Jul 4, 2017
July 3rd - It’s time for my annual heart-wrenching over the purple conundrum that is the butterfly bush. Buddleia is a prolific, very common shrub that will grow anywhere, in any scrap of earth or soot, and is synonymous with urban decay: look upwards in any town right now and you’ll see this tenacious battler growing and flowering from cracks in brickwork, lifting tiles on roofs, blocking gutters, prizing apart chimneys and crowding any embankment, towpath, disused rail line or wasteground.
It’s beautiful and very good not just for Lepidoptera, but all manner of bugs and is very, very pretty. But it is such a symbol of dereliction and decay.
