The Butterfly-Friendly Garden - Buddleia

The Buddleia commonly known as The Butterfly Bush was named posthumously after the Rev. Adam Buddle (1662-1715), a botanist and rector in Essex, at the suggestion of Dr. Wm Houstoun.  Houstoun sent the first plants to become known as Buddleja to England from the Caribbean about 15 years after Buddles death. (this info is from Wikipedia but other articles say it is from China - take your pick).




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 Some species commonly escape from the garden. B. davidii in particular is a great coloniser of dry open ground; in towns in the United Kingdom, it often self-sows on waste ground or old masonry, where it grows into a dense thicket, and it is listed as an invasive species in many areas. It is frequently seen beside railway lines, on derelict factory sites and, in the aftermath of the Second World War, on urban bomb sites. This earned it the popular nickname of 'the bombsite plant' among people of the war-time generation.

Butterflies are interested solely in nectar, to maintain their strength, so they will only visit the same flowers as bees when their interests coincide.  An obvious instance of converging interest is on this bush.

They come in a variety of colours from white through to deep purple - I myself have pink, lilac and purple.

Butterflies love Buddleia because it produces nectar that has a higher content of sucrose, glucose, and fructose than many other garden flowers, in particular Buddleia generally has a higher sucrose level (two or three times higher than fructose or glucose) and that is what attracts butterflies, however Buddleia do not produce much nectar, which is why we see butterflies spending so much time on a particular plant. It is also worth mentioning that usually only the larger butterflies visit Buddleia, this is because the tiny individual flowers of Buddleia are relatively long and the smaller butterflies simply can't reach their proboscis far enough into the flower to extract the sucrose laden nectar.

Buddleia - Black Knight

In the UK Half of the butterflies are under threat of extinction, and more than 70% are in decline, we can help turn this process around by planting more Buddleia and more importantly different varieties of Buddleia.  Buddleia is called the "Butterfly Bush" for a very good reason, it acts like a magnet to butterflies, they just love Buddleia nectar.see here for more info



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The only problem I find with them is that they look awful once they have finished flowering, the flowerheads turn brown and if you don't remove them fairly promptly they seed all over the place.  Which is why they have a bad reputation for being invasive.  If you do want to increase your stock they root very easily from cuttings by just sticking a piece of stem into the ground.

This is what Elspeth Thompson has to say:-
"What struck me the other day, though, as the train slid in from Bristol, was how well the place suited its mad urban fringe of purple flowers.  Buddleia is renowned for its capacity to take root wherever it can find a crevice and a little water.  At Royal Oak, it has managed to find footholds in cracks in the paving, along the tops of walls, in angles of the openwork metal bridges that span the different platforms, and even down among the tracks."

The sun over the last couple of days has brought more butterflies out - but my bushes aren't smothered with them as they usually are - a sign of the times maybe.