The Cutest Butterfly Bushes Ever? Buddleia Little Rockstars in 5 Stunning Colors

You know it's really quite amazing how moments in time get stored in our memory banks and then recalled many years later with vivid clarity. I remember for instance the day when I first seen Budleigh of Black Knight. It was at Mount Usher in County Wicklow, beautiful gardens in Ireland, and there as I went through the entrance to the gardens, I looked up and there against the fluffy white clouds were those big panicles of deep almost black purple flowers. I say looked up because the plant was bigger than me, it was at least seven, eight, perhaps even nine foot high, really magnificent. And if you want to find out about it and all the other varieties of butterfly bushes that we grow and make available through our network of partnering garden centers, if you take a moment or two and scroll through our many videos, you'll be able to find out about those and perhaps want to have a few of them to grow in your garden too. But today, with ever more pressure on our garden spaces, smaller gardens etc, there seems to be a strong demand for smaller, more compact, freer flowering plants, and in this video I want to tell you about an important breeding breakthrough that has led to the development of, believe it or not, miniature butterfly bushes. Hello, I'm David Wilson, and as you see I'm out here at Overdie Vest Nurseries in our production area. This is where we grow the plants and get them ready to send out to the partnering garden centers I was telling you about. And here on this wagon is a little selection of those miniature butterfly bushes that I was talking about. And as you see, they come in five different colors. There's this white one here, which is white with a little yellow eye. Then there's this purple one, and then look at this absolutely fantastic little flowering machine here, this is the pink one. And then look at this blue, and then on the end of the wagon here, a beautiful bright red one too. These are Buddleja little rock stars. And what's more, just like we see with the other larger growing butterfly bushes, these are very attractive to butterflies, to skippers, to bees, and different types of other insects that I can't identify, but there's activity going on as you see all the time, which is wonderful to see. It's really great to see these winged visitors come and visit the nectar-rich flowers. And like other Buddlejas, these are really easy to grow, and nice and hardy throughout our region, that's the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states too. And when you plant them of course, dig a good sized hole, work in plenty of organic matter, water them well until they get established, and then you'll see that they grow out with these silvery furry leaves that deer and rabbits normally leave alone. And like their big cousins, these are ones that will be really beautiful from the summertime right through to the fall. And if you picked up on one of our previous videos that we have here on the channel, where I was showing you that you can go through and you can deadhead the old flowers by taking them out just when they're starting to go over, or if you want to keep this extra small and compact, you can take hedging shears when a high proportion of the flowers go over, and you can shear back the whole plant and keep them really tight and compact. So I think you can see that this is a plant with a lot of potential. They're easy to grow in a sunny or partially shaded site, in just an average garden soil, about the only place that you need to avoid is anywhere that's wet and soggy. Avoid that, put them out, get them well established, and you'll find that they will be remarkably heat and drought tolerant too. And if you're interested in floral arrangements, you can snip off these little flowering stems and make beautiful little miniature arrangements, or perhaps even put them in as a table decoration or something like that. Now just to give you a little bit more background information, these were bred by Jim Koot and his team at Botanic Experience in Kutchevel in the Netherlands. They made the cross in 2019 and then selected out these seedlings in 2022. So as you see, this is a very new and exciting plant. On the breeding team is somebody that we've admiring for a long time, in fact reckon to be one of the best plant breeders in Europe, and that's Ari Bloom, famous for producing some really beautiful coneflowers, daylilies and several other plants, and now I think he had a big hand in the development of these exciting compact bushy and really fantastic little butterfly bushes. Now if you're interested in going along and seeing some of these plants in reality, I'm going to put up the link along the bottom of the screen here that will take you to a locator that will show you where all of the partnering garden centers that handle our plants are located. Talk to the experts there, get their opinions on these, and then be sure when you're calling in to take a look at these very special little compact miniature bud lilies. I think you're really going to enjoy growing them. This is David Wilson, enjoy your gardening, it's good for us, and it's very good for our environment too.