Net gains for insect lovers
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LAMOROUS garden flowers and British native butterflies may not sound like natural bedfellows but it’s easy to have the best of both worlds.
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, four-foot wide and eight-foot tall, even when you severely prune it. The most compact, “Nanho Blue” will produce a bush three-feet wide and six-feet 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 softer, rosier pink flowers.
For rockeries, tubs and hanging baskets try compact sedums such as the semi-prostrate “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 mainly for cooking try to keep your hands off until after they finish flowering so butterflies enjoy them too. Once deadheaded they’ll soon regrow.
With conventional flower borders the star butterfly plant has traditionally been the Michaelmas daisy. They aren’t grown so much now as they got themselves a bad name for mildew and flopping over but today you’ll find many compact, disease-resistant perennial lasters with just as much butterfly pulling power. Look for Aster x frickartii “Monch” and New England asters (varieties of Aster novae-angliae).
There’s also a plum Edwardian flower that deserves a reprieve for its looks and appeal: scabious.
Years ago large-flowered varieties such as “Clive Greaves” were great favourites for their huge, rippled, silky rosette flowers; most were blue though some came in white. My grandad grew them because grandma loved a bunch on the kitchen table.
They weren’t the easiest to grow well, being big untidy plants that could often muster only one or two blooms. Now there are compact plants with masses of flowers right through the middle of summer.
“Pink Mist” and “Butterfly Blue” are especially brilliant. What’s more, the butterflies love them.
If you’ve room after growing other butterfly magnets, you might add valerian, Verbena bonariensis and mint. Ordinary horse mint or spearmint are very insect-friendly when allowed to flower but the ultimate butterfly variety is buddleja mint, which has conical pink flowers like its namesake.
Every scrap of space counts in small gardens so it makes sense to grow plants that earn their keep – and you can congratulate yourself for doing your bit for wildlife as well as growing a glamorous garden.
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