April 6 2019
The buddleia bushes grow out of and around the derelict buildings and open spaces in many a city.
Buddleia grow everywhere in London, sprouting from the tops of many buildings that are not abandoned and forming great thickets along railway lines.
It is also a prized garden plant, attracting a great variety of insects, and is commonly called “the butterfly bush”.
And though it is from China and was brought to Europe by a Frenchman, Linnaeus named it after the Rev Adam Buddle of Hadleigh rectory, Essex, in honour of observations he had made of local plants.
Buddle never saw the butterfly bush, as he died more than a century before it was introduced in the last decade of Victoria’s reign.