Buddleja davidii Lilac Chip - Butterfly Bush

The Buddleia davidii Lilac Chip, also known as Butterfly Bush, is a recent introduction from the United States that is truly different. This dwarf variety has an unusual habit, prostrate and wider than it is tall. Perfectly hardy, it blooms all summer, covering its beautiful silver foliage with pleasantly scented spikes of countless small lilac-blue flowers with orange throats. It is a plant for small gardens, romantic terraces, sunny rockeries, and fragrant borders. It adapts to all ordinary and well-drained soils, even poor ones, but requires full sun to flourish.

This Buddleia is the result of extensive hybridization work between the species B.davidii, B. lindleyana, B.globosa, and Buddleia fallowiana. If you don't have a Buddleia in your garden because of its reputation as an invader, this variety is made for you! Indeed, the 'Lilac Chip' Buddleia reaches just 70cm (27.6in) in height, forming a small, prostrate, bristly, and rounded bush. Its growth is rapid. It has the advantage of being sterile and therefore not self-seeding! It develops deciduous, opposite, ovate leaves, 8cm (3.1in) long and silvery, on upright and rigid branches. From July to September, it bears upright spikes of flowers, blue with a hint of mauve, with orange throats, 15cm (5.9in) long, whose heady fragrance attracts numerous butterflies.

The 'Lilac Chip' Buddleia likes well-drained soils and sunny, not too windy locations. Deadhead the faded flowers as they appear, solely for aesthetic purposes, and prune severely from March to April. There is no shortage of ideas to showcase this unusual buddleia, which is just as beautiful in the ground as it is in a pot. It can be used as a standalone specimen, in a shrub bed, as a border plant, in a rockery or like creeping potentillas or ceanothuses.