ALL AFLUTTER.. Choose the right flowers to attract butterflies (Image: Getty)
Buddleja davidii is the key butterfly bush, best known for its violet and mauve flowers, though there's a nice white variety, too. The drawback is that buddleja is a big, spreading shrub. Even the compact variety, Nanho Blue, can overwhelm a small garden. Perennials are more manageable.The ice plant, Sedum spectabile, is a butterfly magnet.
The buddleja davidii bush can overwhelm a small garden (Image: Getty)
Apart from "Autumn Joy" with rusty-pink flowers in August and September, butterflies like Sedum telephium "matrona" which has pink flowers starting a month or so earlier. Grow both to extend the season.
For rockeries and tubs there are compact sedums, such as "Bertram Anderson", which flowers from late summer into autumn.
Butterflies love flowering herbs, particularly marjoram, oregano and thyme. If you grow the plants mainly for cooking try to keep your hands off until after they finish flowering so butterflies can enjoy them too.
When it comes to conventional flower borders the star butterfly plant isn't grown much now as it got itself a name for mildew and for flopping over, but today you'll find plenty of compact, diseaseresistant perennial asters with just as much butterfly pulling power.
Look for Aster x frickartii "monch" (which starts flowering in midsummer instead of autumn) and New England asters (varieties of Aster novae-angliae).
There's also an Edwardian flower that deserves a reprieve for its looks and butterfly appeal: scabious. Years ago large-flowered varieties were great favourites with flower arrangers for their enormous, rippled rosette flowers.
They weren't the easiest flowers to grow well, making big untidy plants, but there are newer varieties that make dense compact plants carrying masses of smaller flowers right through the middle of summer. "Pink mist" and "Butterfly Blue" are especially
