of the garden less tidy. Leave some leaf litter under shrubs, allow a corner of native plants to stand through the season, and avoid cleaning every stem down to the ground at once. These features help adults rest and give larvae places to hunt.
Provide safe egg-laying sites
Female lacewings lay eggs on slender stalks, often on leaves near prey. They need plants where the foliage is not constantly brushed, washed, or disturbed. Avoid strong overhead watering that flattens stems and removes egg sites. Water at the base of plants so the canopy stays intact.
If you want to attract green lacewings consistently, keep a steady plant structure in the garden. Frequent deadheading is fine in some areas, but leave enough blooming stems and foliage nearby to support egg-laying and larval hunting.
Use Natural Garden Practices That Keep Lacewings in Place
Lacewings do not stay in gardens that are treated like sterile spaces. The fastest way to lose them is through broad-spectrum sprays, harsh soaps used indiscriminately, and repeated dusting or washing of every leaf. Natural pest management and beneficial insect habitat go hand in hand.
- Stop using broad-spectrum insecticides and foggers.
- Spot-treat pests only where you see them, using the least disruptive method.
- Keep flowering herbs and small-flowered plants in the same beds as vegetables.
- Water at the soil line and avoid blasting foliage with a hose.
- Leave some plant diversity, including a few weeds like wild carrot or clover if they are not invasive in your area.
- Use row covers early in the season on crops that need protection, then remove them when flowering starts so lacewings can enter the space.
These steps matter because lacewings search for a garden that rewards them. They need prey, flowers, and low disruption. A garden that supports bees and hoverflies will support lacewings too, since the same open flowers and pesticide-free conditions help all of them.
Attract Green Lacewings to the Garden Faster
Green lacewings are the species most gardeners want, and the same habitat rules apply with a few important details. They are drawn to warm, plant-rich spaces with accessible flowers and a steady supply of soft-bodied pests. They also respond well to pheromone and food-based lures in some managed settings, but for home gardens, plants and habitat do the job best.
Focus on the right garden zones
Put nectar plants near vegetables, orchard trees, and ornamentals that attract aphids. Lacewings follow food. If you place dill, alyssum, and cosmos near peppers, beans, roses, or young fruit trees, you create a useful patrol zone. Green lacewings move where prey is available and where flowering plants support the adults.
Night lighting can work against you. Bright outdoor lights attract and disrupt many nocturnal insects. Keep garden lighting low and directed away from beds if you want lacewings to settle in.
Time your planting for succession bloom
Plant in waves so something is always blooming. Start with early spring flowers, add midsummer herbs and annuals, and finish with late-season asters or sedum. This steady nectar supply keeps adult lacewings in the yard long enough to reproduce and help reduce pest pressure.
When the garden offers continuous food and habitat, lacewings become part of the local insect community instead of a temporary visitor.
What to Avoid if You Want Lacewings
The biggest mistake is removing the very conditions lacewings need. Clean, overmanaged gardens with repeated chemical treatments, bare soil, and no flowering plants do not hold beneficial insects. Strong sprays also kill the prey species that lacewing larvae hunt, which removes the incentive for adults to stay.
Avoid these common problems
- Broad-spectrum insecticides
- Heavy neem or soap applications sprayed across the whole yard without a pest target
- Frequent power-washing of foliage
- Perfectly bare borders with no shelter
- Only large, double-petaled flowers that block access to nectar
- Constant cleanup that removes all leaf litter and plant residue
If you need pest control, use targeted natural methods instead. Hand-remove heavy infestations, prune out severely infested tips, encourage predators, and use exclusion like row covers or fine mesh on vulnerable crops. Diatomaceous earth belongs only in dry, targeted applications where crawling pests cross it, not on flowering plants where beneficial insects forage.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I attract lacewings without buying anything?
Plant small-flowered herbs and blooms, stop using broad-spectrum sprays, and leave a little shelter in the garden. Dill, cilantro, alyssum, yarrow, and cosmos bring in adult lacewings because they offer nectar and pollen. If aphids are present at low levels, lacewings will stay longer and lay eggs nearby.
How do I attract lacewings to my garden if I grow vegetables?
Place flowering herbs and companion plants along the edges and between vegetable beds. Dill, fennel, cilantro, sweet alyssum, and yarrow work well near beans, peppers, tomatoes, and brassicas. Keep the garden free of broad-spectrum pesticides and give the plants enough spacing and cover to support both adults and larvae.
How do I attract green lacewings specifically?
Use a mix of nectar plants, light shelter, and low pest pressure. Green lacewings respond well to open flowers, mixed planting, and aphid activity that gives larvae food. Avoid harsh sprays and keep blooming herbs near the plants you want protected. That combination brings green lacewings in and helps them remain active through the season.
Will lacewings help with aphids?
Yes. Lacewing larvae are one of the best natural aphid predators in the garden. They also feed on thrips, mites, whiteflies, and insect eggs. Adults do not hunt pests the same way, but they help by reproducing in the garden once they find flowers, shelter, and prey.