Petite Snow Nanho White Butterfly Bush

The butterfly bush is a garden classic, always popular with gardeners for how easy it is to grow, and with children in the family for its ability to attract the most gorgeous butterflies to its flowers. It is amazing that a shrub this beautiful grows so vigorously, even in difficult locations, but it is true, and we wouldn’t want to pass up the opportunity to so easily bring color and interest to the garden from early summer to the end of fall.

Most of these plants have brightly colored flowers, with pink, red and purple being always popular, but much rarer is the most useful and fashionable color of all – white. Shrubs with white flowers are always in high demand, because they bring a wonderful calm and serenity to the garden, and they always look at their best in late afternoon and evening, just when we get home from a busy day. They blend with any other colors, so color clashes just never happen – so wouldn’t a white butterfly bush be a treasure in any garden?

With that thought we offer you the Petite Snow™ Butterfly Bush, an outstanding white-flowering shrub, with enormous panicles of pure, snow-white flowers carried in profusion on a bush that stays compact and flowers for months, right up to the first frost. The great thing about white flowers is that they never clash with other colors, and their presence lifts and highlights your existing color schemes. They look as equally attractive among yellows and oranges as they do among reds and purples.

Growing Petite Snow™ Butterfly Bushes

Easy to grow in any sunny location, in almost any soil, with no special needs, this is the perfect bush for low-maintenance gardening, and to use in many parts of your garden. Plant it among other flowering shrubs. Plant a row to create a colorful boundary, or to screen an old fence or wall. It is also very suitable for planting in large pots and boxes, where you can plant flowers or small shrubs beneath it – the open growth habit will not cast a lot of shade on them. Because this plant is very drought resistant once it is established, you can plant it in sunny, hot places too, where most other flowering plants will grow badly.

The Petite Snow Butterfly Bush is a compact, multi-stemmed shrub which can be easily maintained as low as 4 feet tall. This makes it perfect for smaller gardens, while if you have more room it can also be allowed to grow taller, up to 7 feet tall and at least as wide. The open habit of the plant creates a light look and allows sunlight to filter through to plants beneath it. The upright stems have rough, gray-brown bark, and the leaves are narrow, growing 4 to 6 inches long. They are a soft green, with a gray-green underside.

Appearance and Fragrance

Every new stem ends in a large flower spike, called a panicle. These are typically 8 inches long, with a broad base and a fat conical shape. Each panicle contains several hundred small flowers, which open from the bottom of the cluster first, as it grows, so they look a little different every day, as more and more flowers open. The flowers are thin and tubular, flaring out at the end into four tiny flat petals, and the whole flower is pure white. The effect is charming and bright, and a bush in flower, with dozens and dozens of flower spikes all over it, is stunning and beautiful.

Then of course there is the sweet honey perfume, which can be smelled feet away, and it is this that attracts all those beautiful butterflies to your garden. On a sunny day each spike may be feeding several butterflies, as well as other nectar-drinking insects, and with others fluttering around, the effect is wonderful, and very attractive to children, who gaze in wonder at these fairy princesses of the natural world. Flowering typically begins in June and continues right up until the first frost, with new flower spikes developing as older ones fade away.

Planting and Initial Care

The Petite Snow Butterfly Bush should be planted in a sunny spot, for maximum flowering, and no spot in the garden is too sunny. It will grow in almost any soil, from sand to clay, and prefers a well-drained, drier soil. Water your new arrival regularly during the first year, but after that it is very drought resistant, and will only need water if you see the leaves drooping. It is only very rarely bothered by any significant pests or diseases, and this is a very easy, low-maintenance plant.

In spring, before or just as the new buds are swelling, prune by removing all thin and weak branches, leaving an open framework of just the strongest ones. Cut branches back to just above a pair of strong buds. To keep your plant small, cut back to no more than 12 inches above ground. By the end of the season it will be 3 or 4 feet tall. For a larger plant, to 7 feet tall, simply leave a taller framework, perhaps 3 feet above the ground. As flowers fade, remove the spike just above the first pair of leaves, and this will encourage the maximum number of new flowers to keep coming and coming.

History and Origins of the Petite Snow™ Butterfly Bush

The Petite Snow Butterfly Bush was developed in 1967 by Monrovia Nursery, in California, who named it ‘Monite’. It has remained the most popular white-flowering butterfly bush ever since that time. In 2010 it received the Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, the premier gardening organization in Britain. As well as being sold under the name Petite Snow, this plant is also sold as Nanho White.

Our plants are guaranteed to be exactly this plant and given the constant popularity of both butterfly bushes and white flowers, we will not have our stock with us for long. Order now, while we can still satisfy your order, because very soon all our plants will be gone.