It’s amazing how much life a buddleia bush can attract – butterflies, bees, moths, hoverflies and an assortment of other flying insects feasting on the purple offerings.
Buddleia is so simple to grow. Plant it. Leave it. Watch it spring to life and live up to its name (the butterfly bush). Cut it hard back in late autumn/winter and it will be back next year to put a smile on your face, and joy in the heart of even the grumpiest of bumblebee.
Plant one soon.
Go on.
You won’t regret it.
Ps. I’m reliably informed it’s the ‘big butterfly count’ until 11th August – I’m going to have a count, how about you? See https://www.bigbutterflycount.org/ for details.
Photo: Courtesy of Lucy King.
FFON. Written by nature detectives. 
I first moved into this house, just off the centre of what was a quite Victorian town 48 years ago. A small 250ft x 18ft back garden, virtually empty of plants/. At the very end was a row of dead elm trees felled just after we moved in. Now the town is in the thoes of becoming a mini Manhattan, with the council debt unlikely to be paid of in our Great grand-children’s lifetime, and every excuse no matter how implausible to build on every green space, build hotels and flats which will be largely uninhabited as the town centre prices itself into oblivion.
I planted several Buddleia and we were rewarded with all the usual suspects – Large and Small Tortoiseshell, Red Admiral, Peacock, Cabbage White, Comma, Common Blue etc. Ten years on and you could count the butterfly’s on one hand. One species prospered, the stag beetle whose larvae thrived in the rotting elm stumps. I have seen one this summer.
As a boy I would enter the local farmland through a sheep gate surrounded by denuded nettles eaten by virtually all of our common species. In the grasslands we would see hundreds of Orange tipped. This summer I have examined large areas of nettles, on the estate where I lectured on wildlife rehabilitation and ecology and failed to find a single Caterpillar and the only species to visit my Buddleia was the Large white
On Sat, 3 Aug 2019 at 18:20, The Frightened Face of Nature (FFON) wrote:
> Simon H King posted: ” > https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eL2mn8UeCoE&feature=youtu.be It’s amazing > how much life a buddleia bush can attract – butterflies, bees, moths, > hoverflies and an assortment of other flying insects feasting on the purple > offerings. Buddleia is so simpl” >
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Thanks for sharing this vivid memory, Graham. It’s a frustrating account that is all too familiar throughout the UK. It reminds me of Maxwell Knight’s Surrey pond story – which we ‘performed’ during the Maxwell Knight Symposium in 2018 – https://thefrightenedfaceofnature.com/maxwell-knight-symposium/lectures/newts-nadders-and-neophyte-naturalists/ (I understand the word ‘newt’ – along with acorn, minnow, Kingfisher and dandelion – has recently been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary – is nothing sacred?!).
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