Plant Highlight: Buddleja

As spring approaches and you begin to grow ornamental plants for the 2022 season, consider adding Buddleja to your growing program. This unique shrub offers visual interest, easy care, and flourishes as a hardy patio plant.

We offer a non-invasive Butterfly Bush cultivar, Buddleja Davidii, developed by Thompson and Morgan. While the wild perennial shrub native to Japan and China might overtake your garden, this compact variety is sterile and reaches just 3-5’ tall and 2-3’ wide.

Seven color varieties enable your customers to choose the hue that works best in their gardens or to combine multiple shrubs with different colored flowers for a visually interesting border. Lavender, Midnight, and Purple offer different shades of purple, while pinks range from Hot Raspberry and Magenta to Soft Pink. Ivory balances bright colors or adds elegance to an English cottage garden.

Butterfly Bush is a perfect patio shrub, flourishing in containers or in the ground. While the shrub we offer is compact, it still produces 6-8” fragrant flowers, which bloom from June to September. Bees and butterflies love Butterfly Bush, making it a perfect addition to your offerings for pollinator gardens, patios, and landscape borders.

This attractive bush requires little more than regular water to succeed in average, well-drained soil. Your customers can enjoy the benefits of a hardy shrub without adding to garden maintenance. Hardy in zones 5-9, these plants will flower every summer and, planted in the ground, can live up to 10 years.

Coach customers to encourage continuous blooming up to frost by deadheading flowers. In warm climates, Buddleja Buzz can be cut back to 12-24”, while in colder climates, it will die back on its own in the fall. In the greenhouse, this plant is low-maintenance and only needs regular water, full sun, and well-drained soil to succeed. It isn’t prone to disease or pests and adds a unique, attractive flowering shrub to your growing program.

Help customers develop delightful cottage-style perennials landscapes by offering Echinacea, Asclepias, Salvia, Monarda, and Perovskia alongside Buddleja Buzz.

Please reach out to us with any questions you have as you prepare and develop your growing program. You can find more information about successful greenhouse growing on the blog and learn more about us on our website. We want to help you grow your greenhouse business!