Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush

Everyone loves the butterfly bush, for its rich colors all summer, fragrant flowers and its power to attract butterflies and hummingbirds to your garden. It has earned a bad reputation though, for bullying its way into natural areas, and in smaller gardens it is often too big and spreading to be a friendly member of the garden community. All that has changed in recent years, because plant breeders responded to the problems, and gave us non-seeding varieties that are also more compact and smaller. Perfect for any garden, including small ones, and available even in states where the wild plant has been prohibited, the Purple Haze Butterfly Bush captures all that is good in these new plants – big blooms, rich color, compact size and non-invasive. All we need now is summer.

The Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush is a deciduous shrub with dense twiggy branches that grow almost horizontally, making a bush that barely reaches 3 feet tall, but spread a full 4 feet wide. At that size it fits into any garden, and into smaller spaces. For larger areas it’s easy – just plant a group of 3 to cover an area 10 x 10 feet with color and interest all summer and fall. The long, tapering leaves are 4 inches in length, and colored a handsome gray-green tone that really looks great in the bright sunshine of summer. Although deciduous, in warmer zones it is often Christmas before the leaves fall, and if there is no frost blooming continues for a long time too. This plant is late to leaf out in spring, leaving room around it for spring bulbs and other early-flowering plants, before it sprouts again, and quickly fills in the space. It is densely branched, and every branch develops side shoots, each one ending in a big flower head, so a profusion of blooms is normal for this great shrub.

The new leaves are hardly out before flowering begins, often at the beginning of June. It will continue unabated until the first frost ends it, and the plant forms a beautiful broad dome, with the flowers horizontal or pendulous. This unique form makes the Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush quite unlike others, which are usually much more upright and spikey. Each flower head contains about 85 individual flowers, which are relatively large and conspicuous. The whole tapering flower head measures 8 inches long and 2 inches across at the widest point – very similar in size and shape to the old-fashioned butterfly bushes we love. The flowers are a gorgeous purple-violet color, with an orange-toned center. The contrast with the gray-green foliage really is like a cloud of purple haze hovering over the ground. Compared to many other non-seeding varieties, this is the most elegant, with the largest flower heads. 

The Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush is very fast-growing, and incredibly easy to grow in any garden. It thrives in those hot, sunny, drier spots where other plants fail, and once established it is drought resistant. The hotter it gets, the more it blooms, so all you need to do is water weekly for the first couple of months after spring planting, and it will take care of itself from there on. Just sit back and enjoy the fragrance of the flowers – and of course the butterflies and hummingbirds it will attract to your garden. Children love this plant, and they will sit entranced by the zoo of visitors that comes. Yet it has no significant pests or diseases, and in winter the deer normally leave it alone. It produces an abundance of pollen and nectar for insects and birds, but no seeds. It has been carefully tested for this, and we can guarantee that the Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush will produce no seeds at all, and this plant cannot ever escape into wild areas. In spring, just as the new shoots are beginning, prune it by removing overcrowded, weak and broken stems. Shorten back the remaining stems by about one-third to one-half, cutting back to just above a pair of new buds. Because this plant never seeds, you don’t even need to deadhead it – they just shrivel and disappear under the new growth.

The Lo & Behold® Purple Haze Butterfly Bush was created in a controlled breeding program carried out by Dennis J. Werner and L. K. Snelling, scientists at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. They used four different butterfly bushes to make it. These were: the wild Chinese species, Buddleja lindleyana; a variety of Buddleja davidii called ‘Nanho Purple’; Buddleja × weyeriana ‘Honeycomb’, a yellow-flowering hybrid between the Chinese Buddleja davidii and the South American Buddleja globosa; and a Dutch-bred Buddleja called ‘Miss Molly’. With that complex set of parents, no wonder it is so good. The plant created was patented in 2014 with the name ‘Purple Haze’, and the proceeds from the patent license go to support further work at the University. It is released to gardeners by a large grower, Proven Winners, as part of their Lo & Behold® series of new butterfly bush varieties. These non-seeding butterfly bushes have been greeted with joy by responsible lovers of these traditional garden plants, and they are always in high demand. As one that has the classic big, purple blooms we all love, ‘Purple Haze’ is especially popular, and it sells out fast. Order now, and welcome back to your garden the butterflies, hummingbirds and happy children.