SPOTLIGHT ON: PLANTS FOR BUTTERFLIES
There are a few showy border plants that urban butterfly lovers shouldn’t be without.
Buddleja davidii is the perfect butterfly bush, known for its violet and mauve flowers shaped like ice-cream cones, though there’s a white variety, too. In August it’s covered in many butterfly types.
But it is a big, spreading shrub, 4ft-wide and 8ft-tall, even when you prune it. The most compact, “Nanho Blue”, will produce a bush 3ft-wide and 6ft-high but that’s still big for a small garden. Perennials are more manageable.
The ice plant (Sedum spectabile) is a butterfly magnet. Apart from “Autumn Joy” with its flattish heads of rusty-pink flowers in late August and September, butterflies also like the showier Sedum telephium “Matrona” which has rosier pink flowers.
For rockeries, tubs and hanging baskets try compact sedums such as the semiprostrate “Bertram Anderson”, which has red flowers from summer into autumn. Most nurseries and garden centres sell other good insect-friendly ones.
Butterflies love flowering herbs, particularly marjoram, oregano and thyme. If you grow them for cooking try to keep your hands off until after they finish flowering so butterflies enjoy them too. Once deadheaded they’ll regrow. With conventional flower borders the star butterfly plant has traditionally been the Michaelmas daisy. You’ll find many compact, diseaseresistant perennials with just as much butterfly pulling power. Look for Aster x frickartii “Monch” and New England asters (varieties of Aster novae-angliae).