Buddleja davidii Franch., Butterfly-bush

Account Summary

Fermanagh occurrence

B. davidii has been found in twelve scattered Fermanagh tetrads located mainly in or near Enniskillen, which is by far the largest conurbation in the county. However, the low number of records largely reflects a lack of recorder interest in the occurrence of the plant, rather than any degree of local extreme rarity! Until the 1980s, the common attitude of plant recorders in Ireland had been for many decades that native species are the major priority and that garden escapes, unless they become invasive, are of little or no significance and therefore not worthy of much notice.

All 21 Fermanagh records were made by RHN, HJN and I. McNeill since 1987, 17 of them since 2000. In reality, here in Fermanagh, B. davidii is just as frequent as anywhere else in these islands. Seedlings, saplings and mature plants of Butterfly-bush are now common all over towns and cities across most of B & I. It grows in dry, disturbed, often stony conditions in waste ground, disused quarries (where dumping of garden waste sometimes takes place), along lakeshore embankments, around derelict cottages, on old stone or brick walls, in neglected gutters and in chimneys – usually in more urban settings but also in villages such as Derrygonnelly, Clabby and Tamlaght.

The ballast beds of railway tracks and areas around sidings are one of the more recent habitats that B. davidii has successfully colonised and overrun. Old railway photographs taken in England show that the shrub did not become really abundant in this type of habitat until the 1980s, and the full economic effects of its rampant colonisation have yet to be felt and measured since the damage inflicted by the roots of Butterfly-bush, growing through and destroying brickwork, has not been widely appreciated. Herbicide control is very expensive and spraying needs to be regularly repeated to get on top of even a moderate scale of infestation by this prolifically fecund, highly resilient shrub.

Should any strain of B. davidii evolve to become herbicide resistant, there would be very serious trouble controlling this extremely vigorous woody weed (Stace & Crawley 2015).

British and Irish occurrence

Introduced in late Victorian times to B & I gardens, B. davidii was appearing naturalised beyond garden confines by 1922 in Merioneth (VC 48) and by 1927 in Middlesex (VC 21). The 1962 BSBI Atlas showed it was locally quite well naturalised in S England and coastal Wales, but only very thinly scattered elsewhere across N England, Scotland and Ireland (Perring & Walters 1962).

The New Atlas hectad map indicates just how rapidly and much more widely it has spread in subsequent decades, becoming common throughout all of lowland England and Wales as far north as a line between Lancaster and Hull, and scattered north to reappear in quantity around the three major Scottish conurbations of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness. In Ireland, it has also greatly increased its presence, especially around Belfast and Dublin, but thinly and widely scattered right across the island to Galway and most west coast VCs (Preston et al. 2002).

Names

The genus name 'Buddleja' is named in honour of the Reverend Adam Buddle (1660-1715), English botanist and vicar of Farmbridge in Essex. The Latinised specific epithet 'davidii' is a name honouring the French missionary and plant explorer who worked in China, Father Armand David (Stearn 1992).

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