Now Batting for ‘Potter’s Purple’…

My butterfly bushes (buddleia) are always the last plants to show signs of life in the spring. Thriving in Zone 5 is iffy for them, and their odds of survival depend on the type of winter we’ve endured.

My favorite buddleia is ‘Potter’s Purple’, a dark-purple beauty that grows 5 to 7 feet high. I used to have a dozen of them, but I yanked out all but three in disgust several summers ago in the midst of a nasty Japanese Beetle invasion. I regret it now because the beetle numbers are leveling off, and I can’t find ‘Potter’s Purple’ for sale locally anymore.

There aren’t many annuals or perennials with such lovely dark-purple flowers, and they blend well with just about every color in the garden. One of my favorite combinations is ‘Potter’s Purple’ with red zinnias:

Ever since ‘Potter’s Purple’ went AWOL at the garden centers, I’ve been on the lookout for a pinch-hitter. Last summer I tried a new cultivar named ‘Butterfly Heaven’. The flowers are more lilac than purple, but they are impressively large. My plant grew about 5 feet tall and was covered in happy butterflies and bees all summer long. But would it survive winter?

I wait to trim back my buddleia bushes until spring. I usually don’t bother mulching them, but because ‘Butterfly Heaven’ is growing on a hill in a very exposed location, I covered it with about 6 inches of straw in early December.

Last week the temperatures were about 15 degrees above normal, so it was the perfect time to go outside and clean up my flowerbeds. I removed the straw from ‘Butterfly Heaven’ and began cutting back the dead wood. On the second cut I noticed the wood in my hand was green in the middle, not brown. I’ve grown butterfly bushes for over a decade now and I’ve never encountered branches that were still alive in the spring. Usually once I cut back the plants, the new sprouts all come from the ground. I was a little uneasy about cutting back the rest of the branches, but I continued.

Four days later, ‘Butterfly Heaven’ looked like this:

I was stunned by the number of sprouts that popped out in just 96 hours. In a normal year I’m lucky to have three or four per bush.

I’m very impressed with ‘Butterfly Heaven’. It’s the most robust butterfly bush I’ve ever grown and a fine substitute for ‘Potter’s Purple’.