Best butterfly plants: These are the best bushes to attract more butterflies into your garden including Buddleia and Orange-Ball-Tree

Readers will no doubt be familiar with the common Buddleia (or Buddleja) generally seen with long, pointed purple or occasionally white flowerheads. This is Buddleia davidii brought from its native China and named after the French missionary and explorer, Father Armand David. He was the first European to report the shrub which is also native to parts of Japan.

Around 1887, botanist Dr Augustine Henry sent material St Petersburg in Russia, and botanist-missionary, Jean-André Soulié, sent seed to a French nursery. By the 1890s the shrub was in commercial production and received the RHS Award of Merit in 1898, and subsequently, in 1941, the Award of Garden Merit. It is now one of our most invasive non-native plants, causes significant economic costs to buildings and infrastructure, is a part of our emerging ‘recombinant’ ecology, and we love it as the ‘Butterfly Bush’.

However, the plant I have pictured has a rather different story and has been with us in the UK for rather longer. This is Buddleja globosa, Orange-Ball-Tree, Orange Ball Buddleia, or Matico, a species of flowering shrub found originally in Chile and Argentina, growing in both dry and humid forest, over a range from sea level to 2,000 metres altitude. It was first introduced to the United Kingdom from Chile in 1774 and finally described and named in 1782. Unlike the buddleia above it is not invasive because its seeds are wingless and therefore it doesn’t disperse so freely. However, these two species have been combined to produce a number of hybrid garden cultivars that are quite popular.

So, during the First World War, Buddleia globosa was hybridized with Buddleia davidii var. magnifica by van de Weyer at Corfe Castle, in Dorset, England. Interestingly, this was the first reported example of a cross between an Asian and an American species of plant. The Orange-ball shrub has associated folk medicine uses with wound-healing properties, with an infusion of the leaves used to treat wounds, burns, and both external and internal ulceration. Chemists have isolated glycosidic flavonoids known for medical properties along with other extracts.

Professor Ian D. Rotherham, researcher, writer; broadcaster on wildlife; environmental issues, is contactable on [email protected] ; follow Ian’s blog and Twitter @IanThewildside